Women and the Rise

of the Novel, 1405–1726

Josephine Donovan
Women and the Rise of the Novel,
1405–1726
Other Works by Josephine Donovan

Sarah Orne Jewett

New England Local Color Literature:
A Women’s Tradition
Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism
After the Fall: The Persephone-Demeter
Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow
Gnosticism in Modern Literature
Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love

Edited Works

Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory

Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations
(with Carol J. Adams)
Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring
Ethic for the Treatment of Animals
(with Carol J. Adams)
P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an
American Doctor in World War II
(by William N. Donovan, M.D.)
Women and the
Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726

Í
Josephine Donovan
WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726
Copyright © Josephine Donovan, 1999, 2000
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, Scholarly and Reference
Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 0-312-23097-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donovan, Josephine, 1941–

Women and the rise of the novel, 1405–1725 / Josephine Donovan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-21827-3 (cloth) ISBN 0-312-23097-4 (paper)
1. Fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and
literature. 3. Frame-stories—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN3404.D66 1998
809.3'99287—dc21 98-41947
CIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the Memory of My Mother
Josephine Devigne Donovan
(1916–1992)

Ne obliviscaris
I had rather be a meteor,
singly, alone, than a star in a crowd.
—Margaret Cavendish
The Duchess of Newcastle
Contents

Introduction ix

1 The Case of the Novel 1

2 Critical Irony, Standpoint Theory, and the Novel 13
3 The Women’s Framed-Novelle: The French Tradition 29
4 The Women’s Framed-Novelle: The Spanish
and English Traditions 43
5 Circumstances Alter Cases: Women, Casuistry,
and the Novel 59
6 The Nineties Generation: A Feminist Prosaics 79
7 The Case of Violenta 95
8 Women against Romance 113
9 Women and the Latin Rhetorical Tradition 129
Conclusion 145

Notes 147
Index 169
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Introduction

T IS A TRUTH (NEARLY) UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED among literary histo-

I rians and theorists that women played a special role in the rise of the
novel. Most critics, beginning with Madame de Staël, attributed women’s
particular relationship with the new genre to their allegedly privileged ac-
cess to emotion, which there found unique expression. It was not just
“sensibility,” however, that women brought to the literary scene in the
early modern period, but also, and more importantly, “sense”—an atti-
tude of irreverent realism that manifested itself as a feminist prosaics. This
book is largely the story of the emergence in the fifteenth century and
growth into the eighteenth century of this women’s literary tradition; of
how it contributed to the genesis of novelistic discourse; and of how it
stands on its own as the first women’s tradition in Western prose fiction.
From their earliest secular literary writings in the twelfth century,
women offered a critique of ideological formations that objectified
them in stereotypical roles or commodified them as objects for patriar-
chal exchange, as in arranged marriages, for example. Their critical
standpoint was rooted in the realization that they were treated as infe-
rior because they were women. Their resistance to that treatment re-
quired them to identify with each other (in some cases over borders of
social rank and race) and to protest their mistreatment as a class. Al-
though the term feminist was not current at the time, I use it to charac-
terize their attitude. By feminism I mean affirmation of female agency
and subjectivity; recognition of patterns of domination and abuse of
women by men; and, most importantly, the perception of women as a
class that has common interests—namely, to protest the harms they ex-
perience as women.1 The harms most vigorously protested in this body
of women’s literature are: rape, what is today called sexual harassment,
and the pejorative stereotypes that were repeatedly served up in the ex-
tensive misogynist literature of the period.
In a preface entitled “To All Noble, and Worthy Ladies” to her collec-
tion Poems, and Fancies (1653), Margaret Cavendish makes a plea to
women readers for support by comparing herself to a fictional abused
x Í INTRODUCTION

woman who similarly asked women “to help her, to keep their Right, and
Priviledges; making [her situation] their owne Case. Therefore,”
Cavendish implores her women readers, “pray strengthen my Side, in de-
fending my Book.”2 Cavendish’s appeal betrays a feminist perspective:
women are viewed as a class with common interests. By embracing one
woman’s injuries as a class case, she argues, women may make common
cause and sustain their rights.
Relying on Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories about the novel’s
formation, I argue that the women writers of the realist tradition I iden-
tify in this study articulated a feminist standpoint in the querelle des
femmes, the centuries-long “debate” about women’s place. The establish-
ment of such a standpoint contributed importantly to the constitution of
the dialogic mentality that Bakhtin considered a precondition for the rise
of the novel. These women’s critical perspectives on patriarchal exchange
systems and misogynist “theoretism” produced the kind of subversive
antiauthoritarian irony that Bakhtin heralded in the novel. Their critical
irony took the shape, in some cases, of anti-romance burlesques and, in
others, of satirical treatment of what has been called marriage-marketing,
in which women were little more than goods up for barter.
The dominant genre in this women’s tradition of prose fiction was the
framed-novelle, a collection of stories encased in a narrative frame. As
early as Christine de Pizan, these women authors recognized the dialogic
potential of the genre, and used the frame for feminist comment on
and/or ironic treatment of the inset materials. In many cases they used the
frame for the expression of a feminist standpoint.
Finally, many of the women in this tradition seized on the theological
method of casuistry to particularize their arguments in defense of
women. Emerging in the late Middle Ages, casuistry is a method whereby
general rules are adapted, modified, or interrogated through the investi-
gation of a particular case that problematizes the rule. The term casuistry
got its bad reputation from the fact that to accommodate particular cases
the rules often became so riddled with exceptions that they were no
longer rules; moral relativism was the result. The women writers’ interest
in casuistry, however, lay in the fact that it afforded them an opportunity
to present particularized cases of women whose stories controverted and
interrogated misogynist generalities, rules, and norms about women.
Such individualized cases not only challenged harmful cultural attitudes,
they also created particularized literary characters, thereby introducing
one of the novel’s most unique features. Such particularized realism about
ordinary people’s common life contributed perhaps the most important
ingredient to the novel’s “prosaics,” another Bakhtinian term, which he
used to designate the ethical and aesthetic “poetics” of the novel.
INTRODUCTION Í xi

“Circumstances Alter Cases,” the title of chapter five, was a byword of

casuistry. It claims that a case is not to be judged in the abstract but always
relative to its particular circumstances. Circumstantial details can change
the purport of any given case and thus an understanding of them is nec-
essary for fair ethical and aesthetic judgment to take place. Paying atten-
tion to the particularities of an individual’s situation necessarily
challenged and enlarged ideological norms and abstractions, allowing for
a more complex appreciation of individual behavior.
Presenting the details of a woman’s case (or, in fiction, her story) al-
lowed for a fuller understanding of her situation, thus preventing reifying
abstractions from obscuring her truth. It allowed her story, told from her
viewpoint, to be heard. The novel itself, as explained in chapter one, is the
genre that best allows for the expression of particularized individual cases.
That particularization is inherently subversive of “theoretistic” authori-
tarian dogma, as Bakhtin contended. What Bakhtin and others failed to
realize, however, is the extent to which women writers, particularizing the
cases of women in the querelle des femmes, contributed to this important
dimension of the novel’s prosaics. In so doing these women not only
helped constitute the new genre, they furthered the cultural work of ide-
ological transformation—the destabilization of dominant authorities—
that occurred in the early modern period. The structural preferences of
these women—for the framed-novelle as a genre, for example, and for a
non-Latinate rhetoric—also contributed importantly to the emergence of
novelistic discourse.
The principal heroines of my study are Christine de Pizan (1365-ca.
1430), whose Le Livre de la cité des dames (ca. 1405–1407) pioneered the
tradition of women’s critical realism that I treat here; the anonymous au-
thor of Les Évangiles des quenouilles (ca. 1466–74); Jeanne Flore (fl. ca.
1537); Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549); María de Zayas y Sotomayor
(1590?-ca. 1661/1669); Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle
(1623–73); Delarivier Manley (1663–1724); Mary Davys (1674–1732);
and Jane Barker (1652–1732). The contributions of many others—from
the twelfth-century women troubadours to Madame de Lafayette to Jane
Austen—are also part of my story. But my main focus is the evolving tra-
dition of Western women’s prose fiction in the framed-novelle genre from
1405 to 1726, the year Jane Barker’s The Lining of the Patch Work Screen
appeared.
While genres similar to the novella or tale may be found in many non-
European cultures, the realist novel is a Western phenomenon. Therefore,
in this study I focus exclusively on the Western tradition. Consideration
of the rich Arabic, Indian, African, and Asian (particularly Japanese) nar-
rative traditions is regrettably beyond its scope.
xii Í INTRODUCTION

In chapter one, “The Case of the Novel,” I examine the fundamental

characteristics of both the novel and Bakhtin’s theory of prosaics in order
to establish how the above-mentioned women writers contributed to the
novel’s emergence. In the chapter two I elaborate on the connections be-
tween critical irony, as expressed in literature, and the establishment of a
political standpoint. Here I use contemporary feminist and Marxist
“standpoint theory” to buttress my claims.
Chapters three and four trace the evolution of the women’s framed-
novelle tradition from Christine de Pizan in France to María de Zayas in
Spain to Jane Barker in England. In chapter five, “Circumstances Alter
Cases,” I explain how these authors used casuistry to make their fictional
cases, and how it in turn shaped their fiction.
In chapter six I focus on a group of British women writers—Catherine
Trotter and Aphra Behn, in addition to Davys and Manley—who consti-
tuted an important literary wave of the 1690s; they created a feminist pro-
saics that did much to shape the realism characteristic of the English
novel. Chapter seven considers the genealogy, from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth century, of a novella about a woman; its evolution illustrates
changing aesthetic and ethical attitudes and serves to chart the transitions
in women’s literary history of the period. Those transitions are further ex-
amined in chapter eight, where I trace the history of the women’s anti-
romance from the troubadours to the nineteenth century. A final chapter,
chapter nine, treats these women writers’ relationship with the once dom-
inant Latin rhetorical tradition, how it affected them and how their resis-
tance to it was another factor in the emergence of the familiar
conversational, non-Latinate prose style used in the novel.
This study is unique in theories about the novel’s origins not only in
its focus upon women writers,3 but also in its attention to the continental
tradition of women writers, which enormously influenced the British
women (and men) who have been the focus of most earlier studies. The
impact of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron on the English women
writers of the seventeenth century was palpable, and the influence of
María de Zayas—whose name was erased in the translation process and
thus unfortunately deleted from English literary history—was also con-
siderable. Certain of Madame d’Aulnoy’s works similarly had a marked
impact on the British women writers. I treat this influence in chapter six.
I also depart from recent (and feminist) predecessors in the field who
tend to lump Jane Barker together with Penelope Aubin and Elizabeth
Rowe as didactic moralists to be distinguished from earlier, more outspo-
ken feminists, such as Behn and Manley.4 Instead I see Barker as part of a
continuing feminist tradition; her satiric treatment of marriage-
marketing is much closer to Cavendish, Behn, and Manley than to Rowe
INTRODUCTION Í xiii

and Aubin. I do agree, however, that the assertion of a feminist voice, still
strongly available in Barker, was largely eclipsed soon after by the moral-
istic sentimentalism that came to dominate prose fiction in succeeding
decades. In chapter seven, “The Case of Violenta,” and chapter eight,
“Women Against Romance,” I discuss these literary transitions.
This study began in the early 1980s as a chapter in my book New En-
gland Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (1983), in which I
sketched through several centuries the genealogy of what I called women’s
literary realism. I first taught my graduate seminar “Women and the Rise
of the Novel” in 1982 at the University of Tulsa’s Graduate Program in
Modern Letters. It was Germaine Greer, then Director of the Tulsa Center
for the Study of Women’s Literature, who proposed the title for the
course, which is now the title of this book. Since then I have continued to
read and study the astonishing numbers of works written by women of
the early modern period. My doctoral training in comparative literature,
under Fannie J. LeMoine at the University of Wisconsin, facilitated my ac-
cess to the continental women writers.
Many people contributed to the completion of this book. In particular,
I would like to acknowledge the students in my courses on early modern
women writers at the University of Tulsa and the University of Maine, as
well as the following scholars, who have generously contributed informa-
tion and support: Ruth Perry, Deborah Rogers, Fannie J. LeMoine,
Germaine Greer, Ulrich Wicks, and Esther Rauch. In addition, I would
like to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities for a fellowship that enabled me to complete portions of the
manuscript; to the University of Maine for three faculty research grants
and a university sabbatical that greatly facilitated my research efforts; to
Maura Burnett and the editing staff at St. Martin’s Press, and to Marilyn
Emerick. Finally, the Reference and Interlibrary Loan staffs at the Univer-
sity of Maine; the Portsmouth Public Library; the Houghton Library,
Harvard University; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and
the Newberry Library, Chicago, were very helpful.
I hope that this book, along with my works in American women’s lit-
erature, will contribute in a significant way to the intellectual task that has
fallen to my generation of scholars: the construction of women’s literary
history.
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Chapter One

The Case of the Novel

HE NOVEL, A GENRE THAT HAS DOMINATED Western prose fiction for

T more than two centuries, is a unique literary form that has its own
distinguishing properties. Specifying what they are is not an easy task,
however. One way is to contrast it with earlier literary forms, in particu-
lar the epic, a classical genre (which was revived in the medieval period),
and the romance, a medieval form.
Georg Lukács famously defined the novel as “the epic of a world that
has been abandoned by God” in his Theory of the Novel (1920),1 thus
identifying the novel in terms of the post-medieval dissociation of sensi-
bility and the rise of secular empiricism that emerged as the medieval cos-
mic synthesis was fatally challenged by early modern astronomy.
Similarly, in his still-classic study, The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt
correlates the emergence of the novel with what he calls “philosophic re-
alism,” a new secular nominalism where Cartesian individualism and
Lockean empiricism combined to establish the particular sense experi-
ence of the individual as a valid epistemological source.2 The novel, Watt
contended, is grounded in this empiricist epistemology: “The novel arose
in the modern period, a period whose general intellectual orientation was
most decisively separated from its classical and mediaeval heritage by its
rejection—or at least its attempted rejection—of universals” (12).
In 1785, one of the earliest theorists of the novel, Clara Reeve, con-
trasted the novel with the romance in order to develop one of the first de-
finitions of the new genre.

The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and

things.—The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times
2 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, de-

scribes what never happened nor is likely to happen.—The Novel gives a fa-
miliar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may
happen to our friend, or to ourselves; . . . represent[ing] every scene, in so
easy and natural a manner, and . . . mak[ing] them appear so probable, as
to deceive us into a persuasion . . . that all is real.3

Like most theorists, Reeves highlighted the novel’s realism: “The Novel is
a picture of real life and manners,” recounting everyday events in a “fa-
miliar” way.
By the latter half of the seventeenth century even authors of romances
were beginning to call for more probable or more realistic characters. In
various theoretical statements made in the mid-seventeenth century,
Madeleine de Scudéry, the leading French romancier, proposed that writ-
ers should attend to probability, thereby invoking an Aristotelian crite-
rion, which soon became codified as vraisemblance.4 In French
neoclassical criticism, however, vraisemblance emerged as a doctrine of
propriety—authors should depict characters who are realistic according
to social norms of appropriate conduct. Unfortunately, this notion pre-
cluded the kind of particularized idiosyncratic realism that twentieth-
century critic Mikhail Bakhtin and others appreciate as one of the novel’s
most important characteristics.
Early English theorists of the novel also critiqued the romance from
the point of view of everyday realism. One of the earliest and most cogent
defenses of realism occurs in Delarivier Manley’s preface to The Secret
History of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (1705). Manley, like de Scud-
éry, calls for more probable characters, but, unlike the French vraisem-
blance, her notion of probability is not synonymous with propriety.
Indeed, her principal example critiques what she feels is the unbelieveably
virtuous female behavior seen in most romances. “It wou’d in no wise be
probable that a Young Woman fondly beloved by a Man of great Merit, and
for whom she had Reciprocal Tenderness, finding her self at all Times alone
with him . . . cou’d always resist his addresses.”5 Similarly, romantic heroes
“have nothing in them that is Natural” (A6r).
Manley argues that a reader “who has any Sense” wants to see someone
like herself “represented” in the work (A6v), for “we care little for what was
done a Thousand years ago among the Tartars or Abyssines” (A3v). Finally,
and most importantly, Manley critiques the abstract generality of ro-
mance characters. “Most authors are contented to describe Men in gen-
eral . . . without entering into the Particulars . . . ; they don’t perceive Nice
Distinctions” (A7r). Manley here adumbrates an idea that is at the heart of
Bakhtin’s “prosaics” theory of the novel, which “focuses on quotidian
THE CASE OF THE NOVEL Í 3

events that in principle elude reduction to ‘underlying’ laws or systems.”6

We will return to this theory shortly.
Earlier, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, had antici-
pated Manley’s critique in scattered negative comments about the ro-
mance and the epic. In the Sociable Letters (1664), for example, itself one
of the earlist examples of familiar realism, Cavendish says of epic and ro-
mance authors, “my Reason believes they Writ Unreasonably, not only of
their Feigned Gods, or of their Feigned Fights, and of their Feigned For-
tunes or Successes; The truth is, they . . . contain . . . more Impossibilities
than Probabilities,”7 thereby reinvoking Aristotle’s probability criterion.
Characters’ actions, she believes, “should be Natural,” noting the im-
probability of many heroic deeds in the epic and romance: “for what One
man can Disorder, or Rout an Army, with his Single Strength or
Courage?” (257).
Cavendish also modifies Aristotle’s theory of mimesis to articulate
the idea that the artist should “imitate” contemporary reality as realisti-
cally as possible. She complains in the above-cited passage that heroic
deeds “cannot be Imitated.” And she offers instead her own work, the
Sociable Letters, which “are an Imitation of a Personal Visitation and
Conversation” (C2v).
In an essay in her Natures Pictures (1656), Cavendish contends that
poets are “Natures Painters,”8 which explains the title of the work. They
should copy nature, that is, the immediate environment, directly, rather
than copying ancient texts. Those who imitate or rework the classics in
their writings are “like a company of Ravens, that live upon dead carck-
asses [sic], so they upon old Authors, and some have been like Maggots,
that have been bred in their dead flesh, which is the living works of dead
Authors . . . but very few [are] rightly begotten from Nature” (Natures
Pictures 361). By this criterion she criticizes Virgil, for example, because
he was not a “true Naturall Poet . . . he was rather an imitator of Homer,
than of Nature” (361). In this essay, “Heavens Library” (where
Cavendish has Jove ranking the great works of literature, throwing out
some and elevating others), she proposes that “all Romances should be
cast out” (360).
Like these early women critics, Bakhtin, in his essay “Epic and Novel”
(1975), also stressed that the novel operates in a “zone of familar con-
tact”;9 whereas the epic is an abstract monolithic genre that exists on a
“distanced plane” (20) that is “walled off ” from the present (15). “There is
no place in the epic for any openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy”
(16), attributes readily apparent in the novel, which manifests a “spirit of
process and inconclusiveness” (7). Significantly, Bakhtin sees the epic as
the product of a “patriarchal social structure”; it “canoniz[es]” the events
4 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

of “the world of fathers” (15). Conversely, to extend Bakhtin’s argument,

the novel valorizes events from the everyday world of mothers.
As a secular genre, the realist novel focuses on the happenings of this
world; its connectives are horizontal and largely paratactic. No providen-
tial transcendent force controls things from above. Causality is secular
and material. Thus, the dominant trope in realist prose fiction becomes
metonymy, as opposed to metaphor. And the dominant style is the plain
style, a familiar, paratactic, conversational mode.
Unlike the epic, the romance, classical tragedy, or other poetic genres,
the novel pays attention to economic realities; indeed, one could argue
that economic forces and motivations become the primary focus of the
realist novel. We will return to this aspect of the genre shortly.
The novel also evinces a critical irony that is unique and definitional.
The word irony derives from eiron, a figure in Greek comedy who under-
cut the boastful alazon. This etymological connotation is readily apparent
in the novel’s irony as reified official doctrines and sanctimonies are rou-
tinely undercut and debunked. It is perhaps Bakhtin who has most in-
sisted on the novel’s inherent irreverence. Parody, satire, travesty—these
are the fundamental responses the novel has toward institutionalized
dogma, according to Bakhtin.
In novelesque treatment “the object is broken apart, laid bare (its hier-
archical ornamentation is removed): the naked object is ridiculous; its
‘empty’ clothing . . . is also ridiculous” (23–24). By contrast, the presenta-
tion of the epic hero is nonironic (34); there is only one, adulatory, per-
spective in the epic: “the epic world knows only a single and unified world
view” (35).
There were undoubtedly several sources for the mentality of critical
irony that emerged in the early modern period. It has been argued that the
economic base for the ironic ethical perspective found in the novel was
use-value production. A Marxist term, use-value production refers to the
production of goods that are used by the producers and/or by their im-
mediate associates. Women have long been associated with use-value pro-
duction because in pre- or noncapitalist sites, such production took place
in the home and involved traditionally female labor, such as cooking,
clothes-making, sustenance gardening, etc. Production for exchange is,
conversely, the production of goods for sale or trade. Any large-scale
monetary-based economic system is based upon production for ex-
change; however, the exchange ethos is particularly evident in industrial-
ized captialism. Theorists of the novel, especially those with a Marxist
bent, have connected the novel’s rise with the emergence of the exchange
ethos of early modern capitalism, seeing the novel as a site of resistance to
that culture. Lucien Goldmann, for example, in Pour une sociologie du
THE CASE OF THE NOVEL Í 5

roman (1964) has effectively argued that economic production for use,
which was increasingly being replaced by production for exchange during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provided an ethical standpoint
from which to criticize and ironize the increasingly dominant ethos of
commodity exchange.
Another probable source of the novel’s critical irony lay in a kind of
folk-culture resistance to the growing colonization of everyday life by
nation-state bureaucracies and by the increasing dominance of scientific
and pseudo-scientific regulation and/or (in Michel Foucault’s terminol-
ogy) “discipline” of the everyday life-world. While this resistance became
more acute in the nineteenth century, it may be seen as early as the fif-
teenth century in various folk parodies, such as Les Évangiles des que-
nouilles (ca. 1466–74), which I treat in chapter three.10
A third source for the novel’s critical irony—one that has not been suf-
ficiently acknowledged—lay in women’s growing resistance to misogynist
ideologies and sexist practices that reified them as objects for exchange
and abuse. In chapter two I further explore the contribution of women
writers to the emergence of critical irony as a dominant perspective in
prose fiction.
To my mind the most important defining attribute of the novel, how-
ever, lies in its character as a form of ethical knowledge. Because of its
unique blend of realism and critical irony, the novel can foster ethical un-
derstanding of individual characters’ plights and of the forces responsible
better than perhaps any other medium. The remainder of this chapter will
be devoted to exploring further this crucial aspect of the novel.
Unlike other literary modes, the realist novel provides a detailed sense
of the density of worldly life, its quidditas, its whatness. We have already
noted how Delarivier Manley identified the novel as a genre that particu-
larizes, that recognizes and embraces distinctions and differences. The re-
alist novel exults, in fact, in the multifariousness of the particulars of the
world. The novel’s characters are much more complexly individualized
than characters in earlier genres, and they are rooted in particularized,
qualitatively differentiated, space and time (what Bakhtin calls the chrono-
tope)—in particular circumstances.
The novel emerged in part out of the theological method of casuistry,
where generalized rules are adapted or refracted by individualized cases
that challenge a general principle.11 A focus on the details of a case, on the
circumstances of a life, is inherently subversive to doctrine, for no rule can
be stretched to accommodate all the particularities of an individual case.
Because of its emphasis on individual and particularized circumstances,
the novel is therefore in this sense necessarily a subversive genre, as
Bakhtin and a number of other theorists contend.
6 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The novel provides, in effect, an ethical defense of the individual

against tyrannical norms. Its antiauthoritarian “Galilean perception . . .
denies . . . absolutism,” according to Bakhtin (Dialogic Imagination 366),
valorizing instead the irreducible uniqueness of the individual and her or
his situation. Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoievsky’s character Devushkin in
the novel Poor Folk points up the novel’s ethical dimension. Devushkin,
himself poor, resents all attempts to fix him, to stereotype him, to objec-
tify him as a poor person. “Already in his first work Dostoievsky shows
how the hero himself revolts against literature in which the ‘little man’ is
externalized and finalized without being consulted.” Devushkin is “per-
sonally deeply insulted . . . and outraged” by the characterization of
poverty in Gogol’s Overcoat; he felt that “he had been defined totally once
and for all.”12 In short, Devushkin had been erased in all his particulars,
reified into an object in someone else’s textual exchange. With Devushkin
we see the expression of a kind of fierce critical irony—rooted in a sub-
ject’s resistance to reification—that characterizes the novel and establishes
its ethical perspective. Devushkin also manifests the awakening of the
critical consciousness that is necessary to the emergence of a standpoint,
as elaborated by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness—to be
explored further in the next chapter.
Bakhtin, in other words, conceives the novel in ethical terms as the site
where the particulars of experience refuse to be dominated or objectified
by what he called theoretism. As identified by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl
Emerson, theoretism is systems thinking, generalizing theories that elide
the singularity of events. “When ‘theoretists’ of ethics or action consider
the world, they generalize to patterns, norms, and rules in which these
singularities are lost” (53). “As Bakhtin uses the term, theoretism always
understands events in terms of a set of rules to which they conform or a
structure that they exhibit. . . . [T]heoretism thinks away the ‘eventness’ of
events” (50).
As opposed to theoretism, Bakhtin proposed an ethical and aesthetic
response he termed a prosaics. Unlike a poetics, which since Aristotle has
been conceived as a largely formalist and purely aesthetic theory, a pro-
saics integrates the ethical with the aesthetic, focusing on the moral the-
matics of a literary work, rather than on its formal aesthetic properties.
As an ethical approach, prosaics entails a casuistical ethic: that is, it
does not focus on abstract principles, and its methodology is not deduc-
tion; rather it emphasizes the particular case, and its method is induction.
As Morson and Emerson explain, “prosaics focuses on the quotidian
events that in principle elude reduction to ‘underlying’ laws or systems”
(33). It is in fact “suspicious of systems,” meaning any “organization in
which every element has a place in a rigorous hierarchy” (27–28). Tolstoy
THE CASE OF THE NOVEL Í 7

expressed a “prosaics,” a casuistical ethic, through his characters Levin and

Pierre (in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, respectively); “instead of a
system, they come to rely on moral wisdom derived from living rightly
moment to moment and attending carefully to the irreducible particular-
ities of each case” (25).
Bakhtin came to see the novel, “the most prosaic of prosaic forms, [as]
occupy[ing] a special place in ethical education” (27). “Far superior [to
abstract philosophical discussions] would be case studies extending over
hundreds of pages . . . and describing all . . . events within their multiva-
lent social milieu. Far superior, in short, would be the rich and ‘thick’ ac-
counts found in great novels” (27). The novel thus comes to be seen as a
form of ethical knowledge. “If ethics is (as Bakhtin contends) a matter of
particular, concrete cases, and not of rules to be instantiated, then novels
may be the richest form of ethical thought” (366).
Though she seems to have developed her ideas independently of
Bakhtin, British author and critic Iris Murdoch in effect amplifies his pro-
saics. Like Bakhtin, she rejects “theoretism” (without using the term, of
course): “What makes metaphysical (‘totalising’) coherence theories un-
acceptable is the way in which they in effect ‘disappear’ what is individual
and contingent by equating reality with integration in system.”13
Murdoch believes that moral sensitivity or moral awareness requires a
knowledge of, an ability to see, the particulars of one’s environment,
whether those particulars be other people, animals, nature, or other as-
pects. A great novel teaches one to attend to these particulars. It trains the
mind to see and to respect “the great surprising variety of the world.”14
The kind of “morally disciplined attention” (Metaphysics 23) that Mur-
doch is talking about derives from Simone Weil’s concept of “attentive
love.” In 1942 Weil explained:

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say
to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer
exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen . . . but as [an indi-
vidual]. . . . For this reason it is . . . indispensable, to know how to look at
him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive.15

As Murdoch continues, an attentive focus on realities beyond the self

makes one realize that the other is a being with “needs and wishes” of her
own; this awareness makes it “harder . . . to treat a person as a thing” (Sov-
ereignty 66). In her view, great novelists can lead one to this kind of aware-
ness because they are not “afraid of the contingent.”16 They are able to
achieve “the extremely difficult realization that something other than one-
self is real,” expressing thereby a “non-violent apprehension of difference.”17
8 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The imagination that is exercised in both writing and reading a novel

is thus “a moral discipline” that makes us aware of others’ situations, their
suffering, and their coping. Such awareness should induce not only ethi-
cal compassion or sympathy; it may also “help people not to become em-
bittered or brutalised or stupefied by affliction” (Metaphysics 322).
In her recent book Poetic Justice (1995), Martha Nussbaum has enun-
ciated a similar theory, linking the novel and the moral sensitivities it en-
courages to the practice of law and the formation of public policy.
Nussbaum reflects that “our society is full of refusals to imagine one an-
other with empathy and compassion” and considers that this kind of
moral imagination can be fostered by novels.18
Like the theorists treated above, Nussbaum remarks that the novel
enacts a kind of casuistical ethic (without using the term): “the novel
constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context-
specific . . . in which we get potentially universalizable concrete pre-
scriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a
concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through the imagina-
tion” (8). “We see the novel’s abstract deliberations . . . as issuing in each
case from a concrete human life” (28). Nussbaum also promotes a “pro-
saics” of fiction in which the ethical and the aesthetic are co-present: the
novel’s “moral operations are not independent of its aesthetic excel-
lence. [Hard Times] binds us to the workers because it causes us to take
pleasure in their company” (35).
In another recent work, The True Story of the Novel (1996), which traces
novelistic discourse back to antiquity, Margaret Doody sees the novel’s pro-
saic attention to the familiar, particularized details of the physical world—
or what Doody calls “presence” (as opposed to “dry transcendence”)—is
what makes the novel “the ‘feminine’ literary form par excellence.”19 To read
a novel “is to tune in to the wavelength of the Feminine” (461).
It is the goddess Demeter, the goddess of earth, who, Doody claims, in-
spires and informs the novel. “The Goddess of prose narration stands for
the subscription—on the part of author, readers, and characters alike—to
the physicality of the narratable world” (440). The novel offers a kind of
subversive “celebration of the Goddess, and of the mundane world” and
proposes a “new nonphallic religion” that affirms “the divine powers of
nature” (462). Here Doody promotes what is probably the first ecofemi-
nist theory of the novel.
Furthering her argument, Doody insists that the novel’s focus on the
messy, disorganized details of life make it inherently resistant to estab-
lished systems of order. “The mess in the Novel is not to be cleaned up by
the broom of the Law” (478). It remains “the repository of our hope in
something that can be stated as ‘feminine’ if the State and Establishment
THE CASE OF THE NOVEL Í 9

are thought of as ‘masculine,’ under the sign of the phallus” (473). “It re-
joices in a rich muddy messiness that is the ultimate despair of Fascismus”
(485). In an earlier article Doody had similarly concluded, “there is always
something uppety about the novel,” which is a genre that “opposes the of-
ficial, the public, the ‘masculine’ and the governing, and speaks for the
marginal, the dispossessed, the emotional.”20
Virginia Woolf proposed a similar aesthetic of contingency. In an arti-
cle entitled “Everyday Use and Moments of Being: Toward a Nondomina-
tive Aesthetic” (1993) I suggested that in various writings—particularly in
A Room of One’s Own (1929)—Woolf articulated an aesthetic wherein the
contingent details of the messy everyday world are valorized over generic
abstractions that would ignore them.21 In her famous visit to the British
Museum in A Room of One’s Own Woolf perceives that venerable institu-
tion as a synecdoche for patriarchal knowledges and methodologies.
These teach one, she realizes, to “strain off what was personal and acci-
dental . . . and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.”22 “The
student who has been trained . . . at Oxbridge has no doubt some method
of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer
as a sheep runs into its pen” (28).
Conversely, Woolf herself uses a methodology that adapts to the ran-
domness and messiness of life itself. “I take,” she says, “only what chance
has floated to my feet” (78). In another essay, “Modern Fiction” (1925),
Woolf urges, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness.”23
Thus, Woolf maintains that the writer of prose fiction should be faith-
ful to the anomalous particulars of reality and not rush to cram them
into a pen of preconceived doctrine. In this she affirms a metaphysics of
presence. Woolf ’s reluctance to shape reality into artificial abstractions is
shared by a number of women writers from Dorothy Wordsworth to
Clarice Lispector, as I document in “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism:
Reading the Orange” (1996).24 “Tell the thing!” exhorted Sarah Orne Jew-
ett to aspiring writers; her advice could serve as the byword of a prosaics
of literature.25
The affirmation of the value and validity of the contingent world’s sin-
gularities may be seen as an important countervalence to the Gnostic
imagination of contemporary existentialism and poststructuralism,
wherein the real physical world is dismissed as alien, threatening, and
slimy (Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea), and/or nonexistent (contemporary dis-
course theories wherein reality is seen as being filtered through linguistic
constructs to the point that it exists only as an absent referent).26
10 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

A prosaics of the novel not only affirms a metaphysics of presence; it

also proposes, as we have seen, a casuistical ethic, whereby the moral re-
sponse is governed not by universal rules and abstract doctrines but
rather by a particularized evaluation of the circumstances of each indi-
vidual case. This kind of casuistical moral reasoning is an important as-
pect of Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care” (as opposed to a rights-or
rule-based ethic); it is a “mode of reasoning that is contextual and narra-
tive rather than formal and abstract.”27
Such contextual reasoning is well illustrated in Susan Glaspell’s short
story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), a work that Gilligan herself has ana-
lyzed as exemplifying an ethic of care (but to somewhat different pur-
poses than I do here). The story concerns a moral dilemma faced by two
women who come to understand that their neighbor has murdered her
husband. By attending to the evidentiary particulars, which their hus-
bands, the police investigators on the case, overlook, the women come to
realize their neighbor’s guilt. In the process, however, they also piece to-
gether the circumstances that led to the murder; namely, that the woman
had been severely emotionally abused, and had snapped when the hus-
band had killed her only emotional connection, a pet canary.
Rather than convict the woman according to a universal ethical and
legal principle (all murder is wrong), the women tacitly pardon her (by
harboring the incriminating evidence, the dead bird), feeling that in this
particular case the murder was, if not justified, at least defensible. In fact,
the women consider that within the context they themselves bear some
responsibility, because they neglected to maintain communication with
the woman, thus contributing to the emotional isolation that fostered the
crime.
It is prose fiction—sometimes short stories but particularly the
novel—that allows for the nuanced exploration of circumstances that is
necessary for this kind of moral reasoning. That is why Nussbaum, Mur-
doch, Bakhtin, and others promote the novel as an ethical form, and per-
haps the only form in which casuistical reasoning can be fully enacted.
The idea that fiction can be used as a tool for the inculcation of moral
sentiments is not a new one. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century, as
Catherine Gallagher points out in Nobody’s Story (1994), this conception
of fiction had been well explored by philosophers like Hume and Adam
Smith, as well as by fiction writers.28 Most of the women writers I will be
concerned with in this study conceived of prose fiction as a means of
transmitting moral and political positions. As early as Christine de Pizan’s
writings at the turn of the fourteenth century, prose narrative was seen as
a vehicle for the refutation of misogynist perspectives and for the advo-
cacy of the moral recognition of women. Emile V. Telle suggests that for
THE CASE OF THE NOVEL Í 11

Marguerite de Navarre the novella became “a means of teaching . . . fem-

inism.”29 And numerous women writers conceived of their work as cau-
tionary tales. Marie de Gournay wrote in her dedicatory preface to Le
Proumenoir (1594) that her novella serves “to warn women to be wary”
[“l’utilité d’advertir les dames de se tenir en garde”].30 Similarly, María de
Zayas, a seventeenth-century Spanish writer, said she wrote her framed-
novelle to present “case histories” [“casos verdaderos”], which are de-
signed to “enlighten, or disenchant, women about men’s deceptions” [“y
que tuviesen nombre de desengaños”].31
Early writers also recognized the potential prose fiction had to arouse
readers’ sympathy for characters, even to encourage their identification
with them (as seen in Don Quixote and the numerous “female quixote”
figures; see further discussion in chapter eight). Such sympathy could well
work then, as theorists claimed, to enlarge readers’ moral sensitivities—a
position similar to that maintained by Martha Nussbaum today.
In her 1671 “Preface” to Natures Pictures, for example, Margaret
Cavendish says that she hopes her work will “beget chast Thoughts, nour-
ish love of Virtue, kindle Human Pity, warm Charity, encrease Civility.”32
While pity was an emotion Aristotle recognized as an appropriate re-
sponse to tragedy, Cavendish’s linkage of the concept with “warm Char-
ity” suggests a significant transformation of the classical idea, one that
anticipates the conception of literature as a vehicle for the inculcation of
moral sentiments, which, as we have noted, came to dominate in the eigh-
teenth century.
One direction that emerged from this view of literature was the senti-
mentalist tradition, which was a dominant strain of women’s fiction well
into the twentieth century. While I do not treat it here, sentimentalist lit-
erature was premised on the idea of using fiction to sensitize readers to
the plight of disadvantaged and oppressed protagonists—usually, in the
earliest examples of the genre, women, but in later works, animals, slaves,
and impoverished lower classes.
Unfortunately, however, most sentimentalist works reimposed a kind
of reductive theoretism, turning characters into specimens, of the type
Devushkin protested against in Dostoievsky’s Poor Folk. And while senti-
mentalist fiction has been enormously influential in changing social atti-
tudes or performing “cultural work” (consider, for example, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], which Abraham Lincoln only
half-facetiously credited with having caused the Civil War), it does not
have the inherently subversive character of the realist works favored in
prosaics theory. The reason for this is that sentimentalist fiction failed to
particularize characters and circumstances as anomalous cases, instead
inscribing (and thereby reifying) them in prefabricated constructs. (Uncle
12 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Tom’s Cabin should not be taken as prototypical in this respect, however,

because it remains in many ways a realist novel.)33
My thesis in this study is that while women have long been identified—
both as writers and as readers—with the sentimentalist tradition, their
contribution to the rise of the realist novel has not yet been recognized.
That contribution included the development of a critical irony that was
rooted in women’s marginalized standpoint and resistant to dominant
misogynist ideologies, and the articulation of a kind of feminist casuistry
wherein case studies of women’s circumstances, realistically conveyed,
were used to refute misogynist generalities and maxims. Women con-
tributed to the formation of this inherently subversive genre by articulat-
ing their own critical voice and particularizing their own circumstances,
in order to resist misogynist reifications that cast them as objects within
the dominant discourse of sexual exchange. They thereby helped to frac-
ture the univocal discourses that dominated in pre-modern eras, estab-
lishing the kind of dialogical counterpoint that was essential to the
emergence of the novel.
Chapter Two

Critical Irony, Standpoint

Theory, and the Novel

RONIC PERSPECTIVES DEVELOP WHEN PEOPLE SENSE a discontinuity between

I the official version of events and their own experience of them. When
an unofficial, marginalized position becomes agreed on by numbers of
people in a group, it gathers strength and provides some countervalence
to the dominant perspective. Once members of a group identify their per-
spective as that of the group, the position approaches that of a political
standpoint, a critical point of resistance to oppression.
Women writers in the early modern period, who were nearly all mem-
bers of or associated with the nobility, evinced early on a resistance to dis-
courses that cast them as inferior beings, objects for exchange in dynastic
power struggles. In fact, that resistance is apparent in the earliest Western
works by women: the debate genres used by the twelfth-century women
troubadours (see chapter five) and, around the turn of the fourteenth
century, the writings of Christine de Pizan (see chapter three).
With the rise of capitalism and the emergence of a merchant and bank-
ing class, the urban bourgeoisie, the exchange of women that had func-
tioned to seal patriarchal kinship relations under feudalism became used
to solidify needed economic alliances between the landed (but cash-poor)
gentry and the cash-rich but land-and-prestige-poor bourgeoisie. The
marrying-off of daughters was an important way these economic rela-
tions were mediated. As one historian noted, “the marriage settlement
[became] . . . the sacrament by which land allied itself with trade.”1
Women who were the objects of these negotiations—often without
their consent or even knowledge—for the most part disliked the system.
14 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Much of the critical animus in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

women’s prose fiction is directed against the marriage market in which
women were in effect commodified goods for sale. Daniel Defoe, often
considered the first novelist, realized the inherent drama in this situation
and used it to frame two of his earliest novels, Moll Flanders (1722) and
Roxana (1724), although somewhat ambiguously.2 As Ellen Pollak has
noted, Moll Flanders manifests a clear “desire to short-circuit or withdraw
from ‘normal’ bourgeois relations in which women are circulated as ob-
jects among men.”3
Moll Flanders was by no means the first woman character to indicate
resistance to the marriage-market exchange system (and indeed Defoe’s
treatment of both her and Roxana tends to undercut the seriousness of
their positions); that resistance is much more clearly stated in the works
of Margaret Cavendish, who wrote half a century before Defoe. Indeed,
Cavendish herself was preceded by the continental women writers, such
as Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas, of the framed-novelle tra-
dition, which effectively began with Christine de Pizan in 1405. These
women also critiqued the marriage exchange system (still principally the
feudal, kin-based system in their day), as well as other abuses of women
such as rape, wife-beating, and what is today called sexual harassment.
As noted, critical irony can be rooted in what has been labeled a stand-
point, which is the political perspective that an oppressed group may
come to have. The notion of a standpoint was originally articulated by the
Hungarian, Hegelian-Marxist theorist Georg Lukács in a section of His-
tory and Class Consciousness (1922) entitled “Reification and the Con-
sciousness of the Proletariat.” Lukács believed that when a person is
treated as a thing, an inherent contradiction emerges because the person
as subject knows that s/he is not an object; from this contradiction may
emerge a critical consciousness, a resentment of being reified, and a re-
jection of the process and forces that are responsible. When several peo-
ple in an objectified class share their resentment, the process of
“consciousness-raising” begins, and a political standpoint develops
wherein it is recognized that the treatment is shared by members of the
group because they are members of that group. Lukács was principally con-
cerned with industrial workers, or the “proletariat,” who are reified on the
assembly line as cogs in the machine; subsequent feminist theorists have
applied Lukács’s ideas to women.
In the capitalist production process, Lukács claimed, the worker “is
turned into a commodity and reduced to a mere quantity. But this very
fact forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition.”4 Beneath “the
quantifying crust,” however, lies a “qualitative, living core” (169), from
which emerges the critical class consciousness that Lukács deemed both
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 15

epistemologically privileged and revolutionary. “[I]n the proletariat . . .

the process by which a [person’s] achievement is split off from his total
personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary con-
sciousness” (171). “Corresponding to the objective concealment of the
commodity form, there is the subjective element . . . that while the
process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehu-
manizes him . . . it remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul
are not changed into commodities” (172).
I will argue that early modern women writers developed a critical fem-
inist consciousness because they too were reified in misogynist ideologies
that cast them as inferior beings, objects of sexual exchange and abuse. As
contemporary feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon has effectively ar-
gued, sexual reification may provoke the emergence of a women’s stand-
point: “What is it about women’s experience,” she asked, “that produces a
distinctive perspective on social reality? How is an angle of vision and an
interpretive hermeneutics of social life created in the group women? . . .
Sexual objectification of women . . . provides answers.”5
It would seem further that the emergence of critical consciousness is
enhanced if the subjects have a point of comparison from which to deter-
mine that their own treatment is unjust. In the case of these women writ-
ers, that comparative perspective came from their upper-class status. Why
should they, who enjoyed privileged treatment by virtue of their class, be
subjected to abuse and derogation because of their gender?
Contemporary feminist theorists have adapted Lukács’s standpoint
theory to women. In general, however, these theorists, notably Nancy
Hartsock, have developed a more Marxist and less Hegelian version of
standpoint theory than Lukács. Reverting to the Marxist theory of his-
torical materialism, they assume, like Marx, that “the mode of produc-
tion of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life
process in general.”6 When standpoint theory is grounded in this
premise, it holds that a group’s consciousness is rooted in that group or
class’s relationship to the mode of production, or its economic base, and
in particular to the labor experience of its members. Feminist stand-
point theory, therefore, holds that women’s labor, their place in the eco-
nomic system, conditions or shapes their consciousness. Nancy
Hartsock finds, for example, in material practices “the structural deter-
minants of [women’s] experiences”; these are “the common threads
which connect the diverse experiences of women.”7 In particular, Hart-
sock has focused upon women’s historical connection to use-value pro-
duction, seeing that as a base from which emerged a critical position
toward the increasingly dominant ethos of commodity exchange. As
noted, use-value production generally means domestic labor, such as
16 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

cooking, knitting, weaving, spinning, and subsistence agriculture—

tasks that even royal women such as Marguerite de Navarre often per-
formed. Such labor is generally less alienating than that of industrial
workers or of those involved in commodity exchange, and therefore
constitutes a more holistic, personalist consciousness, according to this
vein of standpoint theory.
I have come to believe (revising a position I took in an earlier article)8
that while both of these branches of standpoint theory—what we may call
the Lukács (Hegelian) version and the Hartsock (Marxist) version—
provide relevant explanations for the presence of a critical feminist irony
in the writings of early modern women, the Lukácian theory is the more
important. The primary animus for these women writers’ development of
a critical standpoint and for the critical irony manifest in their work was
their intense resentment of their sexual objectification as women. The
Hartsock use-value production theory remains nevertheless suggestive,
and I wish to explore further some of its ramifications before returning to
the other, which I do later in the chapter. Lucien Goldmann has proposed
that the novel arose as a dialectical critical response to the emergence of
capitalism, with its exchange-value ethos and the attendant marginaliza-
tion of production for use and its personalist ethos.9 He saw the novel’s
thematics as an ethical reaction against the alienation inherent in com-
modity exchange; and argued that the artist retains a connection to the
world of use-value production and that this provides the critical basis
from which she or he criticizes the abstractions and immoralities of the
world of commodity exchange. While Goldmann does not explain why or
how an artist retains a connection to use-value production, it is apparent
that artistic production resembles use-value production in that the latter
retains an artisanal character in which products are valued for their per-
sonal, “sacred” qualities rather than for their abstract commodity worth.
What Goldmann does not specify, however, is that much of women’s do-
mestic use-value labor is on the edge of artistic production. Indeed, the
line between use-value product and “art” is blurred in many of women’s
household tasks such as knitting, baking, needlepoint, quilting, etc.
An interesting contemporary work that explores the relation between
women’s use-value production and art is Alice Walker’s brilliant story
“Everyday Use” (1973). The mother in the story values a family quilt for
its personal connections, its sacred character, reflecting a use-value ethos,
where the daughter, Dee, values it in terms of its exchange value as an aes-
thetic commodity. The story revolves around the conflict between the two
women on this issue.10
As we have noted, Bakhtin contrasted the novel with the epic, which he
claimed was “walled off ” from the “continuing and unfinished present,”
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 17

where the novel presents “a zone of maximally close contact between the
represented object and contemporary reality in all its inconclusiveness.”11
The novel, he thought, was a genre on the boundary between the literary
and the non-literary, routinely incorporating “extraliterary genres,” such
as letters, diaries, etc. within its fabric (33). I argue that the “zone of con-
tact” between women’s use-value production and their artistic production
is uniquely close. Early women writers such as Cavendish and Jane Barker
in fact appropriated use-value practices (spinning and needlework, for ex-
ample) in their aesthetic theory to explain aspects of their own literary
composition (see further discussion below).
A sense of irony toward patriarchal exchange systems, with their in-
herent commodification of women, was one of the principal contribu-
tions women writers made to the rise of the novel. Women’s historical
connection to use-value production appears to have been a primary
source for this irony. The conception of art as a use-value praxis held by
many early modern women writers was accompanied by an ethical per-
spective that was functional in use-value relations. Qualitative rather than
quantitative, personalist, and unalienated, it provided a likely basis for
women’s resistance to the commodification of relationship that attended
production for exchange.
Although early modern women writers came predominantly from a
group of upper-class women who had a somewhat problematic relation-
ship with use-value production, they retained an identification with it,
and with the domestic sphere. Women’s base in use-value production,
therefore, provided a critical, ironic standpoint from which to judge the
machinations of the exchange system. This viewpoint was, I contend, an
important basis for the irony seen in their early literary production, and
it contributed importantly to the dialogical consciousness Bakhtin
posited as essential to the rise of the novel.
Theorists who consider the emergence of the novel primarily in lit-
erary historical terms, such as Maurice Z. Shroder, see the form arising
as an ironic reaction against the romance, constituting itself as an
“anti-romance.” Shroder suggests that the archetypal character rela-
tionship in the novel is between an alazon figure, who expresses a ro-
mantic (or mystifying) sensibility and an eiron figure, who expresses a
commonsensical, realistic viewpoint.12 Don Quixote is the classic ro-
mantic alazon and Sancho Panza the sensible eiron. In early women’s
novels the alazon figure took the form of the “female quixote,” a char-
acter who imbibes romances to the point that she mystifies the under-
lying commodity relationship of the marriage-market exchange. She is
usually coupled with a sensible sister or servant who debunks her pre-
tensions (eiron).
18 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

It may well be that the irony inherent in this pattern was rooted in
women’s historical connection to use-value production. Once again Gold-
mann provides the necessary link when he argues, in effect, that the nov-
elist is herself an ethical eiron to the ideological alazon of the marketplace.
Goldmann remarks, “In the economic world, which constitutes the most
important segment of modern social life, every authentic relationship be-
tween objects and human beings, [which is] qualitative, tends to disap-
pear; at the same time relationships among people [are] replaced by a
mediated and degraded connection, [one based on] . . . the purely quan-
titative values of exchange” (38). The artist, however, for reasons, as noted,
that Goldmann does not explain, retains a connection to a use-value,
qualitative ethic, and this forms the critical or ironic standpoint from
which she or he takes an oppositional position to the dominant exchange-
value ethic of capitalism.
Like Lukács and Hegel, Goldmann sees the novel as a “fallen” form be-
cause it reflects a world where authentic values have been compromised
by the secular, amoral Machiavellian ethic of commodity exchange. The
romanesque hero, then, has the problematic task of seeking “authentic
values in a fallen [dégradé] world” (26). But those values, reflecting the
relatively unalienated experience of use-value production, are no longer
accessible; they can only be achieved or even imagined through the medi-
ation of the quantitative ethic of exchange production (39). Don Quixote
is a good example of a figure whose desire for unalienated experience is
mediated by false, reified images that intrude. Goldmann deplores the
profane character of exchange-value thinking, arguing that it negates the
sacred (or the qualitative), functioning entirely in terms of “anaesthetic”
rationalism (55).
In his study Popular Fiction before Richardson, John Richetti follows
Goldmann in seeing that there is a moral dialectic in the novel between
what he calls religious and secular values. Unique among scholars of the
novel in drawing attention to such early modern women writers as
Delarivier Manley and Jane Barker, Richetti sees that in their works the
religious-versus-secular thematic connects to a feminist critique of patri-
archal society. Although he does not explain it in explicitly feminist terms,
Richetti recognizes that these women criticized the “financial and sexual
materialism” that “reduces love to a biological impulse and marriage to a
profitable alliance.”13 In other words, they resisted the commodification
of relationships that resulted both from the growing extension of ex-
change-value consciousness into all areas of life and from the marriage-
market exchange system in which women’s bodies were reified into
implements for male gratification; into what are now called “sex-objects.”
By contrast, the women envisaged (sometimes implicitly) an oppositional
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 19

ethic, one rooted in spiritual love, in a personalist relationship that does

not entail the commodification of women.
The writings of Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker reveal that
women writers of this period consciously connected the idea of literary
production with use-value production: they both draw analogies be-
tween the traditional use-value roles of women and the role of writer,
and they both seek models in use-value production for their art. They
thus locate their literary production in that blurred “zone of contact” be-
tween reality and literary representation—and between use-value and
artistic production—whose emergence Bakhtin saw as critical to the rise
of the novel.
While their relationship with use-value production was clearly prob-
lematic, they nevertheless both personally identified with the subjective
and valued roles it had provided women (as opposed to the devalued ob-
jectification that attended women’s relegation to commodity status in
marriage-market ideology). Their attempt to appropriate writing to such
use-value labor as spinning and needlework suggests a desire to validate
their new craft and thereby to legitimate the critical, ironic perspective ex-
pressed therein.
Jane Barker’s Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), one of the most
important, if most ignored, works in women’s literary history, vividly ap-
propriates use-value production to literary production. Barker’s linkage
of the two realms—women’s work and art—provides a critical standpoint
for the author’s ironic view of the received “word of the fathers” (Bakhtin,
Dialogic Imagination 342).
In apologizing for her inadequate poetry, Barker suggests that perhaps
her “Fingers ought to have been imploy’d rather at the Needle and the
Distaff, than to the Pen and Standish. . . .”14 Barker uses, however, this
self-deprecatory remark (with its suggestion that women’s proper identi-
fication is with use-value production rather than with literary produc-
tion) to criticize a received masculine literary tradition—the Pindaric
ode, a classical verse form. The reason she ought to return to the needle
and distaff is that she has had difficulty trying to compose a “Pindarick,”
whose aesthetic she then proceeds to debunk. Its “irregular Jumps, and
Starts,” she observes, its “sudden Disappointments, and long-expected Pe-
riods . . . deprive . . . the mind of . . . Musick” (7). Thus, Barker ends by
ironically undercutting the received “word of the fathers” from the view-
point of one trained in use-value production.
Like Cavendish and most other early modern women authors Barker
decries women’s exclusion from formal education. “A learned Woman,”
she laments, “is like a Forc’d Plant, that never has its due or proper Rel-
ish” (11). Nevertheless, she implicitly sees women’s training in use-value
20 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

occupations as relevant to, indeed indispensable to, literary production.

Indeed her very concept of what a work of literature, in particular a
novel, should be is based on a use-value product, the patch-work screen.
Not only is such a creation quintessentially women’s work, it also exhibits
the “unofficial,” random, folk character that Bakhtin saw as essential to
the novel’s dialogic discourse (Dialogic Imagination 20).
In her introduction Barker expands the patch-work analogy to a dia-
logic discussion among women: “whenever one sees a Set of Ladies together,
their Sentiments are as differently mix’d as the Patches in their Work . . .
they divide and sub-divide, ‘till at last they make this Dis-union meet in an
harmonious Tea-Table Entertainment.” Barker carries the metaphor still
farther, remarking a correlative to “the Clashing of Atoms, which at last
united to compose this glorious Fabrick of the UNIVERSE” (v-vi).
Barker, however, apologizes for this flight of fancy (reminiscent inci-
dentally of Cavendish’s similarly undisciplined and extravagant analogies)
immediately thereafter: “Forgive me, kind Reader, for carrying the Metaphor
too high; by which means I am out of my Sphere and so can say nothing of the
Male Patch-Workers; for my high Flight in Favour of the Ladies, made a mere
Icarus of me . . .” (vi). Barker is not only referring to celestial spheres here
but to her proper sphere as a woman. Being a writer meant she was ven-
turing out of her sphere and risking thereby a fall from social grace.
Barker had earlier explained that she chose the patch-work form “the
better to recommend it to my female readers, as well in their Discourse, as
their Needle-Work” (iv). In other words, Barker connects women’s “dis-
course” directly to their use-value practice, assuming that their aesthetic
understanding derives from their domestic labor. Barker thus anticipates
a female readership and the frame of the novel is that of one woman,
Galesia, narrating the events of her life to another, presenting them to her
as patches that contribute to the patch-work composition. Some of these
patches are poems, some are essentially short stories, some are stretches of
narrative, some are indeed recipes (czar’s punch, p. 92; Welsh flummery,
p. 96; French soup, p. 109).
Barker is clearly positioning literature in what Bakhtin called the “zone
of contact.” In Barker’s view the boundary line between literature and
non-literature was blurred. Not only did she include what we consider
non-literature (recipes, for example) as “patches” in her work, she also
wrote them in verse—thus according them equal status with “serious” lit-
erary work.
Moreover, in a poem on how her protagonist became an herbalist
apothecary, Barker connects medical prescriptions with poetry—another
blurring of boundaries. Calling upon her muse to inspire her in the writ-
ing of prescriptions (recipes), Barker comments,
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 21

. . . if my Muse, will needs officious be,

She must to this become a Votary.
In all our Songs, its Attributes rehearse,
Write Recipes, as OVID Law, in Verse.
To Measure we’ll reduce Fibrific-Heat,
And make the Pulses in true Numbers beat.
Asthma and Phthisick chant in lays most sweet;
The Gout and Rickets too, shall run on Feet. (58)

Barker seems here to see poetry as a healing art that has a direct phys-
ical effect on illness. Thus, literature, in her view, retains a direct practical
connection with the real world and does not assume the institutionalized
official character of earlier patriarchal forms. Barker’s praxis seems to
confirm Bakhtin’s insight that the novel emerged from such an anti-
authoritarian consciousness, rooted, as here suggested, in a marginalized
use-value ethos.
An incident in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (l664) serves, however, to
indicate that at least some women of the nobility had a problematic re-
lationship to use-value production. Cavendish nevertheless legitimates
her writing as a use-value occupation, seeing herself finally as a spinster
in words.
In this episode, which is narrated in indirect discourse (see further dis-
cussion of the significance of this convention in chapter nine), Cavendish
sets herself (or her persona) up as alazon to her servant, who serves as
eiron. Cavendish, herself apparently neither skilled in nor interested in
“Huswifry,” is chastened by neighbors’ criticism that she and her servants
rarely engage in domestic crafts. Acknowledging that she has spent most
of her time in studies, Cavendish decides that she and her maids will em-
bark upon a course of spinning.
Upon hearing of this scheme her chief servant smiled. “I ask’d her the
Reason, she said, she Smil’d to think what Uneven Threads I would Spin,
for, said she, though Nature hath made you a Spinster in Poetry, yet Edu-
cation hath not made you a Spinster in Huswifry.”15 After proposing var-
ious similar plans, such as making silk flowers and preserves, which are
similarly debunked by the servant, Cavendish decides “to Return to my
Writing-Work” (314).
Cavendish’s idea of engaging in use-value production is here presented
as fantastical as Don Quixote’s various dreams. As in Cervantes’s work,
the commonsensical view is presented by a servant. It is clear that
Cavendish is herself disconnected from the domestic practices that con-
stitute use-value production; they are alien to her, and she is economically
superfluous, supported by her husband. Writing is the practice that has
22 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

clearly filled the void. As she says in her preface to the Poems, and Fancies,
“our Sex hath so much waste time.”16
Yet she continually appropriates her writing to use-value production.
In her dedication to Poems, and Fancies, for example, Cavendish analo-
gizes poetry to “Huswifery” and to spinning, noting that her lack of skill
in the latter made her turn to the former: “True it is, Spinning with the
Fingers is more proper to our Sexe, then [sic] studying or writing Poetry,
which is the Spinning with the braine: but I having no skill in the Art of the
first . . . made me delight in the latter” (A2r; see also A7r). By using this
analogy Cavendish is clearly ironically undercutting traditional female
roles and attendant ideologies from a position that posits writing as a use-
value occupation.
Cavendish did not publish primarily in order to support herself, as
most subsequent women novelists did, beginning with Aphra Behn.
(Cavendish said she published principally because she wanted to be fa-
mous, and probably because she wanted thereby to exert power.) It is clear
nevertheless that for her writing has become a substitute for use-value
production: she has become a spinster in words.
Returning to Lukács’s Hegelian theory that there is an inherent human
resistance to being treated as an object, another, and perhaps more im-
portant, source of women’s critical irony was their resistance to sexual ob-
jectification. While sexual objectification of women was not new, it was
reinforced by the exchange ethos that accompanied the rise of capitalism.
As noted above, changing economic conditions fostered the emergence of
“marriage markets”—places like Bath, a recurring site in novels, where
women went to meet prospective spouses. Such a system involved more
overt commodification of women than did the arranged marriage, in
which women were objects for exchange but at least did not have to sell
themselves. Under the new system women increasingly had to advertise
themselves in order to attract potential mates. Ruth Perry cites a diarist
who in 1654 remarked how London women had begun “to paint them-
selves, formerly a most ignominious thing, and used only by prostitutes.”
As Perry notes, “by the end of the seventeenth century the amount of oils,
rouges, perfumes, and cosmetics being sold was dizzying.” Late
seventeenth-century feminist Mary Astell remarked how while men make
their fortune, “with us Women [it is a matter of] the setting ours to sale,
and the dressing forth our selves to purchase a Master.” Anyone who has
read a number of eighteenth-century novels knows that they are centrally
concerned with the marriage-market processes; with, as Perry puts it, “the
politics of [women’s] sexuality.”17
In her study of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s nov-
els, Women, Power, and Subversion (1981), Judith Lowder Newton argues
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 23

similarly that the writers she studies—Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Char-
lotte Brontë, and George Eliot—evince in their writings a consciousness
that is “alternative or oppositional to dominant values.” She locates the
source of the authors’ critically ironic attitude toward patriarchal ideology
in their own experience. “Each writer . . . appears to be working through
some painful personal encounter with culturally imposed patterns of male
power and female powerlessness. In Burney this is specifically the shock of
being reduced to merchandise in the marriage market.”18
Probably the earliest extended critique in English prose fiction of the
marriage market from a woman’s standpoint occurs in Cavendish’s novella
“The Contract,” which appears in Natures Pictures (1656). (Since Cavendish
uses the method of casuistry in this story, I treat it more extensively in chap-
ter five). It is also apparent in another novella in the same work, “Assaulted
and Pursued Chastity,” where the female protagonist embarks on a series of
far-flung adventures in order to escape being prey to what Cavendish calls
the “marchandiz[ing]” of women (Natures Pictures, 220).
But perhaps the best early example of feminist critical irony occurs in
an episode in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters. It is related in a form of indi-
rect discourse Bakhtin (or V. N. Vološinov) calls “quasi-direct discourse,”
or the style indirect libre.19 In his analysis of Bakhtin’s theory, Gary Saul
Morson notes as an example of indirect discourse the opening sentence of
Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that, a single
man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Morson
remarks the critical irony inherent in this mode. “This sentence does not
make an assertion, it reports one; and reported speech is already the be-
ginning of a dialogue. Considerable irony is implicitly directed at the
group that might make such an assertion and identify itself with the uni-
verse.”20 The patriarchal voice that so universalizes itself, of course, views
women as exchange objects, as Austen pointedly infers in her opening
sentence. Neither Bakhtin nor Morson recognize, though, that the critical
irony inherent in such use of indirect discourse—which Bakhtin sees as a
sine qua non of the novel—derives from the woman’s perspective as the
subject who is being objectified in the reported speech.
In the Sociable Letters Cavendish uses indirect discourse (or technically
“quasi-direct discourse”) to describe a scene where she is overhearing a
ponderous and lengthy dialogue among several male pundits about the
origins of the universe. As the discussion winds down, she notes,

N. N. said, that if the World was Eternal, it was not made by Chance, for
Chance proceeded from some Alteration, or Change of some Motions, and
not from Eternity, for Eternity was not Subject to Chance, although
Chance might be Subject to Eternity, and to prove the World and Worlds
24 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

were Eternal, he said, the Fundamental Frame, Parts, Motion, and Form,
were not Subject to Change, for they Continue One and the Same without
any Alteration. Thus, Madam [the addressee of Cavendish’s letter], the
Sages Discoursed, but they perceiving I was very attentive to their Dis-
course, they ask’d my Opinion, I answered, they had left no Room for an-
other Opinion, for the World was Eternal or not Eternal, and they had
given their Opinions of either Side; then they desired me to be a Judg [sic]
between their Opinions, I said, such an Ignorant Woman as I will be a very
unfit Judge, and though you be both Learned, and Witty Men, yet you can-
not resolve the Question, it being impossible for a Small Part to Under-
stand or Conceive the Whole, and since neither you, nor all Mankind, were
they joyn’d into one Soul, Body, or Brain, can possibly know whether the
World had a Beginning or no Beginning, or if it had, When it was Made,
nor of What it was Made, nor for What it was Made, nor What Power
Made it, nor What the Power is that Made it, nor whether it shall Last or
Dissolve; wherefore said I, the best is to leave this Discourse, and Discourse
of some other Subject that is more Sociable, as being more Conceivable:
Then they Laugh’d, and said they would Discourse of Women, I said, I did
believe they would find that Women were as Difficult to be Known and
Understood as the Universe. (224–25)

We have in this passage all the ingredients that Bakhtin saw as essential
to the rise of the novel: indirect discourse ironically reporting the “word
of the fathers” from the critical point of view of the marginalized other, a
woman who, interestingly enough in this passage, is speaking to another
woman in tones of unmistakably Austenian irony. The pompous asser-
tions of the men serve as alazon to the woman narrator, the eiron.
Moreover, the narrator calls attention to her inferior status. By implic-
itly debunking at the end of the passage the men’s projected theories
about women, Cavendish effectively resists the imposition of any patriar-
chal objectification upon her. The characterization of women as a “Sub-
ject that is more Sociable” is not only rejected by the narrator; it also
inflects a certain irony upon the title of Cavendish’s collection, the Socia-
ble Letters, suggesting a note of bitterness and anger at being an intellec-
tual subject relegated to the status of a sociable object—a resentment that
is expressed throughout the work.
Elsewhere Cavendish pointedly rejects the patriarchal exchange system
with its inherent commodification of women and their accompanying de-
valuation. Letter XCIII in the Sociable Letters provides her critique of mar-
riage and motherhood. First, “a Woman hath no . . . Reason to desire
Children for her Own Sake, for first her Name is lost . . . in her Marrying,
for she quits her Own, and is Named as her Husband.” Nor does the estate
descend through her line, “for their Name only lives in Sons, who Con-
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 25

tinue the Line of Succession, whereas Daughters are but Branches which
by Marriage are Broken off from the Root from whence they Sprang, &
Ingrafted into the Stock of an other Family, so that Daughters are to be ac-
counted but as Moveable Goods” (183–84). The perception of women
(daughters here) as objects for exchange could not be more acute.
Similar feminist assertions pervade Cavendish’s work. A comment in
“To the Two Universities” (1655) is representative:

. . . so as we [women] are become like worms that onely live in the dull
earth of ignorance, winding our selves sometimes out, by the help of some
refreshing rain of good educations which seldom is given us; for we are kept
like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses . . . we are shut out of
all power, and Authority by reason we are never imployed either in civil nor
[sic] marshall affaires, our counsels are despised, and laught at, the best of
our actions are troden down with scorn, by the over-weaning conceit men
have of themselves and through a dispisement of us.21

An acerbic critique of the commodification of relationships associated

with exchange-value production is provided in another important work
of the period, Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella (1714). In this au-
tobiographical novel Manley vigorously opposes the exchange-value
ethos of capitalism (for example, see her discussion of the financial
machinations surrounding the will of Lord Crafty’s wife),22 urging in its
stead a relationship ethic wherein women would be treated as subjects,
not sexual commodities. Manley’s critique of Lord Crafty’s mercenary
mentality is representative:

This Lord us’d to . . . [trust] no person with his real Designs: What Part he
gave any one in his Confidence when they were to negotiate an Affair for
him, was in his own Expression but tying ‘em by the Leg to a Table, they
cou’d not go farther than the Line that held them. He was incapable of
Friendship but what made for his Interest, or of Love but for his own
proper Pleasures: Nature form’d him a Politician, and Experience made
him an Artist in the Trade of Dissimulation. (56–57)

Rivella’s (or Manley’s) own ethic entails refusing to play the game of
commodity exchange—whether it be in the commercial realm, as seen in
Lord Crafty’s exploitation of his assistant, or in the marriage-market ex-
change of women. Rivella is unwilling to abandon her printer and pub-
lishers, for example, when they (and she) are the target of a libel suit
brought against the New Atalantis, an earlier work by Manley. A friend
(the narrator) urges her to flee to Europe in order to avoid a prison term.
“I us’d several Arguments to satisfy her Conscience that she was under no
26 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

farther Obligation, especially since the Profit had been theirs; she an-
swer’d it might be so, but she could not bear to live and reproach her self
with the Misery that might happen to those unfortunate People” (112).
Thus, Rivella refuses to allow a financial consideration—that the profit
for her book had accrued to the printer and the publisher—to override
her personalist concern for their welfare.
Earlier she had declined to play the marriage-market courtship game
with the narrator, who remarks that while “she did not return my Passion
yet [she did so] without any affected Coyness, or personating a Heroine of
the many Romances she daily read” (18). Rivella’s insistence upon honesty
in relationships—that they be based on affectional ties rather than eco-
nomic interest, free of the ideological mystifications that sustain the
marriage-market trade—proves costly, however. She becomes increas-
ingly cynical and pessimistic and appears to feel trapped in a secularized
Machiavellian exchange-value reality. Sir Charles, the narrator, reports,
“She told me her Love of Solitude was improved by her Disgust of the
World” (41). She develops a philosophy of self-interest and becomes a
“Misanthrope” (109). In the end she withdraws from politics, declaring
that it is not the place for women and resolving from this point on to
write only of “more gentle pleasing Theams” (117). John Richetti sum-
marizes Manley’s vision as follows:

[Her] ideology, with its distrust of the complex world of financial power
and aggressive economic manipulation, reinforces the female distrust of a
masculine world where a woman is either only another pawn in the strug-
gle for power and influence or a commodity to be possessed and devoured
by the same ruthless individualism of a society whose highest values are
economic laws. (149)

In A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies Jane Barker also treats the rituals
of marriage-market courtship with intense critical irony. She includes as
subplots (or “patches”) the stories of several “seduced-and-abandoned”
women (what Nancy K. Miller has identified as the “heroine’s text,” a sta-
ple of eighteenth-century fiction);23 the main character Galesia’s own
abandonment by a lover Bosvil forms a leitmotif. But Galesia refuses to
“act the Coquet” (40) or engage in similarly stereotypical behavior ex-
pected of the courted woman (“the Curtesies, the Whispers, the Grimaces,
the Pocket Glasses, Ogling, Sighing, Flearing, Glancing” [46]).
In a particularly significant scene Galesia overhears (or has reported
to her) a discussion between her father and a suitor’s father regarding a
marriage contract in which they assess her market value. Like
Cavendish, Barker casts the episode in a form of indirect discourse. In-
CRITICAL IRONY, STANDPOINT THEORY, AND THE NOVEL Í 27

terestingly, she uses quotation marks in conjunction with the “that” sub-
ordination, but the effect is clearly that of indirect discourse, overheard
or reported conversation.

So the good old Gentleman was overjoy’d at his Son’s own Proposal, and
took the first Opportunity with my father, over a Bottle, to deliver his Son’s
Errand. To which my father answer’d . . . and told him, “That he was very
sensible of the Honour he did him in this Proposal; but he cou’d not make
his Daughter a Fortune suitable to his Estate. . . .” To which the old Gentle-
man reply’d, “That Riches were not what he sought in a Wife for his Son . . .
A prudent, vertuous Woman, was what he most aim’d at.” (34–35)

Once again the ironic effect is achieved by the fact that a subject, Galesia,
is looking in upon her own commodification in a marriage-market ex-
change. She thus is the eiron to the fathers who are alazons. In this way the
literal “word of the fathers” is undercut or problematized in accordance
with Bakhtin’s insights.
Galesia rejects the suitor, despite parental encouragement, and indeed
eventually retires from the beau monde of courtship rituals, choosing
solitude instead. She finally becomes an herbalist healer, a use-value oc-
cupation dominated by women to the present day. Galesia’s reservations
about early modern capitalism are expressed in her warning to her
woman companion not to invest in the “South-Sea . . . Bubble” (111–12),
an investment scheme of the period that collapsed. In the end, Galesia se-
cures a room of her own—a place of solitude on the margins—in which
to ruminate and to write. This position reinforces her peripheral stand-
point, from which she continues to criticize patriarchal society and its
exchange-value ethic.
We see manifest therefore in Barker’s work, as well as in Cavendish and
Manley’s, a feminist critical irony that is rooted in a women’s standpoint
of resistance to the reification forced upon them by patriarchal exchange
systems. In the next chapter we will trace an important source for this re-
sistance, the women’s framed-novelle tradition. As Erich Auerbach re-
marks in his study of the early modern novella, only with the emergence
of the framed-novelle does one have the possibility of the expression of a
standpoint; in earlier folk forms, such as the fabliau, “one has no stand-
point but [only] naïve, unreflective, uncritical folk poetry” (“haben gar
keine Standpunkt, sondern sind naive, nicht reflektierende, unkritische
Volkspoesie”).24 The standpoint that emerges in the women’s framed-
novelle is feminist.
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Chapter Three

The Women’s Framed-Novelle:

The French Tradition

HE FRAMED-NOVELLE WAS THE DOMINANT genre in prose fiction in the

T late medieval to early modern period, until it was superceded by the
novel. It is an assemblage of short tales that are linked by a frame narra-
tive, usually that of the social interaction among the story tellers. The
best known example is probably Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
(1353). Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387–1400) uses the frame for-
mat but the inset tales are in verse and therefore are not novellas, which
are in prose. Like the early novel, the framed-novelle was “a literary genre
without status, often alleged to be written for women and thus not to be
taken seriously.”1
The major theorists and historians of the rise of the novel—Ian Watt,
Michael McKeon, and J. Paul Hunter, for example—have overlooked the
framed-novelle as a progenitor of the novel, probably because their focus
tends to be Anglocentric, and possibly because the genre has been trivial-
ized by its association with women. By and large these theorists ignore
continental sources, which are considerable, for the rise of the English
novel. Russian critic Victor Shklovsky, however, in his Theory of Prose
(1925) recognizes the important link that exists, both historically and
structurally, between the framed-novelle and the novel.2
The Shklovsky thesis is summarized by Morson and Emerson as
follows:

According to Shklovsky, novels arose from collections of short stories. First,

authors wrote stories separately, then they found ways of combining them
30 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

in a “a common frame.” . . . The next step was to find a better way to link
stories. Authors discovered the “stringing together” . . . of stories: instead of
framing them as separate narratives about separate people, they trans-
formed them into episodes of a single character’s life. In this way, the mod-
ern novel was born.3

While this is an oversimplification, Shklovsky’s claim that the framed-

novelle was an important source for the novel is a position reinforced by
this study. The Shklovsky thesis is in fact considerably strengthened by a
consideration of the women’s framed-novelle tradition. As I argue in
chapter five, casuistry provided the writers in this tradition with a theory
that identified stories as “cases” that were used to prove, disprove, or mod-
ify received theses. Among the later writers in this tradition—that is, by
the mid-seventeenth century—writers were beginning to conceive of
their own life-histories as cases or series of cases, which provided the con-
ceptual model for what are considered the first English novels.
In this chapter I will focus on the early examples of the women’s
framed-novelle tradition, which was in fact the first women’s literary tra-
dition in Western prose literature. I will argue that these women used the
framed-novelle format to articulate a women’s standpoint, which they
forged in opposition to the dominant ideological voice of misogyny that
characterized the men’s novella tradition. Such articulation established a
dialogical counterpoint between subordinated and authoritarian idioms,
which contributed to the dialogic mentality that Mikhail Bakhtin identi-
fied with the rise of novelistic discourse.
While the framed-novelle format—short tales enclosed in a larger
frame narrative—was well established by the early modern period,4 the
women writers modified the genre considerably, expanding the discursive
frame greatly and using it for feminist purposes. This device, where frame
characters comment on and analyze the inset stories, was pioneered as a
feminist practice by Christine de Pizan in the Livre de la cité des dames
(1405) and perfected as a dialogical form by Marguerite de Navarre in the
Heptaméron (1549). As seen in the Cité des dames, it enabled the expres-
sion of feminist ideas and the articulation of a women’s viewpoint (which
was also sometimes expressed within the stories themselves).
The male writers in the tradition, the most notable of whom was Boc-
caccio, did not use the discursive frame to the same extent or the same ef-
fect, or for feminist purposes. Indeed, by the time of the Heptaméron the
men’s framed-novelle was characterized by a virulent misogyny, especially
in the French tradition.5 It is clear that the women writers seized the genre
in order to counter this misogyny. The feminist framed-novelle tradition
originated, therefore, in France—possibly facilitated, ironically, by quasi-
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 31

misogynist parodies like Les Évangiles des quenouilles, which I discuss

below. It spread to Spain and England undoubtedly through the influence
of the Heptaméron.6
Although other factors may have attracted women writers to the
framed-novelle—such as its roots in oral culture and a gift economy, as
discussed below, and its nonLatinate, folk character (see chapter nine)—
I believe the main reason was that it enabled the articulation of a feminist
standpoint in the querelle des femmes. In expressing a critical position
against abusive treatment of women, the women writers established the
kind of dialogical critique that Bakhtin saw arising in the early modern
period and culminating in the novel. Bakhtin, however, ignores the con-
tribution of these women. Not only does his failure to appreciate their
work limit his dialogic theory,7 but insufficient attention to the framed-
novelle and its role in the emergence of the dialogic led him to overesti-
mate the dialogical character of the novel. In fact, the novel is structurally
a much less dialogical form than the framed-novelle, even though it may
evince a subversive dialogism in its thematics. But the inherent structural
tension between the inset stories and the frame commentary sets up a di-
alogical potential in the framed-novelle that is eclipsed in the novel, where
the narrative focus is more unified.
Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic is, however, more a matter of the-
matics than structure. As articulated in Rabelais and His World and in
The Dialogic Imagination the dialogic is presented as a form of discourse
in which the subversive antiestablishment standpoint of marginalized,
oppressed groups is represented. Their “Galilean” perspective is per-
ceived as being inherently critical of the “official” monologic culture of
established institutions, notably the Church and the crown. As we have
noted, Bakhtin is particularly interested in forms of speech, such as pro-
fanity or the ironic use of indirect discourse, that debunk or destabilize
the “word of the fathers,”8 thereby establishing the “relativity of prevail-
ing truths and authorities” (Rabelais 11). The novel is, according to
Bakhtin, a particularly subversive genre because of the “dialogized het-
eroglossia” (Dialogic 273) it exhibits. “Diversity of voices and heteroglos-
sia . . . constitute . . . the distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre”
(300). Unlike earlier literary genres, such as the epic, which are charac-
terized by “unitary” discourse, the novel decenters monolithic ideologi-
cal forms (367).
While Bakhtin is undoubtedly right to recognize subversive irony and
parody as inherent in many early novels (Don Quixote, for example), he
is wrong to see it as a form that retains a “diversity of voices,” a “dialo-
gized heteroglossia.” On the contrary, the novel as it finally took shape in
the eighteenth century is characterized by its focus on one or a group of
32 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

individuals whose voice dominates—to whose story digressive narratives

are subordinated. This indeed is the distinguishing difference between
the novel and the framed-novelle. In the latter the inset narratives exist
in dialogical counterpoint with the frame narrative, and the frame voices
exist in dialogical relationship with one another. While the frame
thesis—its hypotaxis—can subordinate the stories (and does in certain
feminist examples of the genre), in the most genuinely dialogical of the
framed-novelles, for example the Heptaméron, no one voice dominates,
and no voices are dominated. In some of the women’s use of the framed-
novelle (notably Christine de Pizan and María de Zayas’s) one voice—a
feminist one—does come to prevail. But because that voice is itself in-
herently critical of the “word of the fathers”—ideologies that legitimize
the exchange and abuse of women—it maintains the subversive view-
point Bakhtin identified with the dialogic.
The women’s framed-novelle tradition, therefore, represents one of the
first dialogical formations in Western literature. These literary works are
dialogical on two counts: the first is that the structural counterpoint that
exists between the frame and the inset stories is inherently dialogical; the
second is that, as noted, the women writers’ handling of the form allowed
the articulation of a feminist standpoint, which provided an ideological
counterpoint to the prevailing misogynistic monologue.
On the first point, the frame perspective opened up the possibility
for ironizing the stories, though this possibility does not seem to have
been exploited by the male authors in the genre. Rather it comes into
play as the women writers attempted to critique a received body of
misogynist folk tales and fabliaux, which reified women in stereotypical
molds; as against this monolithic discourse the women counterposed a
view that values women as diverse subjects—thus establishing the dia-
logical heteroglossia Bakhtin identified with the novel. As noted,
Bakhtin indeed conceived the dialogic in political terms as arising from
the clash between authoritarian absolutist discourses (the “word of the
fathers”) and anti-authoritarian perspectives. What he failed to note was
that in the early modern period a primary ideological source of resis-
tance was feminism, women claiming their voice in the querelle des
femmes.
It may be that women writers were drawn to the framed-novelle for-
mat in part because of its roots in oral culture and in a gift economy—the
socio-economic habitat of nearly all women in the early modern period.
The frame story almost always involves a group of people gathered
together to tell each other stories (oral culture) and/or to discuss their
meaning. As a genre, the framed-novelle marks the transition between an
oral and a print culture. The works may be written down, but until the
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 33

seventeenth century they were not “published” in the modern sense;

rather they circulated by manuscript.9
The genre thus has its origins in a gift economy. Gift economies are
precapitalistic or noncapitalistic systems, seen in small communities,
such as extended families, small towns, tribes, or, in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century France, in court circles and salon society. Histori-
cally, in most societies women’s economic functions have been restricted
to gift economies and use-value production. Their role in gift economies
has been two-pronged, however. On the one hand, women have been
participants in gift economies as the exchangers of gifts, particularly as
the donators of gift or unpaid service labor, which helps to keep the
economy operational, and as the producers of items for noncommercial
use, rather than for the market.10 But, on the other hand, women are
themselves used as gifts or exchange objects in patriarchal kinship sys-
tems. Indeed, some theorists see women’s “cultural utilization as exchange
objects” as definitional of patriarchy.11
Both aspects of women’s role in gift economies are relevant to their lit-
erary production, as seen in the framed-novelle. First, its oral conversa-
tional style is, as Elizabeth Goldsmith (and others) have noted, a
“gift-giving” mode; that is, it involves collaborative literary production
and a free exchange of ideas on a given topic.12 No one “owns” the topic
as property; it remains in circulation in a kind of open-ended process. It
does not become alienable as a commodity is reified in a market economy.
The frames in the framed-novelle convention retain this kind of gift econ-
omy conversational mode. Margaret Cavendish’s assertion that she wrote
Natures Pictures “not . . . so much for sale, as pleasure”13 suggests a con-
ception of literature rooted in a gift economy, not a capitalist exchange
economy.
On the other hand, one of the principal ideas that emerges in these dis-
cussions is a critique of the marriage exchange system in which women
are commodified as exchange objects whose subjective opinion counts for
nothing. A central component of the feminist thesis that dominates early
modern women’s literature is a vociferous protest against this system and
its silencing of women. Along with this protest, these women writers also
demanded greater educational opportunities, they protested against male
violence against women and misogynist ideologies, and to a surprising
degree they rejected or ironized conventional roles, in particular such do-
mestic roles as sewing (as we have seen with Cavendish), which were seen
as precluding women’s participation in such traditionally male roles as
writing for circulation.
In short, these writers are asserting women’s voice as a subject in a
world where they are more often treated as objects. As Patricia Francis
34 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Cholakian remarks in her study of the Heptaméron, the woman is “in

Lévi-Straussian terms . . . both a ‘sign’ (an object of exchange) and a ‘gen-
erator of signs’ (a speaking subject).” To a great extent in women’s writing
“this split manifests itself in the disruptive effort to impose a feminine
subject on the masculine grammar of narrative desire.”14 Such ideological
disruption establishes critical irony and a dialogical relationship between
the two terms: counterposing to a viewpoint that sees women as objects
one that sees them as subjects.
Interestingly, what is considered the first articulation of feminist the-
ory by a woman occurs in Marie de Gournay’s Le Proumenoir (1594) as a
long digressive critique of a novella. I propose that Gournay derived this
critical practice from several of the writers we treat in this study, particu-
larly Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre.15 Gournay’s feminist
digression, which comprised about one-fourth of the original text, was
excised from subsequent editions. She later expanded her ideas, however,
in Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622). Significantly, in the frame dis-
cussion of Le Proumenoir, Gournay presents it as a gift to her mentor,
Montaigne.
The novella on which Gournay bases her commentary concerns a
woman who is used as “an object of exchange, the conqueror’s trophy,”
after the defeat of her country.16 As Domna Stanton remarks, in Gour-
nay’s handling the story, “told by the Daughter . . . is the tale of a Daugh-
ter as object of exchange in a world of Fathers and Sons. [It reflects] the
dual (and contradictory) vision of a woman as subject and object of ex-
change” (13). This divided political ontology—being both subject and ob-
ject for exchange—is what, I believe, occasioned the emergence of a
political standpoint, in Lukács’s sense of the term, in the women writers
of the framed-novelle tradition.

Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the City of Ladies)
(1405) is the first feminist use of the framed narrative format. While the
inset stories are not (with a few notable exceptions) fiction but rather ex-
empla gleaned from classical, Judaic, and Christian myth and history,
Christine’s work provided a model for subsequent women writers. Her
use of the frame for feminist didactic purposes was particularly influen-
tial; as can be readily seen in later women writers from Marguerite de
Navarre to María de Zayas and Delarivier Manley. (The Cité des dames
was translated into English in 1521 as the Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes).
The explicit purpose of the Cité des dames is to refute misogynistic
views of women by means of counter examples that illustrate women’s
strengths and virtues. The frame “plot” consists of a dialogue between the
author’s persona, “Christine,” and three allegorical figures, Reason, Recti-
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 35

tude, and Justice [Raison, Droitture, and Justice]—all of whom are fe-
male. The three allegorical women instruct Christine in the ways of the
world (in this case the misogynistic ways of a patriarchal world) and sug-
gest to her counter arguments and strategies.
In one section of the Cité des dames, Christine uses novellas as the inset
stories, thus employing the framed-novelle format. These narratives,
which are much longer than the others, include three novellas adapted
from Boccaccio’s Decameron and one, the Griselda story, taken from Pe-
trarch (although the story is also in the Decameron). Significantly, Chris-
tine chose only novellas that illustrate a feminist thesis. Two—Boccaccio’s
IV.1 and IV.5—show brutally tyrannical treatment of women by male rel-
atives who disapprove of the women’s choice of lovers and punish them
by murdering the lovers. In the first of these, the story of Ghismonda, the
woman is served her lover’s eviscerated heart as punishment for defying
her father’s orders. Versions of these much recounted tales were picked up
by Jeanne Flore (Comptes amoureux, novella seven), Marguerite de
Navarre (Heptaméron, novella forty), and María de Zayas (“El traidor
contra su sangre,” Parte segunda, novella eight).
The third tale that Christine borrowed from Boccaccio (II.9) is the
story of Bernabo’s wife. Here a woman falsely accused of adultery by her
husband and condemned to death acts as her own defense attorney (in
male disguise) and wins her case. In Boccaccio’s handling, however, the
feminist thesis of the tale is undercut by the frame. He juxtaposes it
against a misogynist tale (II.10) that illustrates women’s fickleness, such
that the women listeners in the frame narrative conclude that Bernabo
was right not to have trusted his wife.17 Mihoko Suzuki suggests, indeed,
that “the Decameron’s paradigmatic narrative strategy [is a] juxtaposition
of . . . female-directed discourse with stories . . . that function to subju-
gate the female character to the will of the male protagonist,” thereby
negating through the frame potentially feminist theses.18
Subsequent women writers, starting with Christine de Pizan, restored
the feminist thesis of II.9 vitiated by Boccaccio. Indeed, María de Zayas
expands the tale considerably in “El juez de su causa” (“The Judge of Her
Own Case”), novella nine in the Novelas amorosas. Christine de Pizan may
thus be said to have pioneered the feminist framed-novelle genre, which
was picked up by her successors.
Les Évangiles des quenouilles (ca. 1466–74), which translated means
“The Gospels of the Distaffs” or more loosely “The Gospels of Women,”
is like the other works analyzed in this chapter a framed collection of
narrations with a purportedly feminist purpose; in this case the nar-
rated material is not, however, novellas or even historical/mythical bi-
ographies such as in the Cité des dames. Rather, it is an assemblage of
36 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

approximately 230 folk beliefs and sententiae, many of them relative to

women’s lives.
In this work, however, there is an overt clash between the inset materi-
als and the frame, such that the ultimate message of the work remains am-
biguous. The inset materials are presented by women narrators who have
the expressed feminist desire to preserve matriarchal oral traditions. Since
as rural women they are presumably illiterate, they engage a male scribe
to write down their stories. He does so but with satiric asides that under-
cut their presentations.
The women narrate their “gospels” (which are a series of folk apho-
risms) while they are working the distaff (the spool used in spinning)
during six successive winter evenings in the winter carnival season be-
tween Christmas and Candlemas. The frame is thus that of a women’s
oral culture.
In the prologue of the frame, which is narrated by the male scribe, we
learn that he has been charged by the women with putting into writing or
recording this oral material. He claims that the work is dedicated to “the
honor and glory of women” [“faittes a l’onneur et exaucement des
dames”] and presented in order to counter antifeminist derision.19
This sentiment is echoed by the first speaker, Ysengrine du Glay, who
in a prologue of her own explains her desire to have women’s cultural tra-
ditions preserved: “it is my opinion . . . that it would be a good idea if with
the help of our secretary and friend we put together a little treatise com-
posed of chapters . . . derived from materials of our great, ancestral moth-
ers, which have been found, in order that they not be forgotten” [“il m’est
avis . . . que bon seroit que a l’ayde de cestui nostre secretaire et ami, nous
feissons un petit traittié des chappitres . . . lesquelz de pieça de noz
grandes et anciennes meres ont esté trouvez, affin de les non mettre en
oubliance” (80)]. She also is motivated by a concern to counter misogy-
nist views of women, thus harking back to Christine de Pizan: “it is re-
markable,” she comments, “how men of the present time never cease to
write and produce defamatory libels and malicious books which strike at
the honor of our sex” [“il est tout notoire comment les hommes du temps
present ne cessent de escripre et faire libelles diffamatoires et livres con-
tagieux poignans l’onneur de nostre sexe” (80)]. Each of the women then
presides in turn over an evening’s recitals of short, folkloric observations,
which are usually accompanied by a short (one or two sentence) gloss.
The narrative proceeds through six successive days, so the structure of the
work is a “hexameron,” as editor Madeleine Jeay points out (9).
The scribe, however, does not present the material unambiguously;
rather he provides an ironic, parodic perspective that tends to undermine
and criticize the authority of the women. He does this mainly through
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 37

short pejorative descriptions of the story-tellers, which precede each

evening’s recital. Jeay notes that the composite narrator is an ugly woman,
marginalized by her location in a sexual demi-monde (being a prostitute,
panderer, or widow), who has special powers and knowledge, especially of
herbs, folk remedies, and childbirth. She is in short an examplar of the
rural witch-woman suspected of heresy and sorcery who was persecuted
during the early modern period (29–30). There is thus a clash between the
self-presentation of the women and their culture and the critical perspec-
tive of the scribe, who represents the emerging world of rationalism,
which ridicules feminine oral folk culture (31). Nevertheless, the women’s
text remains accessible despite the parodic frame. Jeay maintains that the
“ironic treatment by the author takes nothing away from the authenticity
of the folkloric material: the two texts coexist side by side” [“le traitment
ironique de l’auteur m’entame en rien l’authenticité du donné folk-
lorique: les deux textes se côtoient” (15)].
The inset material in the Évangiles is a series of aphoristic folk obser-
vations. A few of these have a feminist point (especially those of Ysengrine
de Glay on the first day), but most are simply folk superstitions. The fem-
inist “gospel” includes pronouncements such as “the man who inappro-
priately spends wealth that comes from his wife, without her consent and
agreement, will have to explain to God” [“l’omme qui despend indeue-
ment les biens qui lui viennent de par sa femme et sans son gré et congié,
il en rendera conte devant Dieu” (82)]. The folk superstitions include such
notions as that the sex of a child can be determined by putting salt on the
head of a sleeping pregnant woman—if she then says a man’s name, the
child will be male, and vice versa (84)—or that a crow crying on the chim-
ney of a sick person’s house means the person will die (96).
Although the patent silliness of many of these beliefs may tend to re-
inforce the scribe’s satiric intent, the work appears to provide a rare
glimpse into rural women’s folk culture and clearly illustrates the connec-
tion between the framed-narrative genre and women’s economic culture
(the women characters are engaged in use-value production—spinning—
and a gift exchange system) and social culture (orality). It also bespeaks
once again the feminist intent of these women authors (here considering
the narrators as “authors”). Since the Évangiles was very popular and went
through many editions (an English translation was made in 1507), it re-
mains an important version of the genre, one that probably influenced
later writers.20
Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux (ca. 1537) is another French example
of a feminist use of the framed-novelle genre; seven stories are linked by
a frame where several women—the stories’ narrators—are gathered to tell
each other the stories and to comment upon them (an expression of oral
38 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

culture). The extant text of the Comptes amoureux is apparently a pastiche

of selections from two original texts: stories number two, three, four, and
five being from one source and number one, six, and seven from an-
other.21 The latter three stories (as well as number three) are unified by
the theme of the unhappy young woman married to a jealous older man,
with a claim made for her right to happiness and love, which are not pro-
vided by the spouse. While some have argued that the Comptes amoureux,
like Les Évangiles des quenouilles and Les Caquets de l’accouchée (1622), are
misogynist satires or parodies, others contend that it is, on the contrary,
the work of “a champion of women’s rights.”22 One scholar in fact notes
that in Flore’s work “the [medieval] misogynist text is negated . . . [and]
the theme of the ‘mal-mariée’ . . . is introduced through the eyes of a
woman who presents herself as the spokesperson for her sex,” that she is,
in short, expressing a feminist standpoint in the on-going querelle des
femmes.23
My hypothesis is that the stories of the first original text may have been
intended parodically, but not those of the second, which indeed includes
(story seven) the tale of Ghismonda treated by Christine de Pizan and
later by Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas—all from a feminist
point of view. The claim, moreover, that women, as subjects, have legiti-
mate desires and are right not to want to be treated merely as objects for
exchange—Flore’s main thesis—is certainly feminist.
In the opening epistle to her cousin, the author (first-person narrator)
recalls that the stories were recently told “in her company” and that she
has written them down in order to present them as a gift to her cousin, an
example of writing as a gift-economy practice. “[J]’avois prinse la plume
en main pour le vous mettre par escript” (97). While the frame characters
are not well developed, Flore extends the frame plot beyond her prede-
cessors’ in that Cébille—to whom the stories are told as exempla—
appears to learn from them (to respect the power of love). In this Flore
anticipates the work of María de Zayas, whose frame women learn from
the inset stories and change their lives as a result.
As with Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre, Jeanne Flore
appears to be responding at least in part to the Decameron’s antifeminist
theses. The Comptes amoureux is in fact the first French work modeled on
the Decameron (Cerrata 251). In her negative critique of young women
trapped in arranged marriages with older men Flore seems to be reacting
against Boccaccio’s depiction of women in such marriages as “sexually in-
satiable and adulterous” (Suzuki 233). In her commentary on tale num-
ber one the narrator, Madame Melibee, points up a counter, feminist
thesis: “The young girl Rosemonde was long oppressed by her jealous hus-
band” [“La damoiselle Rosemonde fut longuement opprimée de son
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 39

jaloux mary” (129)]—thus articulating the voice and point of view of the
subordinate, enacting the possibility of Bakhtin’s dialogic.
Flore’s work may be seen as an intermediary between the Cité des
dames and the Heptaméron; like the former it retains a feminist hypotaxis,
or unifying focus, but the frame format and the use of fictional stories
point in the direction of Marguerite de Navarre’s great work.
In L’Heptaméron (1549) Marguerite de Navarre turned the frame in the
framed-novelle into a dialogical, “discussion-group” forum in which the
stories are interpreted and evaluated by the storytellers. Considering how
she expanded and enriched it, many scholars consider her to have in-
vented the discursive frame. In L’Heptaméron, the frame comprises ap-
proximately one-third of the text, including a prologue and discussions
following each of seventy-two novellas. The frame here is much more de-
veloped as a work of fiction in its own right than were its predecessors.
The frame characters—five women and five men—are distinct (psycho-
logically and ideologically consistent) individuals (as opposed to the gen-
erally flat characters in antecedent frames), which has led one critic to see
them as “forerunners” of the novel’s characters, who are similarly pro-
vided with consistent psychological motivation (unlike earlier genres such
as the romance and the epic where characters are rarely developed).24 The
frame characters do not act or change their lives as in a novel, however;
María de Zayas appears to have been the first woman writer to develop
this evolutionary innovation.
Several critics have suggested that Marguerite developed the discur-
sive frame as a way of responding to the misogyny rampant in the Re-
naissance novella tradition. In this, she was furthering the cultural work
of Christine de Pizan, the women of the Évangiles des quenouilles, and
Jeanne Flore. As Robert Clements and Joseph Gibaldi note in Anatomy of
the Novella, “With Marguerite de Navarre proving that she could beat her
countrymen at their own game and María de Zayas . . . women eventu-
ally moved in totally, metamorphosing the once predominantly misogy-
nistic genre into a vehicle for propounding their own strongly feminist
ideas” (181, emphasis in original). While Christine de Pizan was not her
only source, Marguerite probably owned a manuscript of Christine’s,
and, in any event, was quite familiar with her work.25 She also may have
known the Comptes amoureux (Jourda 685), and possibly the Évangiles
des quenouilles.
Each character in the frame has a consistent position in the querelle des
femmes, which is the issue that dominates the discussions, providing the
text’s hypotaxis. Unlike the Cité des dames, however, the feminist position
is but one of many expressed on the subject. The work remains more gen-
uinely dialogical, arguably the first work in Western literature to evince
40 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

the heteroglossia that Bakhtin heralded in the novel. In the Heptaméron

the standpoint of women is clearly presented.
In the Prologue, Parlamente—generally considered Marguerite’s voice
in the text—proposes that the storytellers—the “devisants”—“not write
any story that [is] not truthful” [“de n’escripre nulle nouvelle qui ne soit
veritable histoire”].26 And, that none “who studied and were men of let-
ters” (69) [“ceulx qui avoient estudié et estoient gens de lettres” (9)] would
be permitted to contribute stories because of a fear that “rhetorical orna-
ment would in part falsify the truth of the account” (69) [“de paour que
la beaulté de la rethoricque feit tort en quelque partye à la verité de l’his-
toire” (9)]. Thus, Marguerite registers a resistance to “learned” rhetoric,
undoubtedly meaning a resistance to Latinate hypotactic syntax. Indeed,
Marguerite’s style is not Latinate, but rather is a “spoken style”: she em-
ployed “the language which she herself actually spoke, using the simplest
terms” (Jourda 927, 967).
While the claim to authenticity was a convention by this time in the
novella collection, many of the stories in the Heptaméron appear to be
based on historical incidents; several purport to come from eye-witnesses
and at least twenty are connected in one way or another with the courts
of the queen of Navarre or her brother. Late in the work a character ob-
serves that “we have sworn not to tell stories from a written source” (512)
[“nous avons juré de ne rien mectre icy qui ayt esté escript” (400)]. This
puts a slightly different cast on the injunction to be truthful, suggesting a
preference for (women’s) oral history and a mistrust of (men’s) written
traditions (perhaps because of their anti-woman bias). The frame discus-
sion group in fact reflects the oral culture of Marguerite’s own court
where courtiers and ladies-in-waiting participated in a daily ritual of oral
discussion during which Marguerite often engaged in needlework (Jourda
291, 294, 1003). The Heptaméron is also conceived in the Prologue as a gift
to Marguerite, reflecting its gift-economy base.
The call for truthfulness means, however, not just historical verifica-
tion but allowing the truth of the silenced, in this case women, to be
heard. As Cholakian remarks, “‘Truth’ in the Heptaméron does not always
mean historical fact. Marguerite de Navarre is telling the truth about
gender relations, from a woman’s point of view” (77). Indeed, Cholakian
argues (a point confirmed by numerous sources) that the Heptaméron is
“a profoundly autobiographical text” (xiii), that certain incidents hap-
pened to Marguerite herself, most notably the rape attempt described in
novella number four. Cholakian claims in fact that a primary motivation
for the production of the Heptaméron was Marguerite’s desire to speak
out about her own near-victimization and other women’s victimization
by rape (18). It is a kind of bearing witness. Rape is indeed the central
THE FRENCH TRADITION Í 41

feminist issue in the Heptaméron. Several stories point up the ways in

which the woman’s experience of rape is silenced by the fear of losing her
reputation.
As mentioned, these include novella number four, in which a lady-in-
waiting warns a noblewoman that if she prosecutes a man who
attempted to rape her, “people will say that he must have had his way with
you. Your honour . . . would be put in doubt wherever this story was
heard” (94) [“si courra le bruict partout qu’il aura faict de vous à sa vol-
unté. . . . Et vostre honneur . . . sera mise en dispute en tous les lieux là
où cette histoire sera racomptée” (32)]. Another example is novella num-
ber ten in which when the woman cries out during the rape attempt and
help arrives (in the form of her mother), the rapist denies her accusation
implying that the woman is delusory. Since the mother at least provi-
sionally believes him, the victim refuses to speak further about the inci-
dent. The issue of women’s silence is also raised in stories twenty-two,
sixty-two, and seventy.
Novella twenty-two is a classic representation of sexual harassment, in
this case of a nun by a prior. He coerces her in nearly every imaginable
way; when she screams during a rape attempt he, like the rapist in novella
ten, covers himself when help arrives, and promises her that if she keep
silent he will reward her with a promotion. When his harassment esca-
lates to the point of forbidding her all outside contact, she manages to
write her story down, smuggling it to her mother who in turn relays it to
Marguerite, the queen of Navarre, who intervenes, saving the woman and
having her promoted to abbess. The story is in some ways a synecdoche
for the entire collection, which appears to be an attempt to write down
the woman’s side of the story in order that women be saved from further
persecution.
Many of the other novellas in the Heptaméron serve as exempla to il-
lustrate feminist theses. Critics have provided detailed comparative
analyses of some of these, showing how Marguerite modified a misogy-
nist source into a feminist statement.27 In several stories women are not
only allowed to speak, they expound lengthy monologues asserting their
rights, defending their positions in no uncertain terms (see especially
novellas eight, fifteen, twenty-one, and forty-two). Also, novella forty
raises the issue of the silencing of the woman’s voice in her choice of hus-
band in the marriage-market exchange system (novellas nineteen,
twenty-one, and fifty-one implicitly raise the issue, too). This was espe-
cially a problem among the nobility, where women were in essence ob-
jects for exchange, “goods . . . up for sale . . . by the highest bidder” (186)
[“marchandise . . . en vente . . . emportées par les plus offrans et derniers
encherisseurs” (114)].
42 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Marguerite de Navarre thus circulates in the Heptaméron the voices of

women as subjects speaking out against their reification in patriarchal ex-
change systems. She provided a model for subsequent women writers who
continued to use the frame to comment on the inset material from a fem-
inist standpoint, and she may have planted an idea that later found
fruition in the English women’s writings, of using one’s own life experi-
ences as evidence to refute misogynist preconceptions.
Chapter Four

The Women’s Framed-Novelle:

The Spanish and English Traditions

of the feminist potential of

P ROBABLY THE MOST SUCCESSFUL REALIZATION
the framed-novelle genre was accomplished by Spanish writer María
de Zayas y Sotomayor. Her two collections, the Novelas amorosas y ejem-
plares (1637) and its sequel, the Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento
honesto, popularly called the Desengaños amorosos (1647), remain—
together with the Heptaméron, which was one of Zayas’s sources—the
finest examples of the genre, and masterpieces in their own right.
While Zayas retained the conventional framed-novelle structure, her
innovations, especially in the frame plot, portend the novel, in which the
frame plot becomes dominant, subsuming the inset stories. In Zayas’s
work the stories themselves reflect what one critic has called a “patchwork
composition” of sources.1 Like Marguerite de Navarre she used the “plain
style” in prose,2 and also like her French predecessor Zayas often reshapes
the material or uses it as exemplum to point up a feminist thesis.
The Heptaméron was clearly a major influence—as a structural model,
in its feminist perspective, and in providing plots or parts of plots for at
least four of Zayas’s novellas. Novella four in the Novelas amorosas, “Fore-
warned but Not Forearmed” (“El prevenido engañado”), which is narrated
by a man and is about the untrustworthiness of women, derives a plot
episode from the Heptaméron’s novella twenty, in which a wealthy woman
is discovered having an affair with a stable boy. The eighth story in the
Novelas amorosas, “Triumph over the Impossible” (“El imposible vencido”)
also has a plot episode—an improvised ghost appearance—that appears to
derive from a similar event in the thirty-ninth story of the Heptaméron.3
44 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Two of the novellas in the Parte segunda are largely based on stories
from the Heptaméron: number four in the former on number thirty-two
in the latter, and number eight in the former on number forty in the lat-
ter. The fourth novella in the Parte segunda, “Tarde llega el desengaño”
(“Too Late for Disillusionment”) concerns the gruesome punishment a
husband metes out to his wife for alleged adultery: he forces her to drink
out of her lover’s skull and hangs the latter’s skeleton in her boudoir.
Zayas’s version of this much-recounted tale is by far the most elaborate
and complex, and her thesis is the most clearly feminist. In comparing her
version with its immediate source, the Heptaméron, one may note that
Zayas adds a number of episodes, including a lengthy opening section
where the protagonist, don Jaime, has an affair with an assertive woman
named Lucrecia, who retains control of their relationship and nearly has
him killed by assassins after he violates her trust. Soon after, he marries a
woman, Elena, who resembles Lucrecia, suggesting a continuity between
the two. Later a black servant woman tells him that Elena is having an af-
fair with a cousin. The husband, don Jaime, immediately kills the cousin
and proceeds with the punishment described above. As she is dying, the
black woman confesses that she has lied because she had been rejected by
the cousin and scolded by the lady for suspecting her of an affair. Shortly
thereafter Elena dies and don Jaime goes mad.
The narrator in Zayas’s version, Filis, gleans a feminist moral from this
macabre tale, that

men are indeed to be feared, for they let themselves be driven by their cru-
elest instincts. . . . This story also shows likewise that many women, al-
though innocent, endure dire punishments. Let us bear in mind therefore
that, contrary to what public opinion would have us believe, not all women
deserve to be blamed, as they commonly are [de que en lo que toca a cru-
eldad son los hombres terribles, pues ella misma los arrastra . . . y se ve
asimismo que hay mujeres que padecen inocentes, pues no todas han de ser
culpadas, como en la común opinión lo son].4

In the Heptaméron, strangely, both Parlamente and Oisille, her mother,

approve of the woman’s grotesque punishment (she is assumed guilty in
Marguerite’s version). There is also in Zayas’s version the implicit possi-
bility that don Jaime is really avenging himself on Elena for Lucrecia’s re-
jection of him—at least this has disposed him to believe the false
accusations.
This story has a long history. Even before Marguerite de Navarre’s ver-
sion it appeared in the Gesta Romanorum (ca. 1340) in Latin. The Italian
novelist Matteo Bandello also included it in his 1554 collection of novel-
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 45

las (II.12). William Painter’s “A Strange Punishment of Adulterie,” novel

fifty-seven in Volume I of The Palace of Pleasure (1575), brought Mar-
guerite’s version into English, where it (or probably a variation by Painter,
“Of a Ladie of Thurin,” novel forty-three in The Palace) became the source
for Delarivier Manley’s version, “The Husband’s Resentment. Example I,”
in The Power of Love (1720). In all of these except Zayas’s the wife is as-
sumed guilty.
The eighth novella in the Parte segunda, “El traidor contra su sangre”
(“A Traitor to His Own Flesh and Blood”), is also based on the Hep-
taméron, novella forty. Both are narrated by women. Loosely, this plot is
similar to that seen in the Boccaccio novella (IV.5) adapted by Christine
de Pizan in which two brothers kill their sister’s forbidden lower-class
lover. In the Heptaméron version, a tyrannical brother discovers his sister’s
unauthorized liaison and has the lover killed and the sister imprisoned.
The discussion that follows among the frame characters highlights the
issue of women’s lack of choice in marital arrangements—a concern that
dominates this tradition of women’s literature. Again Parlamente and
Oisille take a conservative position favoring parental control over the
marriage choice, while one of the men, Geburon, suggests the brother’s
behavior was illegal, since the sister was legally of age to make her own
choice. Even Hircan, the most resolute antifeminist in the work, agrees
that the brother had exceeded his legal authority over the sister.5
Another of the men, Dagoucin, offers a political analysis of arranged
marriages, that they are made—especially in the upper echelons—for
raisons d’état: “in order to maintain peace in the state, consideration is
given only to the rank of families, the seniority of individuals and the pro-
visions of the law . . . in order that the monarchy should not be under-
mined” (374) [“pour entretenir la chose publicque en paix, l’on ne regard
que les degrez des maisons, les aages des personnes et les ordonnances des
loix . . . afin de ne confondre poinct la monarchye” (280)].
Zayas modifies this tale considerably. First, it is preceded by a feminist
preface in which the narrator, Francisca, warns women not to be vulner-
able to men’s deceits [“Esto es señoras mías, no dejarse engañar” (Parte
segunda 371)], a point the story, a “desengaño”—which connotes “de-
mystification” or “enlightenment”—is to illustrate. Thus, the novella is
conceived, like the others in the collection, as revealing a feminist lesson
or message to its women hearers/readers. Here again Zayas’s thesis is
more straightforward, less problematized, than that presented in the
Heptaméron.
In Zayas’s version, the woman is motivated to engage in the unautho-
rized liaison largely for feminist reasons: she “thought of the tyrannical
way in which her father and brother wanted to deprive her of her freedom
46 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

in order to cheat her of her inheritance. Overcome by anger” she agrees to

a tryst with her suitor [“considerando cuán tiranamente su padre y her-
mano, por desposeerla de la hacienda, la querían privar de la libertad, de-
sesperada con la pasión”].6 (The father wants to reserve the estate for his
son, and so wants to place the daughter, unmarried, in a convent. Thus
she is vulnerable to the “engaño” [romantic deception] of the suitor). An-
other change is that the brother, don Alonso, kills his sister (rather than
the lover) when he learns of the liaison. Finally, Zayas adds a denouement
in which don Alonso marries, deceives, and kills another woman. He is
eventually executed.
Zayas’s feminism may also be seen discursively in the prologues to her
works and in the frame plots, with the frame characters changing their
lives largely as a result of the stories they hear. In the prologue to the Nov-
elas amorosas, the author defends her right to publish her work despite
her gender: “There will be many who will attribute to folly my audacity in
publishing my scribbles because I’m a woman, and women, in the opin-
ion of some fools, are unfit beings” [“habrá muchos que atribuyan a
locura esta virtuosa osadía de sacar a luz mis borrones, siendo mujer, que,
en opinión de algunos necios, es lo mismo que una cosa incapaz”].7 She
protests women’s “cloistered” condition and lack of educational opportu-
nities: “the real reason why women are not learned is not a defect in in-
telligence but a lack of opportunity. When our parents bring us up if,
instead of putting cambric on our sewing cushions and patterns in our
embroidery frames, they gave us books and teachers, we would be as fit as
men for any job or university professorship” (1–2) [“la verdadera causa de
no ser las mujeres doctas no es defecto del caudal, sino falta de la apli-
cación, porque si en nuestra crianza como nos ponen el cambray, en las
almohadillas y los dibuxos en el bastidor, nos dieran libros y preceptores,
fuéramos tan aptas para los puestos y para las cátedras como los hom-
bres” (22)]. Zayas proceeds to catalog past learned women, and comments
of herself that she is a voracious reader: “The moment I see a book, new
or old, I drop my sewing and can’t rest until I’ve read it” (2) [“en viendo
cualquiera nuevo o antiguo, dexo la almohadilla y no sosiego hasta que le
paso” (22–23)].
Her frame plots, which, as noted, are more developed than her prede-
cessors’, are clearly organized around a feminist thesis. In the Novelas
amorosas interactions occur among six men and six women (five narra-
tors of each gender, as well as a female hostess and another male who tells
no story). The plot is that friends of Lisis, a young noble woman who is
ill, plan a series of evening entertainments for her during the Christmas
season. These festivities include dancing, music, and songs, as well as
storytelling (the songs are incorporated into the text). Two stories are nar-
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 47

rated each evening. Meanwhile, amorous intrigues occur among the char-
acters during the frame interstices between the stories; the main plot
being the competition between don Juan and don Diego for Lisis. By the
end of the work she is betrothed to the latter though she loves the former.
In the Parte segunda, the Desengaños amorosos, the same people are in
attendance but four additional women are there and only women narrate
stories. It is in many ways more feminist than the Novelas amorosas. Many
of the stories are about brutal treatment of women by men. After narrat-
ing a particularly grisly tale, novella ten, “Estragos que causa el vicio” (“The
Ravages of Vice”), Lisis delivers a feminist oration in which she condemns
men’s poor opinion and ill treatment of women and announces that she is
breaking off her engagement and entering a convent, where she is joined
by several other women characters. The narrator proposes that “this end is
not tragic but rather the happiest that one could have asked for, because
she, wanted and desired by many, did not subject herself to anyone” (xvii)
[“No es trágico fin, sino el más felice que se pudo dar, pues codiciosa y de-
seada de muchos, no se sujetó a ninguno” (510–11)]. Thus, the frame has
a coherent plot itself, and the characters are influenced to assert themselves
as subjects by the feminist message of the stories.
The English women writers of prose fiction in the seventeenth century
inherited the framed-novelle genre as the principal women’s prose form.8
The Heptaméron had been available in English since 1597, and a selection
of Zayas stories—including “The Judge of Her Own Case” (“El juez de su
causa,” novella nine in Novelas amorosas)—was available in English trans-
lation in 1665. Unfortunately, however, Zayas’s name was elided in the
translation process. Paul Scarron had included the above story as “Le Juge
de sa propre cause” in his Roman comique, part 2 (1657), and three other
of her novellas in his Nouvelles tragi-comiques (1655–57). A collection of
Scarron’s novellas (including these four by Zayas) were translated by John
Davies as Scarron’s Novels in 1665. There was also another French transla-
tion of several Zayas stories in 1656–57. In addition, three Zayas novellas
appeared in a collection of novellas erroneously attributed to Cervantes,
A Week’s Entertainment at a Wedding, in 1710.9 Thus, scandalously, Zayas
was erased from English literary history even though her work was
prominently available and clearly influential.
The English women writers of the period, while influenced by Zayas
and Marguerite de Navarre, soon, however, began to enact important
modifications in the framed-novelle form they inherited from their con-
tinental sisters. The ideological currents in favor of individualism were
such by mid-century that the English women began to modify the genre
in ways that anticipated the novel and its focus on the individual life-
story.
48 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

An intermediate work, which suggests the reconceptualization occur-

ring in the mid-seventeenth century is The Case of Madam Mary Carleton
(1663), which is discussed in more detail in chapter five. It is relevant to
note here, however, that Mary Carleton conceived of her life-story as a se-
ries of Boccaccian novellas unified by an autobiographical frame or hy-
potaxis: in her preface she asks readers to “cast a favourable eye upon
these Novels [novellas] of my life, not much unlike those of Boccace [Boc-
caccio].”10 Carleton thus conceives the autobiographical episodes in her
life-story as novellas in a framed-novelle, which further suggests how
powerful a structural paradigm the framed-novelle genre was at the time.
Similarly, the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Englishwomen
treated in this chapter—Cavendish, Manley, and Barker—were beginning
to use autobiographical swatches or women’s life-histories as the basis for
feminist commentary in the same way that traditional novellas had been
used as exempla or cases in earlier works in the genre, by Marguerite de
Navarre or María de Zayas, for example. In their use of the life-history as
case, these women invented a new way to interrogate the ideology of
women’s subordination, established by their predecessors as the dominant
theme of the genre.
A new English translation (by Robert Codrington) of the Heptaméron
appeared in 1654, while Cavendish was writing Natures Pictures (1656).
Marguerite de Navarre’s influence is apparent, but Natures Pictures repre-
sents a movement away from the framed-narrative format and toward the
novel. The first part of the work, entitled “Her Excellencies Tales in Verse,”
retains a frame similar to that of the Heptaméron, with several aristocratic
men and women exchanging stories and comments on the general theme
of the querelle des femmes. While much less developed than its predeces-
sor, the frame nevertheless contains characteristically pro and anti-
feminist remarks. Following an essay in verse on women’s narcissism, for
example, the women auditors threaten to leave, but the men beg them to
stay.11 After a short essay that argues that, for men, the single state is bet-
ter, a woman responds with a tale to illustrate that “Marriage is to Woman
far more worse/Than ‘tis to Men, and proves the greater Curse” (57). At
one point the women comment critically on the “dispatch” (85) with
which the men tell their stories, which aside from its sexual innuendo,
suggests an aesthetic preference for a meandering paratactic style. Later a
woman claims “the masculine Sex” is obsessed with “vain-glorious foolish
amorous love” (87).
But the second and much longer section, “Her Excellencies Comical
Tales in Prose,” dispenses with the frame altogether. And three of the sto-
ries threaten to break out of the collection completely as autonomous
works. These three pieces include two novellas—“The Contract” and “As-
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 49

saulted and Pursued Chastity”—and Cavendish’s autobiography (one of

the first by a woman), “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life.”
The novellas, which I focus on here, no longer resemble the short
anecdotal tales seen in the classic framed-novelle (the Decameron, for ex-
ample); rather they are extensive treatments of one individual’s life-story,
unified by feminist explanatory theses. “The Contract” is really in em-
bryo a female novel of manners of the Evelina type, and “Assaulted” is a
prototypical female picaresque novel. The central issue in the former is
the marriage-market economy and the woman character’s refusal to be
made into an object for exchange, claiming instead the right to choose
according to her own inclination or desire. The latter story also provides
a critique of the “traffick” in women, and thus similarly exhibits a femi-
nist thesis.
In “The Contract” a young woman is married by contract at the age of
seven for economic reasons. Her husband, however, marries another, and
she is left with an uncle guardian who is charged with bringing her out
in society and educating her in the ways of the (social) world—a set pat-
tern in the female bildungsroman where “bildung” or education means
learning how the marriage-market works. The protagonist in this piece
(Delitia) resists, however, her uncle’s “educational” schemes: “When her
Uncle was gone, Lord, said she, what doth my Uncle mean to set me out
to shew: sure he means to traffick for a Husband; but Heaven forbid
those intentions, for I have no minde to marry” (189). The tale ends hap-
pily with Delitia successfully arguing her case in court (which we discuss
in the next chapter) and in effect winning the right to live with the man
of her choice—a feminist ending her literary foremothers would have
approved of.
The other novella of major significance in Natures Pictures is the oddly
titled “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” This wildly imaginative story,
somewhat similar to her utopian fantasy, The Description of a New World,
called the Blazing-World (1668), has not received the attention it deserves.
In this feminist novella the woman character, variously called Miseria, Af-
fectionata, and Travelia, resists and escapes from the “traffick” in women,
by arming, disguising herself as a man, and through various escapades. In
one lengthy episode she serves as general of an army, recalling Zayas’s
“Judge of Her Own Case” (see discussion in chapter five). The “traffick”
in this story is not marriage, however, but prostitution. The story opens
with Miseria discovering herself in the clutches of a bawd, “which used to
marchandize; and trafficked . . . for the riches of beauty” (220). Miseria
resists the rape attack of a client, who is a prince, by shooting him with a
pistol; he survives, however, and has her imprisoned. Later she escapes by
dressing as a male page and jumping ship, where she is adopted by the
50 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

ship’s master. After a shipwreck, they land in a cannibal culture, but as

they are about to be sacrificed she shoots and kills the chief priest and
henceforth she and the old master are treated as a god’s messengers.
After they leave this realm, Miseria and her companion meet up with
the prince she had shot earlier who is still after her. She and the old master
escape again, arriving in a land ruled by a queen who immediately falls in
love with Miseria, now called Travelia. Meanwhile, the prince ends up in a
neighboring kingdom, where the king is warring against the queen because
she is refusing his seduction attempts. The prince then becomes the king’s
general, and Travelia becomes the queen’s general. After lengthy battle
scenes the men are subdued, and all the parties wed—after the lesbian re-
lationship between Travelia and the queen has been artificially resolved.
The king tells the prince to court Travelia so as to remove her as his rival
for the queen’s affection, saying “Dispose of your Mistress some way, for I
am jealous . . . although she is a Woman. Sir, said the Prince, I have as
much reason to be jealous of the Queen as you have of my mistress, setting
her Masculine Habit aside” (267). Travelia finally tells the queen that she
“cannot return such love you desire, for you have placed your Affection
upon a Woman” (267). Thus, with Cavendish we leave behind the recycled
novellas of the classic framed-novelle collection; rather the inset stories are
becoming autonomous entities in their own right, more mini-novels than
novellas, still, however, unified by a feminist perspective.
Like Natures Pictures Delarivier Manley’s Secret Memoirs and Manners
of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Is-
land in the Mediteranean [sic] (1709) is a work that is structured in the
framed-novelle format but that threatens to break out of that format in
new directions. The frame of Manley’s work is in fact very similar to
Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames. Here a Manley persona, Astrea, who
lives in a “lunary World” far from earth, decides to revisit the planet in
order to better educate a young prince, who is her tutorial charge. She
wants to find out “if Humankind were still as defective, as when she in a
Disgust forsook it.”12 Astrea is accompanied on her return by two allegor-
ical women figures—Virtue, who is in rags (1:2), and Intelligence. The lat-
ter serves as narrator of twenty inset stories and anecdotes that enlighten
Astrea about the current state of humankind, which she learns is “univer-
sally corrupted” (1:15). Manley’s style throughout is similar to
Cavendish’s, a familiar, gossipy parataxis.
As with its continental predecessors the frame serves a feminist didac-
tic purpose; following several episodes either Virtue, Intelligence, or As-
trea point up the often feminist moral of the story. Many of the episodes
and characters are only thinly disguised, true stories about members of
the English court. Manley’s work is thus a proto-roman à clef, although
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 51

some of the episodes seem to be more or less traditional novellas. (Man-

ley was very familiar with the novella tradition; see chapter seven below.)
And, as noted, one of the stories is her own thinly fictionalized autobiog-
raphy (vol. 2, episode eight). In her use of “true stories” Manley recalls
Marguerite de Navarre.
Manley’s frame characters sometimes intervene in the stories, how-
ever, meeting and influencing the inset characters, so that the frame plot
and the inset plots converge at times in a way that is more like the novel
than the framed-novelle. In the second volume the first episode, for ex-
ample, opens with a frame discussion of whether the frame women
should go to the aid of a woman they discover groaning by the wayside,
or whether they should hear her story first (2:9). Intelligence argues the
story should be told in order to expose vice, while Virtue suggests they
should dispense with the story and help the woman. Intelligence wins
out with her argument that telling the story is an ethical, not simply an
aesthetic act (and thus reaffirming the stated moral purpose of the New
Atalantis; see preface, 2:A5r). The story is then introduced by Mrs. Night-
work, a midwife, who has delivered numerous illegitimate babies to
women of the court, and who has just delivered the woman they heard
moaning, who is “Harriat” (ostensibly Lady Henrietta Long), the victim
of a rape-seduction plot.
In the third episode (2:59–113) of the same volume the women hear
another woman in distress and intervene, scaring off a “spark” who had
been attempting to rape her; the woman, the lady Elonora, then tells her
story. This tale, though told as a first-person narration from a subjective
viewpoint, is in the tradition of the Spanish novella (complete with Span-
ish names), which suggests a possible Zayas influence. After hearing her
story, the frame women decide to rescue Elonora and provide her with
protective custody (2:109).
In having her frame characters intervene in the inset stories—signifi-
cantly, by having the frame women come to the rescue of the women in
the inset tales—a feminist gesture—Manley is employing a central device
of the novel: protagonists’ encountering others who then tell their stories.
In cases where those stories remain essentially discrete, connected parat-
actically, the form remains more of a framed-novelle collection; but where
the characters of the frame or central story and the narrators of substo-
ries interact and change each others’ life-plots, the work becomes a novel.
The New Atalantis is on the cusp between these two forms but remains in
the framed-novelle genre because the life-histories of the frame characters
are not developed enough.
One of the stories in the New Atalantis is, however, Manley’s own: the
story of Delia, who at the age of fourteen is seduced and then married
52 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

bigamously by a cousin-guardian by whom she bears a son (2:185–93).

These are all incidents from Manley’s life. Like Zayas’s frame characters
Manley’s see the story as a “desengaño” that can help to prevent
“Women from believing” and “Men from deceiving” (2:192).
Perhaps recognizing the potential inherent in the use of autobiograph-
ical materials to make a feminist point, Manley went on to write The Ad-
ventures of Rivella, her thinly fictionalized autobiographical memoir that
serves as a feminist apologia pro vita sua. Its enunciated thesis is “If she had
been a Man, she had been without Fault: But the Charter of that Sex being
much more confin’d . . . what is not a Crime in Men is scandalous and un-
pardonable in Woman”13—a condemnation of the double standard,
which establishes the text’s main theme. In this work Manley provided
Defoe with an important model for Moll Flanders and Roxana.
By using the escapades of court figures as her source, Manley was fol-
lowing in the late seventeenth-century French tradition of the scandalous
“histories” or “chroniques scandaleuses,” written largely by women. These
exposés of the sexual indiscretions of powerful men of state were not
written simply to titillate; they had a clear political purpose: to undermine
the sources of political authority. While Manley has been seen as reveal-
ing the affairs of Whigs in order to promote the Tory cause (which indeed
was one of her motives), she also and perhaps more insistently exposes
masculine betrayals, abuse, and exploitation of women. Indeed, the cen-
tral pedagogical message that Astrea gleans for her protegé, as enunciated
near the end of the second volume, is that he should govern his regime in
a way that protects women from abuse: “My prince shall make it Death to
those who can be prov’d to have seduc’d a Virgin. Since sense of Shame
and Reputation can’t with-hold ‘em! since Conscience, Honour, and what
the World calls Principles, can’t deter those Betrayers; the Laws must, and
those shall be Sanguinary. My prince shall adore, and serve the Fair”
(2:192) (meaning the “fair sex,” i.e., women).
In her preface to the second volume, Manley claims that she has a se-
rious satirical intent, aligning herself with the great satirists of antiq-
uity, Lucian and Varro, who, she insists, targeted specific individuals
even as she has done (Manley here is apparently defending herself
against criticisms that she should not have personalized her attack on
corruption). Her purpose, she claims, is in the end not sensationalist
but moral: “the very Soul of Satire, is scourging of Vice, and Exhorta-
tion to Virtue” (2:A5r).
Perhaps the most powerful story in the work, and certainly one that
well illustrates Manley’s feminist satirical purposes, is that of Charlot, a
tale that anticipates Les Liaisons dangereuses in its exposé of ruthless, cyn-
ical manipulation and the corruption of the innocent and powerless by
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 53

the powerful. The victim here is Charlot, a young female ward of a duke
(ostensibly the Duke of Portland, a minister to William III). Her guardian,
the duke, “followed the wise Maxims of Machiavel” (1:49) to seduce his
charge.
Manley manages in this seduction tale to introject a critique of the
Machiavellianism of political figures in pursuing raisons d’état; it is not
just their personal behavior that is corrupt but also their public, political
modus operandi. The duke “had a seeming Admiration for Virtue . . . but
he was a Statesman, and held it incompatible (in an Age like this) with a
Mans making his Fortune, Ambition, desire of Gain, Dissimulation, Cun-
ning, all these were meritoriously serviceable to him” (52). In preparing
for the seduction, the duke “open’d a Machiavel” (61), and then has the
girl read an Ovidian story about father-daughter incest (63–64). After her
ruin, Charlot is advised by a cynical countess that “the first thing a
Woman ought to consult was her Interest, . . . ; that Love shou’d be a han-
dle towards it” (73). The duke soon abandons Charlot, who then “dy’d a
true Landmark: to warn all believing Virgins” (83), and he marries the
countess after she bargains with him for a title (still playing liaisons as an
economic, political game).
Manley also wrote an unframed collection of novellas, The Power of
Love (1720). This work is of interest because it shows how Manley modi-
fied novellas she inherited from continental antecedents, including Mar-
guerite de Navarre and María de Zayas, modifications that signify the
emergence of realism. Manley’s collection of seven novellas is based
largely on Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure; five are adaptations from
Painter. But two of these derive from the Heptaméron and two were also
treated by Zayas (Manley’s novella four from the Heptaméron, number
thirty-two; novella five, from Heptaméron, number thirty-six; novella
three, though it probably derives from Bandello, is also treated by Zayas
in Novelas amorosas, number one; and novella four parallels Zayas’s num-
ber four in the Parte segunda, as noted above).
Since I analyze Manley’s novella three at length in chapter seven, I will
confine myself here to novella five, “The Husband’s Resentment. Example
II” (novella four, “The Husband’s Resentment. Example I,” was the skull
story described earlier). Manley follows the plot laid out in the Hep-
taméron, but her addition of realistic details in character development
shows strikingly what realism was and how its addition made the novel,
which Manley closely approximates, so distinct a genre. The plot is that of
a Grenoble city-official who discovers that his wife is having an affair with
a household clerk. In order to preserve his honor, he acts as if nothing has
happened; later, however, he exiles the clerk and secretly poisons the wife.
The Heptaméron version uses the story as a case to discuss the ethics of the
54 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

husband’s act (we discuss it further in the next chapter). Manley, however,
adds to the story a pathetic old woman servant, Mrs. Ursula, who remains
loyal to her master, but who becomes a kind of scapegoat, with the mas-
ter publicly accusing her of lying, when she reveals the affair to him, and
then banishing her. In developing this character Manley presents the
standpoint of the female underclass, thus providing a new critical per-
spective that further ironizes the main characters’ behavior, such that the
novella in her handling is more a novelistic episode than a novella.
Mrs. Ursula had been with the city-official since his birth; she had
been his wetnurse and was wholly devoted to him. She considered that
he had married below his class, and his wife resented her, often asking
him to get rid of her. “She used to tell [him] she loved Faces that were
young, and would not shock one as Mrs. Ursula’s did, with forbidding
Wrinkles and antique Head geer, as if she had been fetch’d from out of
the Tombs.”14 When Mrs. Ursula tells the husband about his wife’s affair,
his doubt deeply offends her: “That she should have suckled him, and
brought him up, nay, and loved him better than his own Mother, to meet
such Returns! She had rather die a Thousand times over than have her
Truth suspected!” (278). (Note Manley’s use of indirect discourse here.)
When, based on Mrs. Ursula’s tip, the husband finds the wife in fla-
grante delicto, he denies what he has seen and blames her: “poor Mrs.
Ursula thought she came to an absolute Triumph, and flew rather than
hobbled at the Sound of her Master’s Voice” (282) only to be fired for
her troubles. Her weeping departure, cast out with nothing after a life-
time of service, is described in detail. This pathetic character recenters
the story away from the adultery issue and onto a kind of class struggle
between masters and servants. The gratuitously evil behavior of the
master and his wife toward each other (seen in the original novella) is
turned into a kind of political evil, wherein the dominant mistreat the
dominated. Highlighting the point of view of the oppressed, the mar-
ginalized, is, as we have seen, a hallmark of the novel, and Manley does
just that in this story.
Like many of the works by Cavendish and Manley, Jane Barker’s un-
justly neglected Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) is an innovative,
protean work that anticipates the novel but is structured in the framed-
novelle format. Although labeled in its subtitle, “A Collection of Instruc-
tive Novels” (meaning novellas—in English at the time novellas were
called novels, with the accent on the second syllable), Patch-Work Screen is
more than a collection; it retains a weighty frame that tends to merge with
the main inset story, the autobiographical narrative of the central frame
character, Galesia. Thus the focus on one woman’s life-story from a fem-
inist point of view—seen emerging in earlier women’s writings—becomes
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 55

the central narrative in Patch-Work Screen, thereby anticipating the bil-

dungsroman, which used the fictional life-story as a central unifying de-
vice, its hypotaxis. The Patch-work Screen, as its title suggests, remains too
“patchwork” or paratactic in structure to be considered a novel. It, how-
ever, perhaps more than any other work, illustrates the tensions between
the conflicting pulls of hypotaxis and parataxis, unity and diffusion, co-
hesion and eclecticism (or what Bakhtin calls “centripetal” and “centrifu-
gal” forces),15 which were finally resolved in the novel in favor of a unity
of theme and character, subordinating other elements.
That Barker was concerned with the question of unity is suggested in
her preface “To the Reader,” discussed in the preceding chapter, where she
analogizes a patchwork composition first to a “tea-table” discussion and
then to the unifying order that operates in the physical cosmos, “the
Clashing of Atoms, which at last united to compose this glorious Fabrick of
the UNIVERSE.”16 Interestingly, Barker then contrasts her patchwork
structure with Defoe’s “Histories at Large; viz. Robinson Crusoe, and Moll
Flanders” (iv), indicating an awareness on her part of the structural dif-
ferences between her work and his.
Barker experiments with two structural devices in this work. The first
frame she uses is a stagecoach journey where various characters recount
stories. This is a variation on the framed-novelle format used successfully
by Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, the Baroness d’Aulnoy, in her
Relations du voyage d’Espagne (1691) (The Ingeneous and Diverting Letters
of the Lady—Travels into Spain), which narrated the voyage retrospec-
tively through letters. It was also used by Delarivier Manley in the satiri-
cal Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley (1696), later retitled A Stage-Coach
Journey to Exeter (1725) (treated in chapter six).
Barker dispenses with the epistolary format, however, using a third-
person narrator to describe a short stagecoach trip north of London in
which Galesia, the main character, hears a number of short stories nar-
rated by four other passengers and tells one herself. In her story she al-
ludes to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, suggesting the familiarity of the
English women writers with their French counterparts (A8v). (Also one of
the stories is a retake of the Portuguese Letters [Lettres portugaises], by then
a popular French, romantic narrative about a nun and her lover.) At the
end of the story-telling the coach collides with another on a bridge and
crashes into a river. This accident ushers in the second and main frame
that Barker uses in this work, which is that of Galesia helping a noble-
woman who has taken her in to construct a patchwork screen. The con-
struction becomes a metaphor for the composition of Barker’s fiction;
Galesia contributes poems, swatches of autobiographical narrative, novel-
las, letters, even recipes, which are patched together to make the work. The
56 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

frame remains that of the two women discussing the merits of the various
pieces and deciding where they should be placed in the “screen.”
But a new unifying force threatens to take over the Patch-Work Screen,
and that is the story of Galesia herself, which is itself informed by a fem-
inist perspective. It is feminist on two counts: the first is her resentment,
which we have seen in chapter two, at having been deprived of a formal
education and for being shunned when she does reveal her autodidactic
knowledge: “A Learned Woman [is] . . . like a Forc’d Plant, that never has
its due or proper relish” (11); the second, also discussed earlier, is her cri-
tique of the marriage market in which she, as a young woman, has been
prepared as an object for sale. She also has it in for faithless men, since she
has been abandoned by the one suitor she loved. Rejecting that “Beau
World” (55) Galesia becomes a herbal healer and develops renown locally
for her skills. “People come to me for Advice in divers sorts of Maladies,
and having tolerable good Luck, I began to be pretty much known.” She
acknowledges that “Pride and Vanity” were “in some Degree” “united to
this Beneficence; for I was got to such a Pitch of helping the Sick, that I
wrote my Bills in Latin, with the same manner of Cyphers and Directions
as Doctors do” (55–56). Here we see women’s sense of being exiled from
the Latin tradition of learning; Galesia uses it mimetically, with no un-
derstanding of its meaning, as a means of seizing power. Earlier, as noted,
Galesia had apologized for her lack of skill in a classical verse form, the
Pindaric ode, wondering whether her “Fingers ought to have been im-
ploy’d rather at the Needle and the Distaff, than to the Pen and Standish,
and leave these Enterprizes to the Learned” (7–8).
The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (1726), a sequel to the earlier work,
is also organized in the framed-novelle format. I see it in fact as the ter-
minal work in the women’s tradition of the framed-novelle. Galesia (now
spelled Galecia) is here the central frame character and tacitly gleans from
many of the stories a feminist point. What is innovative in the frame is
that in at least some of the episodes we see Galesia alone, and some of the
inset stories come from books she is reading in solitude, signifying the be-
ginnings of print culture. In one case, for example, a secondary character
reads Aphra Behn’s “History of the Nun; or the Fair Vow-Breaker” (1689),
and that story is then reproduced.17
While the effect of these stories on Galecia is not fully developed, many
of them point up the feminist conclusions she had reached in The Patch-
Work Screen: that men are not to be trusted, that young women are often
victimized in various marriage-market schemes, and that solitude is
preferable to being prey to the “traffick” in women. The work concludes
with Galecia’s returning to the country, having despaired of urban Machi-
avellianism and feeling “inexpressible Joy” to be rejoining a woman friend
THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH TRADITION Í 57

there.18 Thus, in both The Patch-Work Screen and the Lining, Barker seems
to be torn between using, on the one hand, the format of the framed-
novelle tradition, which she inherited, and moving toward a new form in
which the central focus is on the “history” and development of the cen-
tral, female protagonist.
The increasing emphasis on the individual life-story, which came to be
the main focus in the novel, was undoubtedly due to numerous social and
economic forces, as Ian Watt details in his study. One of these (which Watt
does not treat) is the popularization of the theological tradition of casu-
istry. In Defoe and Casuistry, G. A. Starr isolates this tradition as an im-
portant source of the novel’s dialectics. In the following chapter I will
show that women writers’ use of casuistry led to an emphasis on the par-
ticularized life-story as a further means of articulating a feminist stand-
point. By focusing upon the particular details of an individual woman’s
story, women writers could establish a case for the defense of women. In
so doing they contributed to the constitution of the novel as a genre that
valorizes the particular details of common life, thereby lending the novel
one of its defining characteristics.
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Chapter Five

Circumstances Alter Cases:

Women, Casuistry, and the Novel

that mediates be-

C ASUISTRY IS A FORM OF LEGAL AND MORAL REASONING
tween general rules or maxims and specific circumstances by means
of the case history, a short anecdote or story—a “hypothetical”—that
points up the contradictions between the circumstances and the law in
order to effect accommodation or change. Etymologically, casuistry de-
rives from the Latin casus [chance, happening, accident], which itself
stems from cadere [to happen].
While today casuistry retains the negative connotations earned by
the excesses excoriated by Pascal in the Les Provinciales (1656–57), it
was (and some claim still is) an important mode of moral reasoning,
one that in any event by the seventeenth century “was a central in-
strument in the social construction of reality.”1 The dominance of ca-
suistry as a mode of “practical divinity” emerged after the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215), which promulgated the doctrine of required
annual confession—a practice whereby the priest applied generalized
theological doctrine to the specific case and levied a specific penance
on the sinner. The golden age of casuistry was from the early four-
teenth through the seventeenth century, reaching a peak from the
mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, during which period more
than six hundred collections of “cases of conscience” appeared in
print.2
Because the case narrative is a fiction, usually posed as a hypothetical
example, it only needed the addition of a few fictional details for it to be-
come extrapolated as a separate literary form in and of itself. That form
60 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

was the novella, which, numerous authorities point out, derived in part
from courtly love casuistry.3
A good example that illustrates the close kinship between the case as
presented in casuistry texts and the literary novella may be seen in novella
thirty of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. This novella, which is re-
ferred to as a cas [case] by a frame character,4 concerns mother-son incest.
The story was widely recounted in various forms during the early modern
period, and seized upon by casuists. Joseph Hall, for example, an Anglican
casuist, devoted four pages to it in his Resolutions and Decisions (1650) in
a section entitled “Cases Matrimonial.”

Case III.—“Whether an incestuous marriage, contracted in simplicity of

heart, betwixt two persons ignorant of such a defilement, and so far con-
summate as that children are born in that wedlock, ought to be made
known and prosecuted to a dissolution?”
“The case thus: A gentlewoman . . . had her son trained up in her house;
who, now having passed the age of puberty, grew up, as in stature, so in
wonton desires. . . .”5

Hall proceeds to relate how, to stop her son’s harassment of a chamber-

maid, the mother substitutes herself for the maid in a nighttime assigna-
tion; however, “the devil so far prevailed . . . that . . . she yielded to the lust
of her son, and by him conceived a daughter” (7:410). The story is com-
plicated by the fact that when the two offspring grow up, they unknow-
ingly wed—another incestuous union. Hall resolves that the mother’s
hiding of the original sin was worse than the incest itself, but that with “all
circumstances thoroughly weighed, the penitent mother should . . . se-
cretly make her peace with God” (7:411).
Marguerite de Navarre recounts essentially the same plot as Hall, al-
though in somewhat greater detail, elaborating considerably more the
subjective point of view and emotional state of the mother. We learn, for
example, that “plunged into a deep sadness and melancholy” (319) [“de-
moura longuement en grande tristesse et melencolye” (231)], she consid-
ered abortion. After the marriage of her children has been consummated,
she consults ecclesiastical authorities. These “doctors of theology” (321)
[“docteurs en theologie” (233)], undoubtedly casuists, counsel that she
should continue to guard her secret but do penance the rest of her life.
As with many of the novellas in the Heptaméron this story is treated as
a case, which the frame characters rigorously analyze. Interestingly, the
gist of their discussion of this story determines that the woman is more
guilty of pride—in thinking that she could control her feelings—than of
lust. In other words, the woman is seen as exhibiting human failings
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 61

rather than exemplifying the going misogynist idea that women are in-
herently promiscuous, “the devil’s gateway,” as early Christian theologian
Tertullian put it. Patricia Cholakian remarks, “What began [in earlier cir-
culations of the story] as a sexist attack on women has been broadened to
include the whole human race.”6 Thus, Marguerite de Navarre con-
structed her novella as an amplified case study of the kind analyzed in ca-
suistry treatises; use of the casuistical format enabled her to refute a
misogynist generality about women.
One of the genetic structures of the early novel was that of a series of
case/novellas linked together by a frame plot. The tradition of casuistry
has been recognized, therefore, as an important component in the consti-
tution of the novel, which, as J. Paul Hunter remarks, “only becomes dis-
tinct . . . when it gets down to cases, recording particulars and telling an
individual’s story.”7 Defoe’s conception of the novel as a series of “cases”
reflecting moral dilemmas facing his protagonists grows directly out of
the casuistical tradition, as G. A. Starr demonstrates in Defoe and Casu-
istry (1971). Indeed, Starr suggests that the episode of Moll Flanders’s un-
wittingly incestuous marriage derives from the casuistical discussions
described above, including the Heptaméron’s novella thirty.8
The novel’s focus on the circumstantial and the anomalous gave it
the subversive character Mikhail Bakhtin and others have identified as
definitional to the genre. For attention to the idiosyncratic inevitably
destabilizes the general rule or maxim. In casuistry, case narratives nec-
essarily point up contradictions in the law and thus precipitate a “dis-
persal of norms.”9 As an “interpretive practice” casuistry “militate[s]
against the authority of final answers” (Gallagher 4). Thus, “the
hermeneutics of casuistry can be seen as . . . enact[ing] what Bakhtin
saw as the signal characteristic of novelistic discourse: . . . the represen-
tation of a dialogic . . . orientation. . . . [B]y inhabiting, and eroding, a
discourse of power charged with the presence of an authoritative Word,
the discourse of conscience [casuistry] articulates the inherent capacity
of the ‘novelizing’ act to serve as a vehicle for political and ideological
subversion” (Gallagher 15–17).
Early modern women writers seem to have realized the subversive po-
tential of casuistry and early put it to feminist use. That is, they realized
that a focus on the particular circumstances of women’s situations would
alter the cases, in other words, change the stories, and thereby challenge
the ideological norms, rules, and maxims that were misogynistic, or
otherwise injurious to women. Significantly, the earliest women writers
in the Western tradition—beginning with the women troubadours and
amplified by Christine de Pizan—used casuistry for feminist purposes. It
appears that the casuistical construction, which permitted the expression
62 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

of an oppositional viewpoint, enabled the articulation of feminist views.

Here I trace the feminist use of casuistry, contending that it allowed
women writers to represent a women’s standpoint in the continuing
querelle des femmes, which in turn contributed to the problematization of
the “word of the fathers,” which Bakhtin saw as integral to the rise of
novelistic discourse.
Feminist casuistry takes its place within a more general feminist tradi-
tion in the early modern period, whereby women attempted to refute or
problematize misogynist maxims and thus to challenge ideological as-
sumptions about women. Writers, of course, operate in an ideological
continuum and must deal with its inherited set of assumptions and no-
tions of probability that restrict their representational possibilities.
Gérard Genette and Nancy K. Miller have pointed out, for example, how
ideological concepts of probability limited critics’ understanding of
Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678).10 I contend, even
further, that these ideological maxims were what Madame de Lafayette—
like many women writers—was writing against, and that indeed she con-
ceived her novel as a particularized case study intended to controvert
misogynist generalities about women.
For example, her protagonist challenges the rule that all women are
prey to uncontrollable and violent passion. When the princess finds her-
self falling for Monsieur de Nemours, she fears that she has become “like
other women—I, who was so different from them. . . . I shall be looked
upon by everyone as a person who has a mad and violent passion” [“que
je me trouve, comme les autres femmes, étant si éloignée de leur ressem-
bler. . . . Je serai bientôt regardée de tout le monde comme une personne
qui a une folle et violente passion”].11 Earlier, in a celebrated deathbed
scene, her mother had warned the princess to control her feelings and not
to “fall to the level of other women” (39) [“tomber comme les autres
femmes” (85–86)]. That the protagonist does control herself, first by ad-
mitting her extramarital involvement to her husband and finally by re-
nouncing a liaison with Nemours after her husband dies, establishes her
as a unique case whose circumstances challenge the misogynist maxim.
Miller calls the protagonist a “heroine without a maxim,” a charac-
ter “whose behavior is deliberately idiopathic”; she “violate[s] a gram-
mar of motives that describes while prescribing . . . what wives, not to
say women, should or should not do” (340). Further, Miller poses the
question that “if we were to uncover a feminine ‘tradition’—diachronic
recurrences—of such ungrammaticalities, would we have the basis for
a poetics of women’s fiction?” (341).
The tradition of feminist literary casuistry constitutes one vein of di-
achronic recurrences of such “ungrammaticalities.” Its genealogy reaches
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 63

back to the women troubadours and Christine de Pizan and continues via
Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas to English writers Margaret
Cavendish, Mary Carleton, Delarivier Manley, and Jane Barker.
Courtly love poets appropriated casuistry early on as a means of dis-
cussing moral and romantic choices available to lovers in the culture of
“fin’ amors.” This “casuistique d’amour” [love casuistry], as it has been
called, was the tradition from which feminist casuistry emerged. Two of
the debate genres favored by the Provençal troubadours—the tenson and
the joc partit—exemplify the use of casuistry to explore romantic issues.12
An early example of how a woman poet seized the opportunity to express
a feminist point of view in such a debate may be seen in an early thir-
teenth-century tenson by Gui d’Ussel and Marie de Ventadour, which dis-
cusses the balance of power in a love relationship. In response to the
question of whether a courted woman must “observe the laws of love”
[“los dreitz que tenon l’amador”] as faithfully as the suitor, Marie replies,
“she must honor the lover/as a friend and not as a master” [“e dompna
deu a son drut far honor/Cum ad amic, mas non cum a seignor”].13
Often the joc partit or tenson was accompanied by a prose razos, a com-
mentary or explication that highlights the issues discussed or circum-
stances of composition. The feminist thesis of the above tenson is
underscored in an accompanying razos: “my lady Maria held the view that
the lover should have neither seigneury nor authority.”14
Significantly, the razos were at the time often referred to as novellas.
Walter Pabst theorizes in his Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung that
the razos was a source for the framed-novelle genre. As noted, in the
framed-novelle the enclosed novellas often served as “cases,” which
were then discussed by the frame storytellers. Boccaccio indeed refers
to his novellas as “casi d’amore” [love cases] in his preface to the De-
cameron (Pabst 28).
Christine de Pizan also employed the Provençal debate-forms in sev-
eral of her long poems, particularly “Le Debat de deux amants,” “Le Livre
des trois jugemens,” and “Le Livre du dit de Poissy.”15 In all of these, “love
cases” are presented for debate. The first case in the “Livre des trois juge-
mens” presents a woman accused of perjury because, after having been
abandoned by a lover to whom she had pledged troth, she has taken an-
other. She argues in her own defense that she is not a perjurer [“Vous
m’avez dit de m’appeler parjure,/ Car ne le suis . . .”]. Instead she argues
casuistically that one is relieved of one’s oath if the other party has not
lived up to the deal [“Que qui promet pour quelque chose avoir,/ Se il ne
l’a, quitte doit estre voir/De son serment”].16 In other words, rules are not
absolute and circumstances alter cases. In arguing her case the woman is
effectively challenging the subtextual misogynist maxim embedded in the
64 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

perjury accusation that women are fickle and untrustworthy. Women

writers’ use of casuistry frequently follows this model; a woman pleads
her side of the case, often in a court or before a legal authority.17
Christine uses a similar format in a novella reworked from Boccaccio’s
Decameron in the Livre de la cité des dames (1405), the story of Bernabo’s
wife (Decameron II.9). A comparison of Boccaccio’s and Christine’s ver-
sions will help to further distinguish women writers’ use of the format.
First, let us note, however, that Boccaccio also introduces a feminist use
of casuistry in two other stories (VI.7 and VII.5)—both of which concern
women who, like Bernabo’s wife, successfully argue their cases by means
of casuistry. However, in each situation Boccaccio undercuts the woman
plaintiff, thus rendering a potentially feminist assertion ambiguous (see
also II.3). Both novellas depict women whose behavior is otherwise so
reprehensible it undercuts their forensic success.
In the seventh story of day six, for example, a woman successfully ar-
gues that a law mandating that adulterous women be burned alive is in-
equitable. Madonna Filippa develops her case with a two-fold argument.
The first part is an example of syllogistic logic: just laws, the woman
claims, “should be equal for both sexes and made with the consent of
those who are to obey them” [“le legge deono esser communi e fatte con
consentimento di coloro a cui toccano].”18 This law is unjust [“malva-
gia”] because it applies only to women, and women did not consult in its
passage—a convincing enough argument.
In the second part of her contention, however, Filippa adds a casuisti-
cal argument: since she fulfills her husband sexually yet has sexual energy
left over, she should not waste it but share it with another man. By using
her circumstances, that of being an adulteress, Filippa challenges the con-
cept of adultery as immoral, claiming another “right”—the duty to share
her sexual energy. That the idea is obviously facetious—the audience in
the court laughs at it—undercuts the serious feminist point Filippa had
made in the first part of her argument.
A second example of Boccaccio’s use of casuistry occurs in the fifth
story of the seventh day. Here a wife tricks an obsessively jealous husband
who had impersonated a priest in the confessional in order to determine
if she is having an extramarital affair. She recognizes him and confesses to
him that she is having an affair with a priest, which is not the case. Later
she claims she told the truth because her husband was the “priest” at the
time of the confession. This slippery casuistry works to compromise the
woman’s character, which is further tainted by her continuing deception
of her husband (by in fact having an affair). Thus, although the listeners
in the Decameron support her, her obviously corrupt character undercuts
whatever feminist message one might otherwise glean from the tale.
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 65

Christine de Pizan chose not to use either of the above novellas in the
Cité des dames; rather she picked three others, among them Boccaccio’s
ninth tale of the second day, the story of Bernabo’s wife.19 The plot is this:
Bernabo had come to a hasty conclusion, based on fraudulent evidence,
that his wife was unfaithful and had ordered a servant to kill her. She,
however, survives and is eventually exonerated when she presents her case
in a court-like proceeding before a magistrate in which she acts in disguise
as her own attorney, disproving the evidence that had earlier convicted
her in her husband’s eyes. In Christine de Pizan’s version the slandered
wife displays considerable forensic skills (more so than in Boccaccio’s ver-
sion), requesting the magistrate to rule “according to the merits of the
case” [“justement selonc le cas”], and confronting the husband directly
for so gullibly accepting false evidence: “You deserve to die for not having
sufficient proof!” [“Vous estes digne de mort; car vous n’aviez mie preuve
soubffisant”].20
The husband has clearly fallen prey to a misogynist generality about
women—that all wives are easy lays and untrustworthy—which the
woman disproves by bearing witness to the particular details of her par-
ticular case. The story thus, as a case study that works to contradict and
destabilize a misogynist maxim, exemplifies a feminist use of casuistry.
Boccaccio, although recounting essentially the same tale, undercuts the
message by following it with a counter example, the story of an elderly
judge (II.10) whose wife abandons him for a pirate who sexually satisfies
her better. The women listeners in the Decameron determine from this ex-
emplum that “Bernabo was a fool” (167) [“Bernabò era stato una bestia”
(157)] (to have repented of his distrust of his wife)—thereby reinscribing
the misogynist maxim that women are sexually voracious, fickle, and ir-
rational. Thus, while Boccaccio anticipates a feminist use of casuistry in
three of his tales, he negates the message in the ways indicated.
Succeeding women writers restored, however, Boccaccio’s vitiated fem-
inist message. Spanish writer María de Zayas in fact picked up and elabo-
rated considerably the story of Bernabo’s wife in her Novelas amorosas y
ejemplares (1637). “El juez de su causa” (“The Judge of Her Own Case”)
adds a number of escapades to the Boccaccio/Pizan version, including hav-
ing the woman (here named Estela) serve in male disguise in the military.
She is rewarded by the emperor for her service with a judicial position. In
this capacity she serves as judge of her former lover, who has been wrongly
accused of kidnapping and murdering her. In the course of the trial the
lover reveals, however, that he has nevertheless falsely held misogynistic
views about Estela, considering her fickle and inconstant. Upon hearing
these the judge Estela roundly condemns him for jumping to conclusions,
revealing herself finally, as in the earlier versions, as the ultimate proof of
66 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

her own truth; the particular details of her story prove her case, demolish-
ing misogynist maxims (such as that women are untrustworthy) in the
process, another example of a feminist use of casuistry.
Probably the most extensive and significant appropriation of casuistry
for feminist purposes in early modern literature remains in the Hep-
taméron (1549) by Marguerite de Navarre.21 We have noted that by her
time the framed-novelle genre had become a vehicle for the expression of
virulent misogyny, especially in the French tradition, and it is apparent
that her extension of the frame discussions (generally recognized as her
contribution to the genre) was at least in part to counter this misogyny.
Although modeled on the Decameron, Marguerite’s opus greatly extends
the casuistical frame analysis of the novellas, nearly one-fourth of which
are explicitly designated “cases,” and nearly all of which present case-like
moral dilemmas. This extensive use of casuistry in the Heptaméron has
not received scholarly attention.
Marguerite de Navarre was, as a member of a royal family, well edu-
cated, especially in Christian doctrine. One of her early teachers, François
Demoulin, wrote a penitential manual for her; it used the dialogue format
of the casuistry treatises and undoubtedly reflects their influence.22 Mar-
guerite was surely familiar as well with many of these treatises, and, al-
though clearly critical of the excesses of casuistry, appropriated its
methodology in the Heptaméron. Moreover, and perhaps more relevant,
Marguerite was quite familiar with courtly love casuistry.23 Indeed, her
immediate entourage would often spend time discussing in salon-like
fashion “a case of romantic casuistry,” according to her biographer, Pierre
Jourda (291). Jourda further proposes that the Heptaméron’s originality
lies in its moral study of the “case of conscience,” where earlier exemplars
of the genre largely described amoral escapades only for entertainment
purposes (960). Significantly, a seventeenth-century English translator of
the Heptaméron, Robert Codrington, writing during the heyday of En-
glish casuistry, remarks in his preface, “The Canonists also, and the Casu-
ists, will here have enough, in many passages, on which with admiration
to reflect.”24
Those novellas that exemplify Marguerite’s use of casuistry for feminist
purposes are of particular interest to this study. Several of these follow
Christine de Pizan’s model of the woman speaking out in her own de-
fense. (As noted, Marguerite was familiar with her predecessor’s work—
she probably owned a Christine de Pizan manuscript—according to
Jourda, 518, 534, 1288). And like Christine’s characters, Marguerite’s
women display impressive rhetorical and forensic skills (I am not propos-
ing Christine de Pizan as her only model, of course, but she was probably
an influence).
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 67

In three of the novellas, numbers fifteen, twenty-one, and sixty-one,

women act as their own defense attorneys, as if in a court of law, arguing
casuistically that the crimes they are accused of are not really sins and/or
that they were justified in their commission. Significantly (and this is an-
other aspect of the Heptaméron that has not received attention), in each
of these novellas the frame discussion pointedly ignores the subversive
implications of the women characters’ antinomian positions. Perhaps this
was because Marguerite did not want to highlight the radical feminism
embedded in these stories; she had already antagonized Church authori-
ties with her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1531), which had been con-
demned by the Sorbonne as heretical in 1533. In those days heresy was of
course a serious matter; a reformer connected to Marguerite’s circle, Louis
de Berquin, had been executed for heresy in 1529.25
Nevertheless, while the subversive character of the women’s positions is
not accentuated in the frame discussion, it is manifest in the women’s
declamations. The situation in novella fifteen is that a woman, long ig-
nored by her philandering husband, takes a platonic lover in courtly love
fashion. The husband then exerts his authority, forbidding her to see the
lover, whereupon she bursts forth with a lengthy speech damning the dou-
ble standard in sins: Why is what is regarded a major crime for a woman
considered a minor peccadillo for a man? Confronting her husband, she
protests, “Now, Monsieur, do you intend . . . to take revenge on me for the
very kind of thing you yourself have been guilty for years . . . ?” [“Et vous,
monsieur . . . vouldriez-vous prendre vengeance d’un oeuvre, dont si, long
temps a, vous m’avez donné exemple . . . ?”]26 She concludes by using the
casuistical formula of the Provençal love debate: “Well, then, judge without
bias. Which of the two of us most deserves to be punished, and which of
us most deserves to be excused?” (197) [“Or, jugez sans faveur lequel de
nous deux est le plus punissable ou excusable . . . ?” (123)]. Thus, with the
realities of the case laid forth, and the woman’s point of view given clear
expression, the authority of “the law of men [which] attaches dishonour to
women who fall in love” extramaritally (196) [“la loy des hommes (qui)
donne grand deshonneur aux femmes qui ayment autres que leurs mariz”
(123)] is challenged. By using a case that points up the moral contradiction
of the double standard, Marguerite effectively critiques that rule.
More seriously heretical is the position of Rolandine in novella
twenty-one, who argues her case before royal authority, contending that
she and her lover were morally justified in marrying outside the Church
and in opposition to royal decree (marriage had been forbidden because
the lover was a bastard and penniless). In her defense she claims that
what she has done is not a sin: “If it were the case that I had sinned
against God, the King, [the Queen], my parents and my own conscience,
68 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

then indeed I would be obdurate not to weep tears of repentance” (248)

[“Quant je aurois offensé Dieu, le Roy, (la Reyne), mes parens et ma
conscience, je serois bien obstinée si, de grande repentance, je ne pleu-
rois” (170)].
A similar position is argued by the main character in novella sixty-one,
who has abandoned her husband and lived in an essentially bigamous but
happy second alliance for fourteen or fifteen years. In defending herself,
the woman claims that she had not sinned against God, and that it would
indeed be a sin to take her away from her second “spouse” and return her
to the first. “Let no one imagine that my way of life contradicts the will of
God. . . . [W]e live . . . without either of us ever uttering a word of dis-
agreement. . . . And it would be a sin to make us part, for [he] is nearly
eighty years old, while I am only forty-five, and he would not live for long
without me!” (482). [“Et, s’il ne fault point que l’on pense que je vive con-
tre la volunté de Dieu, car . . . [nous] vivons . . . sans que jamais entre
nous deux y eut eu parolle. . . . Et, qui nous separera fera grand peché, car
le bon homme, qui a bien près de quatre vingtz ans, ne vivra pas longue-
ment sans moy, qui en ay quarante cinq” (375)]. Thus, by invoking the
particulars of her case, which suggest the possibilities of another moral
rule, the woman is able to raise questions about the patriarchal law that
makes her her husband’s possession.27
Other Heptaméron novellas are similarly presented as cases for casuis-
tical discussion. The most significant of these are numbers twelve, thirty-
six, and forty (and number thirty, as noted above). Novella twelve, which
is discussed as a case by the frame characters, concerns a conflict between
two moral imperatives: the claims of loyalty versus the claims of honor.
A nobleman, chief servant to a duke, is asked by the latter to procure for
him his sister. The nobleman is thus torn between loyalty to his master
and the obligation to defend his sister’s (and family’s) honor. He chooses
the latter course and assassinates the duke to protect his sister. In the
frame discussions the women consider that he acted properly; the men
do not (162/95).
Novella thirty-six also concerns a murder and whether it is justifi-
able. In this case a city official discovers his wife’s adultery and eventu-
ally poisons her as punishment. (This story was the one retold and
reworked by Delarivier Manley as “The Husband’s Resentment. Exam-
ple II” in The Power of Love [1720], discussed in chapter four.) The
frame discussion is a characteristic casuistical analysis of whether the
murder was a sin, the issue hinging on the question of the husband’s
state of mind, with some contending that a violent act committed in the
heat of passion is not so grevious as a coldly premeditated act (this was
a standard issue in the casuistry manuals).28 In this case the husband
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 69

had delayed his revenge for several months. One of the discussants ob-
serves that if “he had killed her out of anger, . . . the learned doctors say
that such a sin is remissable” (356) [“il l’eust tuée en sa collere . . . les
docteurs dient que le peché est remissible” (264)]. Others consider that
his anger might have lasted that long.
Another of the discussants engages in the kind of casuistical reasoning
that has given it a bad name, in arguing that since it was love that drove
the man to murder it should only be considered a venial sin, because it is
by “passing up the ladder of worldly love” that one reaches God (357)
[“c’est ung degré pour monter à l’amour parfaict de luy” (265)]. This is an
ironically perverse reworking of Marguerite’s own platonic theory, and is
put down immediately in the text.
Novella forty, while it may, like much of the Heptaméron, have a basis
in historical fact (see François, p. 480, nn. 589, 591), recounts a story that
was oft told—that of the sister who defies patriarchal authority (a brother
who has acceded to family sovereignty because of the father’s death) by
marrying or consorting with a forbidden lover.29 The brother responds by
killing the lover. In addition, in the Heptaméron version, the woman is im-
prisoned for life.
The frame characters discuss the story as a case (the word cas [case] is
used twice [279]). Their discussion focuses on the issue of familial control
of marriage choice, with two characters questioning whether the brother
legally had authority over the sister because he was neither husband nor
father, and she was no longer a minor [“qu’elle estoit en l’aage que les loys
permectent aux filles d’eulx marier sans leur volunté” (278)]. The issue of
daughters having free choice of marriage partner, which the frame char-
acters further debate, was a hot one in casuistry treatises, which generally
supported at least the daughter’s right to veto a parental choice (see Starr
40, n. 75). The issue continued to be a major one in women’s literature.
Undoubtedly under the influence of Marguerite de Navarre, María de
Zayas continued the feminist use of casuistry in her two framed-novelle
collections, the Novelas amorosas and the Parte segunda, the Desengaños
amorosos. Significantly, in her preface to the reader of the Novelas
amorosas, which, as we have seen, presents a lengthy defense of women’s
right to write and a plea for women’s education, Zayas suggests that it
was by reading casuistry treatises in the vernacular that women became
literate: “there were the . . . Summas morales in the vernacular so that
women and lay people could become literate” (Enchantments 2)[“hay . . .
Sumas morales en romance, los seglares y las mujeres pueden ser letra-
dos” (Novelas amorosas 22)]. Zayas may be referring to the Summa
Moralis alphabetice per casus digesta by Gabriel Saint-Vincent (officially
published in 1668, it probably circulated earlier). In any event, there were
70 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

numerous works of casuistry available in Spanish by Zayas’s time, in-

cluding what is considered to be one of the most important works of
high casuistry, the Enchiridion sive manuale confessariorum et poeniten-
tium (1569) by Martin Azpilcueta, the “Doctor of Navarre.”
Like the Heptaméron, Zayas’s works include a continuing frame dis-
cussion of the querelle des femmes. The stories in the Novelas amorosas
told by women (five are told by men and five by women) have a feminist
point, and all the stories in the Desengaños, which are all told by women,
concern feminist issues. Indeed, we have noted that the narratives in the
Desengaños are intended to be “case histories” [“casos verdaderos”], which
are designed to “enlighten, or disenchant, women about men’s decep-
tions” (Enchantments xvii) [“y que tuviesen nombre de desengaños”
(Parte segunda 118)]. The stories are also to be “in defense of women’s
name” (xvii) [“por la fama de las mujeres” (118)]. The concept of desen-
gaño or disenchantment, central to Spanish literature of the period,
means that the stories are to disabuse women of any illusions they may
have about men and romance. In this sense, the novellas thus have the
feminist moral purpose of “consciousness-raising.” And, indeed, all of the
“cases” in the Desengaños portray brutal abuse of women from a feminist
standpoint.
Feminist casuistry remained a central rhetorical mode in the writings
of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English women. Margaret
Cavendish continues the tradition in Natures Pictures (1656), her framed-
novelle, which was also modeled on the Heptaméron. Two stories—“The
Contract” and “The She-Anchoret”—are particularly relevant. The latter
sets up a woman (a Cavendish persona) as a casuistical divine to whom
various people pose questions. The question-answer format is that of a
casuistry text (333–44). The She-Anchoret is clearly a kind of intermedi-
ary between the theological casuist and the popular casuistical advice-
giver of late seventeenth-century journalism, which Starr sees as an
important source for Defoe’s use of casuistry in the early novel.
One of the first English periodicals for women, the Athenian Mercury
(1690–97), specialized in fact in this kind of popular casuistry. Its original
title was significantly The Athenian Gazette: or, Casuisticall Mercury (Starr
9). A subtitle, “resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed
by the ingenious” was expanded after the first volume (in 1691) to include
“of either sex.”30 Bertha-Monica Stearnes notes that casuistical issues (of
the type discussed by the She-Anchoret), such as “whether it be lawful to
look with pleasure on another woman than one’s wife?,” were staple top-
ics. Increasingly, the issue “whether it be proper for women to be
learned”—a perennial concern of early modern women writers—was dis-
cussed (47). The editor, John Dunton, realizing the potential market of fe-
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 71

male readers, established regular special issues for “ladies.” In these issues,
according to Stearnes, the “cases became more elaborate in detail and if
not actually short-stories, certainly offered plot material” (51).
G. A. Starr notes, the Athenian Mercury, to which Defoe contributed
pieces, was “an important link between Defoe and the earlier casuistry”
(9). He suggests that the episodic, paratactic structure of Defoe’s plots
probably derives from casuistry.

In Dunton’s periodical, highly diverse ethical dilemmas are resolved

through detailed consideration of the relevant circumstances . . . each case
of conscience becomes something of an episode. . . . [T]he casuistical
method tends to dissolve narrative into a series of discrete episodes. . . .
[T]he paratactic structure of such books as Moll Flanders . . . is in part as-
cribable to Defoe’s habit of approaching experience casuistically, case by
case. (32)

Another important source for Defoe’s use of casuistry was, however,

the writings of several women writers whose contribution I outline in the
remainder of this chapter. Margaret Cavendish, for example, enlarges the
tradition of women arguing their own cases in “The Contract” (the
novella in Natures Pictures discussed in chapter three). The story is an im-
portant (if neglected) forerunner of the female bildungsroman, anticipat-
ing Fanny Burney’s Evelina by over a century, but in its complex,
casuistical plot harking back to the novella. It revolves around the issue of
which of two marriages a bigamous duke has contracted is valid; it ends
with a court hearing in which all the parties present their cases.
In the process, however, Cavendish develops the subjective point of
view of a woman—the first wife, Delitia—to a much greater extent than
generally seen heretofore in literature. Her standpoint presents a clear cri-
tique of the marriage-market system. She resists, as we have seen, her
guardian’s efforts “to traffick for a Husband” (Natures Pictures 189).
Her situation is complicated by the fact that she is already married,
having been contracted in an arranged marriage at the age of seven. Her
husband, however, later bigamously married another. Upon meeting
again as adults (he not knowing who she is) they fall in love. The uncle-
guardian, however, wants her to marry an older and wealthier man.
After they have a lengthy casuistical debate on the subject, the uncle
warns her “not to use Rhetorick against your self, and overthrow a good
Fortune” (197).
In the court hearing over the validity of the marriages Delitia argues
that her contracted marriage is valid, urging the judges to “cast aside your
Canon Law . . . and judge it by the Common Law” (210). Here Delitia
72 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

(and thus Cavendish) shows her knowledge of theological casuistry.

Canon law generally favored marriages made with free consent of the par-
ties, and opposed the arranged marriage of minors. Canon law would
thus hold the husband’s second marriage valid.
However, in Joseph Hall’s casuistry text, Resolution and Decisions
(1650), a treatise Cavendish as an Anglican might well have consulted,
case number ten (7:398) in the section “Cases Matrimonial” advises that
a second marriage should be dissolved in the case of a first marriage with
a living spouse—obviously Delitia’s case. The judges rule in her favor. By
means, therefore, of clever casuistical subtleties Cavendish provides an
ironic portrait of marriage-market “trafficking” from a feminist point of
view: the woman only succeeds in “choosing” her spouse, who happens to
be her husband, because of the ironically coincidental circumstances of
her case (and because of her knowledge of casuistry).
The feminist use of casuistry took a significant turn in the latter sev-
enteenth century, when women writers began to construe their life-
histories as cases in order to challenge laws or ideological norms (encoded
as maxims) that were pejorative to women. Exemplifying the life-as-case
construction are The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663), The Adven-
tures of Rivella (1714), and A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723).
Defoe picked up on this model in both Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana
(1724). We have already seen an anticipation of this construction in La
Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette.
The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663), which has been designated
as part of “a missing chapter in the history of the English novel,”31 is the
autobiographical defense written by Mary Carleton, who was a somewhat
notorious figure tried for bigamy and eventually executed as a thief, and
about whom circulated a series of narratives that debated her guilt or in-
nocence.32 She maintains her innocence in The Case of Madam Mary Car-
leton, arguing in the process that the feme covert laws, which deprived
wives of legal standing and ownership of property, were unjust.33
As noted in chapter four, in her preface Carleton refers to her life as a
series of novellas, asking her readers to “cast a favourable eye upon these
Novels of my life, not much unlike those of Boccace [Boccaccio], but that
they are more serious and tragical” (A4v). Indeed, the escapades in the
Case do read like novellas, and early commentators considered it fiction
(see especially C. F. Main and Ernest Bernbaum). If that is true, Carleton
should be considered the first woman novelist, combining as she does the
novella tradition with an autobiographical frame and a first-person nar-
ration—central formal components of the first novels.
Like the other women writers in this study, Carleton uses casuistry to
argue her case—an aspect of her work that has not received attention. In
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 73

relating her amusingly deceitful courtship (where both she and her suitor
are pretending to wealth and status that neither has), Carleton argues ca-
suistically that “to deceive the deceiver, is no deceit” (46), which she claims
is “a received principle of Justice” (46). In fact, it was a received principle
in casuistry, one that was analyzed in the Athenian Mercury (11.20.10) and
picked up by Defoe; in Moll Flanders one episode, as Starr notes, is “built
around a case of conscience . . . namely, the question of whether it is le-
gitimate to deceive a deceiver” (Starr 128; also n.26). Carleton proceeds to
act successfully as her own defense attorney in court against a charge of
bigamy (the Case includes a purported transcript of the trial).
Ernest Bernbaum convincingly argues that the Mary Carleton narra-
tives, particularly as they were synthesized in Francis Kirkman’s fictional-
ized The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673), were important progenitors of
the novel. In particular, the “curious parallelism between the careers of
Moll Carleton and Moll Flanders with their frequent marriages, their
thefts, and their transportation” is noteworthy (89), leading Bernbaum to
see Counterfeit Lady as “an early link in the chain of realistic novels” (90).
His view is corroborated by the dean of authorities on the “rise of the
novel,” Ian Watt, who notes, “the closest seventeenth-century analogue to
Moll Flanders” is Mary Carleton (101 n.1).
In The Adventures of Rivella, Delarivier Manley extrapolates from
the feminist defenses seen in earlier works, particularly The Case of
Mary Carleton, to construct a novel-length autobiographical defense of
her life. In other words, Manley here makes her life a case in the ongo-
ing debate about women, and thus takes her place in the continuing
feminist use of casuistry. Manley had first explored the possibility of
making her life a case in the New Atalantis (1709) in the story of Delia
who at the age of fourteen was seduced and then married bigamously
by a cousin-guardian by whom she bore a son—all of which are inci-
dents from Manley’s own life (2:185–93). The frame characters inter-
pret the story like many others in the New Atalantis as a “desengaño”
that raises the question of how to prevent “Women from believing” and
“Men from deceiving” (2:192).
Manley’s knowledge of casuistry is apparent elsewhere in the New Ata-
lantis where she shows how men use it to deceive women: for example, in
the Charlot episode (1:45–84), in which Portland legitimizes his seduc-
tion of a ward casuistically, which is refuted by Astrea, a frame character,
in the frame discussion. In a similar episode another guardian seduces his
charge by persuading her of the legitimacy of bigamy—indeed polygamy.
The narrator acidly ironizes his position as follows: “she could admit of
Poligamy, but would not hear a word of Concubinage; whether the differ-
ence be so material I leave to the Casuists” (1:226).
74 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

But it is in the Delia episode that we can best see how the New Atalan-
tis is a transitional link between the novella-case seen in earlier works and
the more extended representation of women’s side of the case seen in The
Adventures of Rivella, itself an immediate forerunner of the novel. In the
latter work the frame consists of two men; one, an acquaintance of Riv-
ella’s, tells her story to another. Her “case” is used to damn the double
standard:

Her vertues are her own, her vices occasion’d by her Misfortunes; and yet
as I have often heard her say, If she had been a Man, she had been without
Fault: But the Charter of that Sex being much more confin’d than ours,
what is not a Crime in Men is scandalous and unpardonable in Woman, as
she herself has very well observ’d in divers Places, throughout her own
Writings. (7–8, emphasis in original)

Rivella is an autobiographical defense; the events of Rivella’s life being

closely modeled on Manley’s own, which was troubled by scandal, gossip,
and social ostracism. She clearly wrote Rivella to present her side of these
personal stories or cases. For example, in one episode Rivella serves as a
companion to a wealthy, flighty duchess, Hilaria, who soon tires of her,
dismissing Rivella with false charges that she has been having an affair
with Hilaria’s son. Rivella, who knew that Hilaria “always blasted the
Character of those whom she was grown weary of ” (35), denies the accu-
sation as if in a court proceeding. When Hilaria says, “I saw [my son] to
Day kiss you as he lead you thro’ the dark Drawing-Room down to Din-
ner,” Rivella retorts, “Your Ladyship may have seen him attempt it . . . and
seen me refuse the Honour” (38).
Rivella, whose reputation has already been ruined by the bigamy of
her cousin (the Delia episode in New Atalantis), is learning the truth of
a warning imparted to her earlier by a neighbor, about “the Ill-nature of
the World, that wou’d never restore a Woman’s Reputation, how inno-
cent soever she really were, if Appearances prov’d to be against her”
(32). Since in the seventeenth century a woman’s reputation (for
chastity) was the primary component in her value as a commodity in
the marriage-market exchange system, it was crucial that she maintain
that reputation. Once it was destroyed and she was labeled a fallen
woman, her value was lost. It was thus imperative that she contest dam-
aging allegations by presenting exonerating specifics—her side of the
case, as Manley attempts to do here. In The Adventures of Rivella Man-
ley conveys the specific circumstances of Rivella’s particular story in
order to challenge the generality “fallen woman” that had been attached
to her. It is a casuistical process.
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 75

Defoe adapted women writers’ feminist casuistry—especially, conceiv-

ing the life-history as a case or series of cases—in Moll Flanders and Rox-
ana. Both protagonists bear considerable resemblance to Mary Carleton
and Rivella, suggesting direct influences. All are victims of circumstance,
all are touched by scandal, and all manage to survive by engaging in ques-
tionable moral behavior. Indeed, Roxana at one point acknowledges her
resemblance to Mary Carleton, noting “I might as well have been the Ger-
man Princess.”34
The differences between Defoe’s use of feminist casuistry and the
women writers’ are, however, significant. For, like Boccaccio, and unlike
the women, Defoe establishes an ironical frame that tends to undercut the
feminist message or at least render it ambiguous.35 For example, Roxana
articulates one of the strongest feminist defenses in early modern litera-
ture in her denunciation of the slave-like status of the wife, choosing her-
self to remain a whore, and thus retaining her independence. “The very
Nature of the Marriage-Contract was,” she said, “in short, nothing but
giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing to the Man, and the
Woman was indeed . . . a Slave” (148).
Yet the statement is ironized both by the context—Roxana soon re-
pents of the vanity and “ambitious Mind” (161) that led her to such an
opinion—and by her character. Her behavior, after all, like Moll Flan-
ders’s, is that of an unmitigated reprobate. Thus, as Starr notes, one can
easily construe Defoe’s heroines’ use of casuistry as serving “to confirm
rather than qualify their guilt” (186). That ironical context or frame is not
present in The Case of Mary Carleton (it was added, however, by others in
subsequent versions of her life, including Kirkman’s), nor in Rivella or
Patch-Work Screen. One might in fact hypothesize that the frames used by
Manley (of a sympathetic male narrator) and by Barker (of a sympathetic
female narrator) were developed to forestall ironical readings of their
“cases,” such as is invited in the Defoe works. In short, however, it is clear
that the women writers’ use of casuistry—in particular the idea of the life
as a case or series of cases—contributed importantly to Defoe’s concep-
tion of the novel.
Jane Barker continued the feminist use of casuistry in several of her
works, although like her women predecessors, to different purposes than
Defoe. Exilius (1715), Barker’s first work of prose fiction, is clearly con-
structed as a series of cases. It is modeled on the French heroic romance,
particularly Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654).36 The French ro-
mances derived from the courtly love tradition and carried on its “casu-
istique d’amour,” though in somewhat frivolous form, considering
questions like “whether a fair and merry mistress be more amiable than
a fair and melancholy.”37 Indeed, a seventeenth-century English critic of
76 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

the romance warned of the influence its casuistry could have on the
young woman reader: “those Authors are subtil Casuists for all difficult
cases that may occur in it, will instruct in the necessary Artifices of de-
luding Parents and Friends and put her ruine perfectly in her own
power.”38
Barker presents case-studies in Exilius that reflect familiar casuistry
concerns. Is a marriage contracted for minors valid (that between Jemella
and Marcellus)?39 Jemella compares another woman’s case to hers in that
both are disobeying their father’s choice of husbands (2:71–72), thus cri-
tiquing the marriage-market. Another figure, Clarintha, resists her fa-
ther’s attempt to marry her to his bastard son, which would be incest. But
the son, Valerius, offers “Casuistical by-ways” to try to persuade her it
would be a legitimate union (1:41).
Other cases include that of a queen of Egypt who decides to annul her
incestuous marriage to her brother (1:118–57). Cordiala, another charac-
ter, learns circumstances about her birth—that she is the adopted daugh-
ter of a wetnurse—that alter her case. “And now, Madam,” she is told,
“that you know the Case” (2:7), it is hoped she will wed the person her
mother has chosen. Cordiala resists, however, in a vignette that recalls
Cavendish’s “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” fleeing in disguise as a man,
in which situation she and another woman fall in love, presenting another
case-dilemma (2:15).
And, in one of the more intriguing stories Galecia (probably a Barker
persona), a princess, kills her lover in defending another man from the
lover’s jealous attack. Since no one can believe a woman could do such a
thing, they hold the other man guilty: “the Princess . . . was believ’d on no
Side; which shews, that Men credit what they fancy” (2:41). Galecia’s story
thus is another case-example that refutes stereotypical assumptions about
women. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the dis-
patched lover is the head of a neighboring kingdom that wants revenge. A
character asks, “I beg you to consider what is to be done in this Case”
(2:44). The story is resolved artificially but it illustrates once again women
writers’ use of casuistry for feminist purposes.
In A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) Barker picks up on the
idea of using a woman’s life history as a case. In this complex modifica-
tion of the framed-novelle the main inset story, as we have seen, is the au-
tobiographical narrative of one of the frame women, Galesia, another
Barker persona. Her story functions overall as a case that argues for
women’s education, warns of the treacheries of men, and most impor-
tantly, critiques the marriage-market exchange of women. The work in-
cludes several other case studies that articulate Galesia’s feminist theses.
There is, for example, the story of a seduced-and-abandoned woman who
CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES Í 77

has venereal disease (52); “The Story of Belinda” (74–79), another se-
duced-and-abandoned victim, who narrates her own account; “The His-
tory of Lysander” (81–90), another suitor whose interest in Galesia turns
out to be entirely financial. Other suitors similarly are found to be treach-
erous (Bellair [31–38], for example, who deceives Galesia’s parents, is later
revealed as a fraud and executed for theft).
Discouraged by these “Beau Rakes” (37), Galesia soon finds herself
similarly nauseated by the beau monde of the London marriage market,
in which as a country girl she finds “the Assemblèes [sic], Ombre, and Bas-
set-Tables, were all Greek to me” (43); and “at the Toilet, I was as ignorant
a Spectator as a Lady is an Auditor at an Act-Sermon in the University,
which is always in Latin; for I was not capable to distinguish which Dress
became which Face; or whether the Italian, Spanish, or Portugal Red, best
suited such or such Features” (44–45). Interestingly, here Galesia presents
herself as an outsider to two traditions, that of Latin rhetoric and that of
self-marketing for a husband—thereby ironically undercutting both of
these patriarchal institutions.
Preferring solitude and study to “those gaudy Pleasures of the Town,
which intangle and intoxicate the greater Part of Woman-kind” (47), Gale-
sia becomes an herbal pharmacist of some repute—an accomplishment in
which she takes some pride. “Thus . . . I celebrated my own Praise . . . for
want of good Neighbours to do it for me” (59). These words could stand as
the catch phrase for these women writers’ use of casuistry—voicing their
own particularized and truthful case as a means of refuting ideological as-
sumptions about women’s nature and place.
Barker also conceives the sequel to A Patch-Work Screen, The Lining of
the Patch Work Screen (1726) as a series of case-novellas held together in
a framed-novelle format. In “The Story of Philinda,” for example, we find
a reappropriation of the woman arguing her own case. Here a wife, falsely
arrested for inadvertently being in a house of prostitution, debates how to
exonerate herself to her husband: “thus she weigh’d every thing but could
pitch upon nothing that had any Face of probability. . . . At last, she re-
solv’d on the plain Truth” and tells her husband “the true State of the
Case” (55–56).
From the women troubadours to Jane Barker we find a series of
women writers using casuistry to present “the true state of the case” from
a woman’s point of view. This feminist use of casuistry allowed women
writers to represent women’s circumstances in detail and thus to alter
people’s understanding of women’s situations. It enabled the articulation
of a women’s standpoint and thus contributed to the cultural work of ide-
ological transformation in the early modern period, destablizing the
“word of the fathers.” It also provided a major organizational idea—the
78 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

notion of the life as a case or series of cases—that contributed impor-

tantly to the conceptualization of the early novel. Male writers like
Defoe—and later Samuel Richardson—seem to have responded to these
new representations and to have incorporated (however ambiguously)
women’s cases in many of their works.
Feminist casuistry thus provided a point of resistance to misogynist
generalities about women that pervaded the early modern period. Voicing
the women’s side of the case complicated the picture and problematized
ideological assumptions; in this way feminist casuistry contributed im-
portantly to the constitution of the critical, ironical, dialogical, and sub-
versive mentality we associate with the rise of the novel.
Chapter Six

The Nineties Generation:

A Feminist Prosaics

ENGLISH WOMEN’S PROSE fiction really

W HILE THE REALIST TRADITION IN
began in the mid-seventeenth century with Margaret Cavendish, it
was not until later in the century that a continuing tradition of realist
prose fiction by women could be said to have developed. In the last two
decades of the century and into the early eighteenth century such a tradi-
tion emerged. Pioneered by Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter, and to a
lesser extent, Aphra Behn, it was most fully developed by the unfortu-
nately neglected Irish woman, Mary Davys, and culminated in the works
of Jane Barker. These women invented women’s realism in English litera-
ture, a realism that did much to establish the character of the English
novel. In their works the woman of sense (as opposed to sensibility) takes
charge, and she expresses the viewpoint of feminist critical irony, by then
firmly established by the women writers of the framed-novelle tradition.
What these British writers add is a kind of commonsensical, comical per-
spective wherein the woman of sense serves as eiron to the alazon of ro-
mantic sensibility. More often than not her (and the author’s) critical
perspective undermines generic stereotypes of women, offering instead a
feminist prosaics wherein the specific realities of women’s lives are treated
with serious attention.
This 1690s generation of English women writers constitutes an impor-
tant “wave” in women’s literary history that has not been recognized. They
were undoubtedly influenced by the rising tide of rationalism that was
sweeping intellectual discourse of the period and by the feminist theoret-
ical treatises that had been appearing with some regularity since early in
80 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

the seventeenth century. These included works by French theorists Marie

de Gournay (1622) and Poulain de la Barre (1673; English translation
1677); Dutch writer Anna Van Schurman (1641; English translation
1659); and English writers Rachel Speght (1617), Margaret Cavendish,
and Bathsua Makin (1673).1 Moreover, numerous women of the period
engaged in serious intellectual correspondence with some of the leading
male philosophers of the day—such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke—
establishing a kind of blue stocking image that necessarily challenged no-
tions of female intellectual inferiority and demonstrated that women
could be rational and speak with “sense.”2
Probably the most important of these theorists in promoting the doc-
trine of feminist rationalism, which so influenced the women writers of
the nineties generation, was Mary Astell. Her “Serious Proposal to the
Ladies” (1694) and “Some Reflections upon Marriage” (1700) formally ar-
ticulated a feminist critique of marriage and faulty female education. “For
since GOD has given women as well as men intelligent souls,” Astell ar-
gued in her first essay, “why should they be forbidden to improve them?”3
Like many women writers Astell criticized romances and urged that in-
stead of wasting their time “reading idle novels and romances” women
should study philosophy (121).
“Some Reflections upon Marriage” critiques arranged marriages and
analogizes the patriarchal family to a monarchy in which the husband
rules (this being somewhat of a theoretical commonplace at the time).4
While Astell does not go so far as to advocate equality in marriage or the
abolition of the institution, she does suggest that women might well
choose to avoid it, since it is an “absolute sovereignty” (139): “For if arbi-
trary power is evil in itself, and an improper method of governing ratio-
nal and free agents, it ought not to be practiced anywhere; nor is it less,
but rather more mischievous in families than in kingdoms, by how much
100,000 tyrants are worse than one” (140). Astell concludes the essay with
this ringing cry, “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born
slaves?” (140). With such ideas in the air it is not surprising that women
writers of the nineties generation adopted an anti-romantic, rationalist
thematic and created women characters of sense.
While Astell and others undoubtedly encouraged these thematic incli-
nations, probably the most important immediate fictional influence on
the nineties generation of English women writers was Madame d’Aulnoy’s
Relation du voyage d’Espagne (1691; The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of
the Lady—Travels into Spain, English translation 1691), an enormously
popular work that went through ten editions in England by 1735.5 Char-
acterized as “a kind of Heptameron-cum-guide book” by Bridget
MacCarthy,6 it is indeed a variant of the framed-novelle. Several novellas
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 81

and other short narratives are embedded within a frame, which is a jour-
ney allegedly taken by the author in 1679–80 from Bayonne in southern
France to Madrid. The journey is recounted retrospectively in fifteen
dated letters to a cousin in France.
The author’s preface “To the Reader” is an important realist manifesto
in which she claims to have verified the factual truth of her contents and
to have fabricated nothing: “I write nothing but what I have seen, or heard
from persons of unquestionable credit . . . you have here no novel, or
story, devised at pleasure; but an exact and most true account of . . . my
travels” [“Je n’ay écrit que ce que j’ay vû, ou ce que j’ay appris par des per-
sonnes d’une probité incontestable . . . —ce que l’on trouvera dans cette
Relation, est très-exacte et très-conforme à la verité”].7 D’Aulnoy chal-
lenges the by-then standard probability criterion saying that anomalous
incidents must not be considered false simply because they do not fit into
preconceived expectations. Because “things . . . must . . . seem probable,
to gain belief ” (3), some “will accuse me of hyperbolizing, and compos-
ing romances” (3) [“qu’il faille encore que [les choses] soient vrayes-
semblables pour les faire croire. . . . Je ne doute point qu’il n’y en ait . . .
qui ne m’accusent d’avoir mis icy des Hyperboles” (154)]. But, she retorts,
“A fact must not be presently condemned as false because it is not public
or may not hit every man’s fancy” (3) [“Un fait n’est point faux, parce qu’il
n’est past rendu public, ou parce qu’il n’agrée point à quelque particulier”
(155)]. In other words, that a fact does not fit within public ideological
expectations does not mean it is not true. Here d’Aulnoy is valorizing the
kind of particularized and subversive realism—a prosaics—that Bakhtin
considered so important to the constitution of the novel. She is willing to
present—indeed is interested in—details that controvert generalities that
go against the conventional grain. In this she is similar to her sister Gallic
writer Madame de Lafayette (whose subversion of ideological givens was
discussed in chapter four).
D’Aulnoy’s claim to be presenting an eyewitness account is, however,
false. Percy G. Adams asserts that she never took this trip to Spain and that
her Travels into Spain is a fiction; she was able to provide realistic de-
scription by reading travel narratives.8 As we have noted, by this time it
had become routine for authors to claim veracity for their stories. In
d’Aulnoy’s case, it appears that while some of the “local color” material is
geographically and historically accurate (and thus true), the four embed-
ded stories in volume I are simply recycled novellas. So the work is an in-
teresting and original combination of a realistic frame and conventional
novellas.
The central frame character is of course the author-narrator herself,
whose personality is considerably particularized, which adds much to the
82 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

work’s appeal. And her environment is rendered in realistic detail. After

arriving in Irun, a town just over the border, the narrator notes, “I had a
great supper . . . but all was so full of garlic, saffron and spice that I could
eat nothing” (14) [“un grand souper . . . mais tout étoit si plein d’ail, de
safran et d’épice, que je ne pûs manger de rient” (167)]. On another
evening, in St. Sebastian, she remarks, “I betook my self to bed after a
good supper, for, my dear Cousin, I am none of those romantic ladies that
never eat” (20) [“je me couchay après avoir bien soupé; car, ma chere cou-
sine, je ne suis pas une Heroïne de Roman, qui ne mange pas” (175)]. Such
comments establish her as a woman of sense, whose perspective under-
cuts romantic stereotypes about women.
Local customs and people are described, sometimes comically, some-
times with apparent embellishment. For example, in “Letter I,” a group of
Spaniards are described as wearing “periwigs, one of which had enough
hair for four, and so frizzled, as made them look as if they were frighted”
(14) [“des Perruques où il y a plus de Cheveux qu’il n’en faut pour en faire
quatre autres bien faites, et ces Cheveux sont plus frisez que du crin
boüilly” (167)]. On another occasion she encounters a group of “Ama-
zons” (18) who run boats in the River of Andaye. “I was told these
wenches swim like fishes, and suffer neither women nor men among
them. This is a kind of republic” (16) [“L’on me dit que ces Filles au Pied-
marin nâgeoient comme des poissons et qu’elles ne souffroient entre-elles
ni femmes ni hommes; c’est une espece de petite Republique” (170)].
When the narrator’s cook makes the mistake of molesting one of these
women, “She being not used to this sort of plain dealing without any
words broke his head with her oar” (17) [“elle n’entendit point de rail-
lerie, et sans autre compliment, elle luy cassa la tête avec un Aviron armé
d’un Croc” (170)]. In fright she then jumps overboard but several of her
sister oarswomen swim after and rescue her. Later on land “we saw this
wench which was saved out of the water making up towards us with near
fifty others, each with an oar on their shoulder, marching in battle array,
with fife and drum” (17) [“nous vîmes cette Fille que l’on avoit sauvée
bien à propos. . . . Elle venoit à nôtre rencontre avec plus de cinquante
autres, chacune ayant une Rame sur l’épaule; elles marchoient sur deux
longues files, et il y en avoit trois à la tête qui jouoient parfaitement bien
du Tambour de Basque” (171)], demanding reparation for damage to the
assaulted woman’s clothing. They then “fell loudly beating their drums,
and the rest of their Amazons set up a holloaing, leaping and dancing and
fencing with their oars in a most astonishing manner” (18) [“com-
mencerent à les fraper plus fort; elles pousserent de hauts cris, et ces belles
Pyrates firent l’Exercise de la Rame, en sautant et dançant avec beaucoup
de disposition et de bonne grace” (171)]. While this episode may have had
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 83

some basis in fact, it rather resembles something out of Margaret

Cavendish’s feminist fantasies, “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” or
Blazing-World.
D’Aulnoy’s Travels into Spain had an immediate and perceptible influ-
ence on three significant works by British women, and thus helped to es-
tablish the English women’s literary tradition of the nineties. These are:
Catherine Trotter’s Olinda’s Adventures (1693), Delarivier Manley’s Letters
Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley (1696), and Mary Davys’s The Fugitive (1705),
later revised as The Merry Wanderer (1725). All of these follow d’Aulnoy’s
Travels into Spain in using a modified framed-novelle format, offering re-
alistic and often comic details, and providing sensible female protago-
nists. Where they improve upon d’Aulnoy from a feminist point of view
is in their use of satire and the critical perspective they bring to bear on
marriage-market machinations. Since the d’Aulnoy influence on Manley’s
Letters is explicit (the author alludes directly to the Travels into Spain as a
point of comparison),9 I start with it.
Like d’Aulnoy’s, Manley’s narrative is told in a series of letters (eight
here, as opposed to fifteen in d’Aulnoy’s work), all of which are dated (as
were d’Aulnoy’s) from June 24, 1694, to March 15, 1695. In them Manley
recounts a journey by stagecoach she presumably took from London to
Exeter. Embedded within this frame are three novella-like stories (I say
“novella-like” because although the plots are somewhat conventional, the
characters and settings in at least two of the stories are located historically
and geographically more precisely than they would be in the traditional
novella).
Like d’Aulnoy, Manley presents specific details about food and fellow
travelers that are often comic and satirical. A landlord at an inn is de-
scribed as “a Master in the Trade of Foppery” (7). Indeed, the work con-
cludes with a document Manley claims to have found, a sequel to the
Portuguese Letters. This item, “A Second Letter from a supposed Nun in
Portugal,” is in fact a burlesque of the French romance the Portuguese Let-
ters (Lettres portugaises), exuding the same breathless anguished despera-
tion that made the original so popular (see further discussion in chapter
eight, “Women Against Romance”).
Meanwhile, a frame plot develops wherein Manley rejects the contin-
ual advances of a baronet’s son she meets in the coach, thus providing an
ironic critique of sexual harassment and marriage-marketing. The initial
encounter between them establishes the tone of the relationship. Upon ar-
riving at an inn the would-be suitor changes his

Travelling Suit, for a Coat and Vest, design’d to dazzle the Curate and all his
Congregation. The way I took to mortifie his Foppery, was, not to speak a
84 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Word of the Change; which made him extream uneasie: At length, out of all
Patience, he desired my Opinion, If his Taylor had used him well? . . . And
recommended to my Curiosity the exquisite Workmanship of the
Loops. . . . I answer’d him, That Finery was lost upon me. (8–9)

Manley disassociates herself from a women’s use-value craft, sewing, in-

sofar as it is employed to construct clothing that is used aesthetically to
market a marriage product—an interesting early example of the connec-
tion between feminist critical irony and use-value production.
The encounter between the author and the suitor continues when, un-
invited, he recounts to her his story, the first of the embedded novellas.
Manley breaks her “Splenetick Silence, and . . . laugh[s] heartily” (24) at
the denouement (where he has discovered his lover in bed with another),
thus effectively undercutting his romantic earnestness.
She finally arrives in Exeter, having warded off this unwanted beau, de-
termined to enjoy solitude and reflection, though she confesses she misses
the social life of London (64–65). Manley had apparently taken this jour-
ney after being dismissed by the duchess of Cleveland (Hilaria), the
episode in The Adventures of Rivella discussed in chapter five. Robert Day
estimates Manley’s Letters (later retitled A Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter
[1725]) one of the most “vivid and authentic” descriptions of English
“provincial life and manners” of the period, and “one of the liveliest pieces
of fiction writing before Fielding.”10
Equally important and engaging as the Manley work is Catherine Trot-
ter’s Olinda’s Adventures (1693).11 Of it Day notes, “such criteria of the
‘modern novel’ as those proposed by Ian Watt are all modestly but ade-
quately met” in this work, which anticipates “the English domestic and re-
alistic novel” by several decades.12 Trotter was herself a philosopher and
published various treatises, including “A Defense of Mr. Locke’s Essay of
Human Understanding” in 1699.13 Her philosophical bent is evident in
Olinda’s Adventures.
While the work is divided into eight letters and thus uses the epistolary
format of D’Aulnoy’s Travels (and earlier Cavendish’s Sociable Letters), it
is really a short autobiographical novel, written by the subject, who is thir-
teen when the work begins. As a kind of autobiographical defense, it rep-
resents another use of the life as case, recalling The Case of Madam Mary
Carleton and The Adventures of Rivella.
As in Cavendish’s “The Contract” and numerous subsequent novels of
manners, the plot concerns marriage-marketing: Olinda’s mother is try-
ing to market her for a husband, a process Olinda observes with caustic
irony. The story is structured on eight suitors whose stories are thus em-
bedded within the frame plot as in a framed-novelle. Olinda dismisses all
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 85

but one of these with biting sarcasm. The description of the courtship of
Beronthus in “Letter I” is characteristic:

Beronthus . . . tells her [the mother] he’s stark staring mad in Love with her
Daughter: The next thing they talk of is Joynture, and Settlement, etc. . . .
So I am call’d for, and commanded to look upon this Spark as one that
must shortly be my Husband. . . . I had a firm Resolution never to Marry
him; but I found my Mother so much set upon it, that I durst not let it be
known.14

Similar to the scene in Barker’s Patch-Work Screen in which Galesia over-

hears herself haggled over, the daughter’s exchange, here being negotiated
by parent and courter, is overheard by the subject, who is being objecti-
fied as goods in the transaction, which is principally an economic matter
involving such issues as “jointure” and “settlement.” Note how Olinda first
presents herself in the third person, as the daughter, an object, and then
switches to the first, a subject.
Olinda eventually settles for a rather unorthodox arrangement with
the suitor she favors, Cloridon, in which he is to support her without see-
ing her until his wife dies whereupon they are to wed. This agreement ap-
parently raised eyebrows, and Delarivier Manley, who had been a friend
of Trotter’s, became one of her principal accusers. Applying her vraisem-
blance criterion (enunciated in the preface to Queen Zarah) to Olinda’s
Adventures, Manley declared it fraudulent and its author a hypocrite. In
the New Atalantis, Manley’s roman à clef, she accuses Trotter/Olinda of
“an Air of Virtue pretended” (2:55) and makes a similar point in The Ad-
ventures of Rivella (66).
In the New Atalantis Manley also connects Trotter to a “Lesbian Cabal,”
a group of women romantically involved with one another who shared
property and engaged in other separatist practices (2:52–56). Trotter was
in fact known to have what were probably lesbian relationships with sev-
eral women.15 It may well be then that we have in Olinda’s Adventures one
of the first expressions of a lesbian feminist standpoint, if Olinda’s resis-
tance to male suitors is rooted in her preference for women.
Olinda does discuss her relationship with two women, Ambrisia and
Clarinda, in “Letter III.” The latter has betrayed her, which, she says, might
have led her to accept misogynist generalities about women’s untrustwor-
thiness had she not met Ambrisia, who provided her with a refuting
counter-example. Of Clarinda she notes:

I involv’d the whole Sex in her Faults, and with Aristotle . . . Repented that
I had ever Trusted a Woman. I don’t know whether I forgot I was one, or
86 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

whether I had the Vanity to think my self more perfect than the rest; but I
resolv’d none of the Sex was capable of Friendship . . . till I knew Ambrisia,
who . . . is just Clarinda’s Antipodes. (150)

Trotter’s rhetorical construction is an interesting variation of the fem-

inist use of casuistry, with a case example being used to refute a misogy-
nist generality. But the discussion also indicates Olinda’s (and presumably
Trotter’s) intense involvement with female friends. (It is likely, however,
that her falling out with Manley was not over the issues of lesbianism or
virtue but rather over politics: Manley was a staunch Tory and Trotter a
Whig.)16 There are two other important uses of casuistry in Olinda’s Ad-
ventures. In the first Olinda indicates that she is writing her “adventures”
as a kind of defense of her reputation. In other words, like Mary Carleton
and (ironically) Delarivier Manley, she is offering the circumstances of
her case in order to refute scandalous assumptions. Writing to her friend
Cleander she explains she is “giving [him] a particular account of all that
has happen’d to me in my Life . . . that the kindness of a Friend mayn’t
find out something in the Circumstances of the Story to Excuse” (my em-
phasis). Olinda goes on to admit that “tho’ perhaps I have not always been
so nicely cautious as a Woman in strictness ought, I have never gone be-
yond the bounds of solid Virtue” (134).
The second example of casuistry is also of considerable interest. In this
Olinda explores the behavior of her friend Ambrisia to Cleander, who is
courting her. Olinda uses Ambrisia’s case to particularize a stereotype and
thereby refute a misogynist assumption. Cleander is worried about Am-
brisia’s shyness, considering that it means she is not interested in him.
Olinda responds:

Trust me, she loves you and only puts on the usual Disguises of Women as
sincere as she is; and give me leave to justifie her, and the rest of our Sex in
that Case: You [men] have learn’d so well to feign Love, when you have
none, that tis’ very hard to discern Art from Nature; and ‘tis but reasonable
we should be allow’d the less Guilty part of concealing ours, till we can
know whether you are sincere. (183; my emphasis)

Thus, by exploring Ambrisia’s motivations, Olinda refutes the misogy-

nist maxim that women are fickle and deceptive (saying no, for example,
when they mean yes). She thereby voices the woman’s point of view—
which is that such coyness is not a crime but rather a defense strategy de-
veloped by women in response to men’s betrayals. Since women suffer
more, one might add, by abandonment (when they are often pregnant out
of wedlock and thus lose their reputations), they have had to adopt cau-
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 87

tionary strategies. Not only does such a particularization allow for the
representation of the woman’s viewpoint, it also deepens the character of
Ambrisia and makes her behavior more complex. Such casuistical explo-
rations are certainly a major reason Olinda’s Adventures meets Watt’s cri-
teria for the realist novel.
Mary Davys’s The Fugitive (1705), later revised as The Merry Wanderer
(1725), is another extremely important (but still almost entirely ne-
glected) early work in the British women’s tradition. It too bears the in-
fluence of D’Aulnoy’s Travels in that it is structured as a framed-novelle
with the frame being a journey taken by the author-narrator, in this case
through southern England.
The frame protagonist is like d’Aulnoy, Manley, and Trotter’s, a sensi-
ble woman whose own life-story is well developed; inherent in that story
is a feminist critique of the marriage-market. Embedded in the frame-
journey are a series of eleven novellas, which are told to the author by the
various people she encounters. These stories are then often discussed by
the author-narrator and other characters, as in the framed-novelle. The
author’s viewpoint is generally that of critical irony and many of the sto-
ries serve as cases. Somewhat modifying d’Aulnoy, however, Davys ac-
knowledges that there may be some fabrication in her narrative: “I will
not say that every Circumstance of the Book is true to a tittle, but the
Ground and Foundation of almost every Story is matter of Fact, and what
I have not taken upon Credit from any Body, but have been a witness to
the greatest part of my self.”17
What is particularly interesting about this work is that not only is a
woman’s viewpoint established but also an Irish standpoint. Indeed, the
opening section is one of the clearest examples in early modern literature
of the positing of a regional or ethnic standpoint, which is used to critique
prejudiced attitudes toward the group. Davys opens The Fugitive by not-
ing how Ireland is “a place very much despis’d by those that know it not”
(2). In The Merry Wanderer Davys expatiates with an apology to the
reader, admitting that as she is Irish she must deflect anticipated dispar-
agement of her work: “To tell the Reader I was born in Ireland is to be-
speak a general Dislike to all I write, and he will, likely, be surprized, if
every Paragraph does not end with a Bull.”18
The first episode in The Fugitive well illustrates English prejudice
against the Irish; Davys uses herself in an attempt to refute these mis-
conceptions. After settling in at an inn near the English-Welsh border,
the narrator hears a man outside who wants to see “some of the wild
Irish” he had heard were staying there. He offers a shilling to a servant to
let him see them: “the Wench, who happen’d to have a little more Wit
than he, came in with the Jest, to see how far we would encourage it” (3).
88 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The narrator proposes playing along with his expectations: “for my part
I was mightily pleas’d at the fancy. . . . Now, said I, does this Fellow think
that we have Horns and Hoofs . . . but I shall be so far from striving to
change his opinion, that I am resolved to do all I can to confirm him in
it” (3–4).
The humorous encounter proceeds:

By this time he came staring in with Eyes, Ears and Mouth open. . . .
Come Friend, said I, you have a mind, I hear, to see some of the wild Irish.
Yes, Forsooth, said he, an yo pleasen, but pray ye where are thay; why, said
I, I am one of them; noa, noa, said he, forsooth yo looken laik one of us; but
those Foke that I mean are Foke we long Tails, that have no Cloaths on, but
are cover’d laik my brown Caw a whome, with their own Hair. Come, said
I, sit you down, and I’ll tell you all . . . when I was three years old, I was
just such a Creature as you speak of, and one day I went a little farther
than I should have done, and was taken in a Net with some other Vermin,
which the English had spread on purpose for us, and when they had me,
they cut off my Tail, and scalded off my Hair, and ever since I have been
like one of you. (4–5)

He then asks her if she could speak before she was captured. She says,
“Speak . . . no, I could make a Gapeing in articulate Noise, as the rest of
my fellow Beasts did, and went upon my Hands as well as Feet, in imita-
tion of them; but for any other Knowledge, I had it not till I got into En-
glish hands” (5). He replies, wonderingly, “yo may bless the day that ever yo
met with that same Net b’r Lady. I have often heard of the waild Irish but I
never saw any of them before” (5). She tells him to go and tell his neighbors
what he has seen. “Thus this poor Soul went away full of Wonder, to
spread the Lye all over the Country, and left us full of Mirth, as he was of
Folly” (6).
The point of view or standpoint here is clearly that of an ethnic group
rejecting or ironizing their objectification—in this case as animals—
thereby establishing themselves as human subjects. The author uses her-
self, obviously a human being to the reader, to undercut and refute the
Englishman’s racist misconceptions about the Irish.
The kind of comic irony used on behalf of the Irish in this section is
manifested on behalf of women in several episodes where the narrator
herself has to contend with being objectified as a woman in marriage-
market rituals. After attending a Christening the author-narrator is “ac-
costed by a Gentleman . . . [who made] violent Court to me” (129). He
turns out to be a man with whom she had engaged in a querelle des
femmes debate at the event. While he is a person of “good Estate” (129),
the narrator soon realizes that “his Designs were mercenary” (134), hav-
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 89

ing discovered that she has a brother abroad “of very good Circum-
stances” from whom she expects a “Bounty” (133). The narrator laments
friends who encourage her to marry for money, thinking “that alone suf-
ficient to make a Woman happy, tho’ it came attended with all the Cir-
cumstances of a Coxcomb” (131). So she decides to get rid of him by
showing him up for what he is, a fortune-hunter. “I thought if I made my
self a little Sport with him, it would be but a just return for his under-
hand-dealing with me” (135). Her “Scheme” is to masquerade as a finan-
cially attractive woman, an episode that is nearly identical to one in
Olinda’s Adventures (147–48), which suggests Trotter’s influence on
Davys. The narrator first writes a pseudo love letter from an imaginary
admirer—a burlesque of the romantic epistle:

SIR, LAST Summer . . . it was my fortune to see a Gentleman . . . whose

Person made such an Impression in my Heart, that I immediately found my
self in the greatest Disorder. . . . I have ever since endeavour’d to stiffle my
growing Folly, but finding it too strong for me, I am forced to . . . apply my
self to you for Cure. My Person is noway to be despis’d, my Fortune and
Family are above your Wishes. (136–37)

The narrator then disguises herself as this admirer and in a secret ren-
dezvous gets the suitor to admit that he is only after her fortune (137–48).
Learning that “there is . . . Money in the case,” as Davys put it in The Merry
Wanderer revision (227), makes him willing to renounce the narrator and
to engage sight unseen (she is still masked) with his newly discovered ad-
mirer. The narrator ruefully reflects, “Thus did poor I sit and hear myself
despised, for one, who for ought he knew might have had the Face of a
Bear” (Merry Wanderer 227). She then pulls off her mask, revealing him to
be a crass fortune-hunter and effectively getting rid of him as a suitor.
The Fugitive ends with similar parodies of romantic courtship cum
fortune-hunting. After a series of stories told by guests at a dinner, the
narrator tells a tale of her own about an ale-wife, which in The Merry
Wanderer version she admits is “not a parallel case” (engaging in the ter-
minology of casuistry) to the preceding tale (246). A Heptaméron-like dis-
cussion ensues in which one guest complains that her story is a non
sequitur to its predecessor. The narrator says she offered it for diversity,
thus proposing another aesthetic principle: “I hope . . . you don’t think I
could be guilty of so much absurdity, to tire the company with the same
Thing over again: No, my Business is to divert the Subject, and bring in
something novel” (Fugitive 188). This exchange suggests Davys’s concerns
about maintaining unity in a text and her awareness of classical aesthetic
theory, which we discuss further in chapter nine.
90 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Several days after this confrontation, the narrator receives an anony-

mous threatening letter telling her she has been uppety in her argumen-
tative outspokenness: “the whole Country takes notice of your Pride; with
how much Insolence you usurp a Superiority over those, who know how to
talk, and behave themselves as much to advantage as you do” (191–92). Far
from being chastened or silenced by this epistle, the narrator invokes the
muse “Spight” (in The Merry Wanderer 249) and responds with biting sar-
casm: “I fancy you inveigh against Wit, for the same reason that the Mob
rail at Grandure, and fine cloaths, because they are out of their reach”
(Fugitive 194). The narrator soon discovers the correspondent to be the
man (Mr. Watts) who had protested her story. In a parody of the Spanish
novella, the narrator’s cousin immediately vows to avenge the insult to
her, challenging Watts to a duel. All is resolved peacefully, however, with
Watts marrying the cousin’s sister.
The final episode in the work concerns an instant courtship proposed
in a happenstance encounter between a young female traveling compan-
ion and a horseman who accosts her and the narrator. Without knowing
her he latches on mindlessly nevertheless, enacting the courtship ritual
mechanistically. The young woman turns the tables on him, however, by
requiring him to go through a series of comical trials (179–204), a further
parody of courtly love ritual.
The other significant fiction Davys wrote at this time (1700) was The
Amours of Alcippus and Lucippe (published 1704; revised as The Lady’s
Tale in 1725). A transitional work between the romance novella and the
realist novel, it has an interesting frame in which the female protagonist
Abaliza (Lucippe was so renamed in The Lady’s Tale), tells her story to a
woman friend whom she hasn’t seen in four years. The friend occasion-
ally interjects comments but Abaliza cuts her off saying, “If you interrupt
me . . . I shall forget where I left off, and make a Botch of my Story.”19 This
comment reveals Davys’s sensitivity to issues of narrative control and re-
flects the transition then occurring from the framed-novelle to the novel.
The plot is another critique of arranged marriages, but Davys’s touch
is uniquely satirical, enlivening a pedestrian plot with the delightful comic
realism seen in all her works. Abaliza, for example, describes a man she
thinks her parents have chosen for her husband as “a Something, which
was, I fancy’d, design’d for a Man, tho’ Nature, to shew us some diversion,
and to let us see she can be merry over her own Compositions, had made
the thing look like a Creature engender’d betwixt a Monkey and a Dutch
Mastiff. His Eyes were red and very small . . . his Mouth was wide, his
Teeth black, his Chaps thin and wrinkled” (126).
Like the other women protagonists in this tradition, Abaliza is a take-
charge character, unlike the wishy-washy heroines of the traditional ro-
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 91

mance. When Alcipus, her lover, mistakenly assumes an uncle of Abaliza’s

is a rival and leaves the country in despair (an incident similar to one in
Aphra Behn’s “The Unhappy Mistake” [1698]), Abaliza persists in track-
ing him down, eventually finding him in Holland and chastizing him for
his lack of faith. “[M]y business,” she says majestically, “is first to reproach,
and then abjure you for ever” (187). Alcipus faints twice in the course of
this encounter. With Abaliza’s honor thus revindicated, the two reconcile
and are wed.
Before discussing the rest of Davys’s works, which appeared in the sec-
ond decade of the eighteenth century and thus are contemporaneous with
Jane Barker’s main works, I would like to consider Aphra Behn’s contri-
bution to the English women’s realist tradition of the later seventeenth
century. Behn has until recently been considered the premiere woman
writer of her day and indeed the first professional woman writer in En-
glish. Many remember Virginia Woolf ’s celebrated paean in A Room of
One’s Own: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb
of Aphra Behn . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their
minds.”20
Behn was certainly a pioneer, but her contribution to the tradition of
women’s literary realism that I am treating in this chapter was not so great
as the other writers I consider. In part, this is because she preceded them
chronologically. Most of her works were written or published in the l680’s
and thus before a solid tradition of realism began to emerge. Behn’s work
in fact generally hovers on the cusp between the romantic novella and the
realist novel but retains more of the former than it pioneers of the latter.
In addition, she lacks the comic perspective seen in the other writers of
this early women’s tradition. Her best-known work, Oroonoko (1688), for
example, while having interesting touches of realism, remains a romantic
work; its principal characters and the plot are stereotypical of the ro-
mance. Similarly, her Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister
(1684–87), which has been heralded as the first English novel, remains
largely in the vein of the chronique scandaleuse, despite its subversive cri-
tique of political Machiavellianism.21
Several Behn stories are, however, relevant to this study; in particular,
“The Fair Jilt” (1688), which may be Behn’s first work (possibly having ap-
peared as early as 1678);22 “The Adventures of the Black Lady” (1681–83);
“The Wandering Beauty” (1687; published 1698); “The History of the
Nun” (1689); and “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” (1700) exhibit impor-
tant sallies into realism.
“The Fair Jilt; Or, the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda” is an
interesting pastiche of two sources: one, a Bandello-like novella and
the other, a contemporary news story. The author claims an eyewitness
92 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

status and, as in Oroonoko, occasionally interjects personal comment.

The arrival of one character, for example, is dated as occurring in
Antwerp “about the time of my being sent thither by King Charles.”23
Behn had served as a spy in Holland for Charles II in 1665 during the
English-Dutch War.
The novella part of the story concerns a conniving mendacious woman
who persuades her husband to kill her sister in order that she receive the
sister’s inheritance. He fails in this project but is caught and sentenced to
beheading. The execution is described in realistic detail that suggests eye-
witness observation. Indeed, it has been discovered that Behn based this
episode on an actual event, which was reported in The London Gazette of
28 May to 31 May, 1666, in which a beheading was aborted because the
executioner’s sword missed the neck and hit the shoulder blade. So the
story, largely a somewhat lurid novella, introduces a new kind of factual
realism, portending the realist tradition in prose fiction that was soon to
emerge.24
“The Adventures of the Black Lady,” which may be Behn’s first story (if
“The Fair Jilt” is not), is also of considerable interest, opening with an “as
near as I can remember” claim to authentic reportage.25 The story is a re-
alistic portrayal of an unwed mother’s plight and provides a pointed cri-
tique of parish handling of such cases. Accurate London street names are
used and financial transactions are specified (she had to pay £30 for church
shelter), signaling a decided departure from the traditional novella.
“The Wandering Beauty” and “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” are both
realistic explorations of a young woman’s struggle with male relatives (a
father in the former and a brother in the latter) over control of their lives,
marital fortunes, and economic resources. In the former story (which is
introduced as a true story that the author-narrator had been told in her
youth), Arabella runs away from home after learning her father had en-
gaged her to a sixty-year-old wealthy friend, which she calls an “almost
unnatural Proposition.”26 Her perambulations through the countryside
give a realistic description of provincial life and manners, and constitute
a success story as well, for Arabella is able to support herself as a gov-
erness, eventually marrying a man “of quality.”
“The Unfortunate Happy Lady: A True History” is also a success story
where the female protagonist, Philadelphia, triumphs over a brother who
had placed her in a brothel in order to get her inheritance. After numer-
ous escapades and two marriages, Philadelphia is wealthy and powerful
enough in the end to take pity on the dissipated brother, who has in the
meantime been imprisoned for debt. This story, if expanded, could cer-
tainly stand as a realist novel. It continues the women’s revenge plot seen
in the novella tradition (the genealogy of which we consider more fully in
THE NINETIES GENERATION Í 93

chapter seven)27 and further enlarges the conception of the woman pro-
tagonist who is the subject, rather than the object, of the plot. It also has
more comedic touches than usually seen in Behn. Interestingly, both this
story and “The Wandering Beauty” were used by Jane Barker in The Lin-
ing of the Patch Work Screen: the former in “The History of Malhurissa”
(147–57) and the latter in the “Lady Gypsie” story (82–102). As noted,
Barker also picked up what is perhaps Behn’s most famous story, “The
History of the Nun; or the Fair Vow-Breaker” (1689), in The Lining.
We conclude this chapter with Mary Davys’s late novels, which,
together with Barker’s works, culminate this early tradition in women’s
realism. These include the Familiar Letters, Betwixt a Gentleman and a
Lady, The Cousins, and The Reform’d Coquet—all published in the Works
(1725)—and The Accomplished Rake; Or, Modern Fine Gentlemen (1727).
The Familiar Letters, which was likely written several years before 1725,
is indeed a work “of exceptional merit,” as Robert Day observed in Told in
Letters (190). Clearly influenced by Olinda’s Adventures, it wittily portrays
a growing and inadvertent attachment between two correspondents who
start out as determined opponents of love and marriage. The work is
structured in a series of twenty-two letters dated from November 1 to Jan-
uary 25. The two correspondents are opposites in certain respects, which
heightens the drama of their discussions. (Berinda is a Whig; Artander, a
Tory. She prefers the city; he, the country.)
Berinda is a rationalist free-thinker, who is opposed to religious fa-
naticism (she catalogs the atrocities of Cromwell’s suppression of the Irish
Rebellion in 1649) and favors a limited monarchy.28 She is a champion of
liberty and rejects institutions or experiences that limit it. Of marriage she
says, “I hate a Yoke that galls for life” (270). And love, which she says goes
“so much against my grain,” is a “base Imposture” (289): the “God of
Love . . . makes mere Idiots of Mankind” (297). When she becomes aware
that Artander is falling for her, she begs him to resist the power of Cupid:
“pull out the Dart” (303), she says.
Marriage and love are seen by Berinda as tyrannies that limit one’s lib-
erty. In a passage that suggests the influence of Mary Astell, Berinda
analogizes marriage to a monarchy with the husband as king. Like Astell
she does not contest that women should be subordinate, but she does re-
sist entering the institution (and perhaps for that reason) (303). Love is
similarly a tyranny and she castigates those who “instead of fighting for
their own Liberty and Property . . . tamely yield to an arbitrary Power. . . .
For shame, Artander, shake off your Chains. . . . Remember your Liberty
lies at stake” (303).
The Cousins picks up from Behn’s “The Lucky Mistake” (1688) and
“The Wandering Beauty” (1687) (and, of course, numerous antecedents
94 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

in the continental novella) on the theme of the young girl pledged to an

older (in this case lecherous) parental friend. The work includes two em-
bedded novellas, which connect to the arranged marriage theme. William
McBurney considers the work may be a burlesque of the continental
novella.29 There is nothing to distinguish The Cousins from other English
examples of the genre (Behn’s, for example), but it may be that these were
all intended as burlesques. Certainly, Davys’s propensity for comedy
would support such an interpretation, in her case at least.
Davys’s final (and best-known) works, The Reform’d Coquet and The
Accomplished Rake, are companion pieces, the one designed to show the
moral education of a young woman, Amoranda, and the other recounting
the moral reform of a young man, Galliard. The Reform’d Coquet follows
in the female bildungsroman tradition of Cavendish’s “The Contract,”
which leads to Jane Austen’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice. While Jane
Spencer, among others, has criticized the novel for its conformist message
and condescending attitude toward the heroine,30 there is much that is
positive in the character of Amoranda, and the work has many redeeming
comic incidents that must distinguish it from the priggish didacticism of
other novels of this type. Amoranda indeed is a fairly forceful character—
at least in the first half of the work—and she exhibits a clever juridic in-
telligence that puts her in the league of the feminist casuists discussed
earlier. Note, for example, her rigorous interrogation of Lord Lofty, whom
she and her guardian trick into marrying a woman he had seduced and
abandoned.31 Similarly, in The Accomplished Rake, the male protagonist,
Galliard, is finally bested when foiled by one of his would-be victims, Be-
linda. She is another example of the witty, argumentative woman who
controls her own destiny. From a structural point of view this work is
truly a novel; the embedded stories are really subplots that connect di-
rectly to the main action. This, together with Davys’s comic realism, make
the epithet “forerunner of Fielding,” which McBurney attached to her, an
accurate label. Unfortunately, however, for reasons discussed in the next
chapter, the women’s tradition of feminist realism described in this chap-
ter came to an end (at least temporarily) with Barker and Davys. It was su-
perceded by a tradition of sentimentalist didacticism that lasted for over
a century.
Chapter Seven

The Case of Violenta

HE TRANSITIONS IN WOMEN’S LITERARY HISTORY proposed at the end of

T the last chapter can be illustrated by tracing the genealogy of a
novella—which I call the Violenta novella—from its sources in the early
Renaissance to its reproduction by Delarivier Manley in her collection of
novellas, The Power of Love (1720) and Eliza Haywood’s similar collection,
Love in Its Variety (1727). It has been proposed that a peak of feminist re-
alism was reached in the 1720s, but it was soon superceded by a senti-
mentalist tradition that many have seen as a capitulation to patriarchal
interests, a backing away from the feminist literary wave that began crest-
ing in the 1690s and early eighteenth century.
Whether this backing away was due to the palpable backlash women writ-
ers experienced during the early 1700s, or whether it reflects more basic eco-
nomic transitions remains a matter for conjecture.1 A number of theorists,
building on the still respected Alice Clark thesis enunciated in 1919, have
proposed that women’s status declined during the period of the transition to
modern capitalism because their economic value lessened with the shift to-
ward commodity exchange and the attendant marginalization of production
for use. As this process intensified through the eighteenth century, the the-
ory goes, women’s political status and cultural authority were also eclipsed.2
One may observe a weakening of feminist authority in women writers
of the eighteenth century after the first two decades—a process Jane
Spencer has detailed in her Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) (see pp.
11–15, 91–92, 118–22). By mid-century Spencer proposes,

women writers, no longer seeing themselves as men’s antagonists, had

dropped the battle imagery in which their predecessors characterized their
96 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

writing as an attack on male domination. . . . Women’s writing . . . seems to

have been limited in various ways by masculine approval, which many were
so anxious not to lose that they became very careful to write in the way that
men found acceptably feminine. (92)

Spencer selects Eliza Haywood as a pivotal figure in this capitulation, a

conclusion that is supported by my analysis of the historical permutations
of the Violenta novella, which serves as a case-study of the historical tran-
sitions here proposed.
A popular Renaissance tale, which had numerous retellings and vari-
ants, was that of Violenta, a seduced and abandoned lower-middle-class
woman who avenges herself by killing her treacherous aristocratic lover.
Unlike the sentimentalist “heroine’s text,” an important tradition in
eighteenth-century fiction, in which the betrayed woman dies in dis-
grace, here the woman has her moment of triumph, in which she takes,
many of these writers assert, a feminist stand against exploitation. A
comparative study of the genealogy of this novella from sixteenth-
century Italy to eighteenth-century England helps to establish impor-
tant new theoretical formulations about women’s literary history of the
early modern period.
The primary plot is laid out in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554), vol.
1, novella 42. Pierre Boaistuau presented a French variant in his loose
adaptation of Bandello, the Histoires tragiques (1559). The first version by
a woman is in the Novelas amorosas (1637) by María de Zayas. Her
novella, “La burlada Aminta y venganza del honor” (I.2) (“Aminta De-
ceived and Honor’s Revenge”) is like Bandello’s a feminist revenge story.
Zayas used a variant of the same tale in her second volume of novellas, the
Desengaños amorosos (1647), in a tale entitled “La más infame venganza”
(II.2) (“A Shameful Revenge”).
English versions of the tale include William Painter’s “Didaco and
Violenta,” a translation of Boaistuau’s adaptation of Bandello’s I.42 in his
Palace of Pleasure (1575); Manley’s “The Wife’s Resentment,” “novel 3,” in
her The Power of Love (1720); and Eliza Haywood’s “Female Revenge; or,
the Happy Exchange” in Love in Its Variety (1727).3
Bandello, Zayas, and Manley present the heroine sympathetically and
see her act in political, feminist terms as expressing an admirable class sol-
idarity with other exploited lower-class women, suggesting that her
upper-class lover may have to some extent deserved his fate. Boaistuau
and Painter eliminate the feminist thesis, with Boaistuau introducing a
misogynist preface (which Painter eliminates), and both weaken the char-
acter of Violenta; while Haywood’s version condemns the woman out-
right, casting her lover as innocent victim.
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 97

I theorize that Zayas and Manley (and to some extent Bandello) be-
longed to a continuing feminist tradition in the novella, one that origi-
nated principally with Marguerite de Navarre, although she did not treat
this story. All three were heavily influenced by Marguerite and in several
instances borrowed or reworked material from the Heptaméron.4 This
feminist tradition in women’s literature appears to end, however, with
Eliza Haywood.
While I trace the genealogy of the novella from Bandello to Zayas and
Painter and then to Manley and Haywood, I place a special focus on the
latter two, whose versions have particular relevance to theorizing about
women’s contributions to the genesis of the novel. In addition to reinstat-
ing the feminist thesis, Manley expands upon Painter, her source, by am-
plifying economic and social factors—the elements of classic realism that
Ian Watt has seen as constituent to the “rise of the [realist] novel.” In her
version Haywood lays the groundwork for the other major type of novel
that dominated the eighteenth century, the sentimentalist.
Haywood’s sentimentalist domestication of the novella marks, I be-
lieve, a pivotal transformation in women’s literary history. She eliminates
the feminist import of the tale by changing the central female character
from a powerful Medean agent of revenge into an object of contempt;
into what soon became the staple of the “heroine’s text,” the disgraced vic-
tim. Despite its title (which in her handling becomes ironic) Haywood’s
“Female Revenge” in fact bears considerable resemblance to what one may
consider the archetype of the sentimentalist genre, Susanna Rowson’s
Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) (better known today as Charlotte Tem-
ple).That Haywood’s version of attenuated female agency superceded that
drawn by Manley (and earlier Bandello and Zayas) signifies, I propose, the
capitulation noted above.
Matteo Bandello (1480–1561) was a Dominican monk who produced
more than two hundred novelle; he is best known to English speakers for
having supplied several plots for Shakespeare (notably for Romeo and
Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado about Nothing—probably mediated
through the French Histoires tragiques). Bandello’s principal audience was
that of courtly women—many of his patrons were from this class—and
he dedicated his stories to various of them. It is perhaps for this reason
that Bandello generally went against the misogynist grain of the novella
tradition. Like his contemporary Marguerite de Navarre—a writer who as
we have seen transformed the novella even more into a feminist vehicle—
Bandello maintained his stories were true. In the epistolary preface to
novella forty-two, he claims to have heard the story from a woman who
was told it by someone who had traveled in Spain and heard it there.
Thus, a kind of oral history is posited for the novella that follows. The
98 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

story is brought up in the context of a feminist discussion between two

noble women of how often men take advantage of “simple” women and
how therefore “one should not be surprised if occasionally women retali-
ate with a vengeance” [“Perciò non si deveno meravigliare se tavolta le
donne gli rendono a doppio la pariglia”].5
Bandello’s novella forty-two is entitled “Signor Didaco Centiglia mar-
ries a young woman and then no longer wants her and is killed by her”
(“Il signor Didaco Centiglia sposa una giovane e poi non la vuole e da lei
è ammazzato” [496]). The basic plot is that Didaco, a wealthy young gen-
tleman (he is twenty-three) becomes enamored of Violante, a twenty-
year-old, who is “of low lineage but very beautiful” [“di basso legnaggio,
ma molto bella” (496)]. Her father is dead, but she has a mother and two
brothers who are goldsmiths, and she herself does beautiful stitchwork.
Violante resists Didaco’s improper attentions, until he finally realizes
he will have to marry her to achieve his desires. This he determines to do
“even if she was of a lower class” [“se bena era di bassa schiatta” (497)], a
status she is well aware of. Beforehand he tries to bribe her and her
mother with money and a promise of a substantial dowry (for her to
marry another), but Violante rejects these, saying she would “rather die
than lose her integrity/chastity” [“di prima voler morire che perder la sua
onestá” (497)]. Didaco then provides a priest for the ceremony to which
the only witnesses are her family and his servant—all of whom he charges
to keep the marriage secret.
After about a year, Didaco, in part because he is becoming “ashamed of
her low social status” [“che del basso sangue di Violante si vergognasse”
(499)], decides to wed a more socially prominent woman, the daughter of
Signor Ramiro Vigliaracuta, one of the most eminent families of Valencia.
The narrator notes that other factors may have impelled his decision, and
that he may simply have “become satiated” with Violante [“di lei fosse
sazio” (499)].
When Violante learns of Didaco’s betrayal she vows vengeance: in part
this is to avenge her honor but it is also to help prevent other poor
women from being so easily deceived in the future [“a ciò che per
l’avvenire gli uomini non fossero cosí facili ad ingannar le povere donne”
(500)]. She thus has an avowed feminist purpose, in that she is identify-
ing with other women as a class that is victimized and is acting to change
their situation. The vendetta is carried out by Violante and a loyal
African slave named Giannica; the occasion is an assignation that Didaco
had arranged with Violante shortly after his new marriage, thinking that
because of her deceptively cheerful behavior he could keep her as his
mistress: “he thought he could have her cheaply” [“si pensò averne buon
mercato” (501)]. He claims that he still loves her and that he had to
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 99

marry the second wife in order to keep the two houses (his and the
Vigliaracuta) at peace. Violante does not buy this, however, and after he
falls asleep, she proceeds to avenge herself with a veritable orgy of torture
and dismemberment. First, she and Giannica bind him and gag him,
preparing knives and other implements “as when a butcher in a slaugh-
terhouse wants to skin an ox or other animal” [“come fa il beccaio
quando nel macello vuol scorticare un bue od altra bestia” (503)]. Then
she twists his tongue with a pair of pliers, castigating him for pledging
false words, and claiming that she is conducting this vendetta to make
him an example so that in the future humble people and unsuspecting
young girls will no longer be exploited [“a ciò che di beffar le semplici ed
incaute fanciulle debbiano guardarsi” (503)].
She then cuts off the tongue in pieces, after which she clips off his fin-
gers and gouges out his eyes, each time addressing him with violent rage,
concluding with further dismemberment and a few final stabs to the
heart. After he finally dies, Violante tries to persuade Giannica to flee for
Africa, giving her sufficient money and jewels, but the slave wishes to stay
with her mistress, whom she had raised from girlhood, accompanying her
eventually to the scaffold. Violante is soon brought before a local magis-
trate where she redeems her honor by having her marriage publicly con-
firmed and by unflinchingly acknowledging her crime and accepting the
punishment. Her demeanor is proud and forceful: she responded to ques-
tions, the narrator tells us, “not like a sorrowful or timid woman but in a
spirited and courageous way . . .” [“la giovane alora non come dolente o
timida femina, ma come allegra e valorosa . . .” (506)]. She notes that Di-
daco’s propositioning her after the second marriage particularly galled
her: treating me “as if I were his prostitute and whore” [“come se io sua
putta e bagascia stata fossi” (507)].
Violante concludes her defense by saying: “I want . . . to defend my
reputation so that if anyone in the past has had a low opinion of me, s/he
will know for certain that I am the true wife” of Didaco “and not a whore.
It is enough for me that my honor is saved” [“Voglio adunque . . . diff-
endar la fama mia, a ciò che se nessuno per il passato ha di me sinistra
openione avuta, sappia ora certissimamente che io del signor Didaco
Centiglia moglie vera sono stata e non bagascia. Mi basta che l’onor mio
sia salvo” (507)]. Violante is then adjudged guilty and executed along with
Giannica.
In María de Zayas’s version of the story, “Aminta Deceived and Honor’s
Revenge” (“La burlada Aminta y venganza del honor”), which is narrated
by a woman, the details differ considerably from Bandello, who was ap-
parently her main source,6 but the character of Violante remains true to
the original, and the essence of the plot is similar.
100 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The Violante character is named Aminta in Zayas’s telling, and her

treacherous lover is don Jacinto. Aminta is younger than Bandello’s Violante
and is socially and economically well off (so class is not an issue here). Am-
inta is pledged in an arranged betrothal to her cousin. Jacinto is well-born,
handsome, and around thirty. But, unlike Bandello’s Didaco, he is already
married, and he has a mistress, Flora, who travels with him pretending to
be his sister. She operates as the pander in Zayas’s version, thinking she will
ingratiate herself with him by arranging what she thinks (correctly) will be
a passing affair. Aminta and Jacinto are then wed, but during the ceremony
her emerald ring splits prophetically and a piece strikes him in the face.
After the wedding night—once “the flame of his passion had been as-
suaged” (Enchantments 60) [“que aplacado el fuego de su apetito” (Novelas
amorosas 100)], he realized he must soon leave town, so he deposits Aminta
with an acquaintance and flees the city with Flora. Aminta is soon informed
by her hostess that Jacinto is a fraud: his name is don Francisco, he is already
married, and Flora is his mistress not his sister.
Aminta is distressed and enraged: “the strength and force of her griev-
ance turned her love for don Jacinto into a desire for harsh vengeance”
(65) [“la gala y la fuerza de sus agravios, la iba trocando el amor de don
Jacinto en cruel venganza” (106)]. Meanwhile, her hostess’s son, don Mar-
tin, has fallen in love with her, and offers to avenge her honor. But she re-
fuses him, saying, “I am the one offended, not you, and I alone must
avenge my honor” [“porque supuesto que yo he sido ofendida, y no vos,
yo sola he de vengarme” (108)]. She promises to marry don Martin but
only after she has “killed that traitor” (66) [“hasta que yo quite la vida a
este traidor” (108)]. Martin agrees to assist her.
Aminta’s assumption of female agency—her determination to carry
out her own revenge—must be seen as especially assertive when consid-
ered in the context of contemporaneous Spanish mores. As H. Patsy Boyer
points out in her introduction to her translation of the Novelas amorosas
(The Enchantments of Love), Zayas reversed the traditional notion of
honor wherein women are but pawns in men’s agonistic struggles to de-
fend their reputations. Zayas recognizes that “honor represents women’s
vulnerability, that which gives men power over them” (xvi). If, for exam-
ple, a woman’s chastity is violated, it is a matter of honor among the men
involved (her brother or father must take revenge against the perpetra-
tor): she has no role to play. But Zayas challenged this assumption; she be-
lieved, according to Boyer, “that women [should] assume responsibility
for their own honor, to such a degree that they should be trained in
swordsmanship so they can properly defend themselves and women’s
good name” (xvi). Aminta, then, like many of Zayas’s characters, Boyer
notes, bears a “resoundingly modern feminist message” (xxiv).
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 101

To carry out her vendetta Aminta puts on men’s clothes and cuts her
hair; then, together, dressed as muleteers, she and Martin pursue Fran-
cisco and Flora. When they find them, Aminta in disguise manages to get
herself hired as their servant, though they are suspicious of her strong re-
semblance to Aminta. (She even calls herself Jacinto, which stretches
credulity even farther. It should be noted, however, that this kind of im-
probable disguise is a familiar convention in the novella genre.) Once in-
stalled in the household, Aminta carries out her revenge by herself: she
stabs Francisco in the heart “two or three times” (73) as he sleeps, and
then also kills Flora by knifing her in the throat and breast. She then es-
capes with Martin as lady and gentleman to Madrid where they wed and
live happily thereafter. Thus, Zayas retains the central motif of the woman
perpetrating her own revenge but varies the details.
In her other version—“La más infame venganza” (“A Shameful Re-
venge”), which is more explicitly feminist, having numerous anti-male
asides by the woman narrator—Zayas has the revenge accomplished by the
victim’s brother. The narrator strongly approves of the idea of a woman
taking revenge (even though she condemns the method). “And for every
woman who seeks, as Octavia did, to revenge herself for the wrongs she has
suffered, there are a thousand who of themselves will do nothing. I am sure
that if they were all to seek revenge, fewer women would be duped and in-
sulted” [“y que por una procura venganza, hay mil que no la toman de sí
misma; que yo aseguro que si todas vengaran las ofensas que reciben, como
Octavia hizo, no hubiera tantas burladas y ofendidas”].7 Thus, as in Ban-
dello, the woman’s action is seen as a kind of feminist gesture done to help
other women. The revenge method, however, is condemned by the narra-
tor as another “piece of treachery” (65) [“una traición” (190)]; for the
brother decides to avenge his sister by raping the wife of the Didaco figure
(named Carlos). Here the focus shifts to this woman’s suffering—she cas-
tigates herself by wearing a hair shirt thereafter, and her husband banishes
and eventually poisons her. Thus, the vengeance backfires when the origi-
nal victim delegates the revenge of her honor to a man: two women end up
destroyed and the men remain unpunished.8
William Painter’s version of the novella, “Didaco and Violenta,” in The
Palace of Pleasure is the main conduit of the tale to later English writers,
notably Manley and Haywood. Some of Zayas’s stories had been trans-
lated into English by the late seventeenth century, as we have noted, but
the two stories described above do not appear to have been among them.
“La burlada Aminta” had, however, been translated into French by the
mid-seventeenth century, and it is conceivable that Manley and/or Hay-
wood may have read it in that translation.9 But their main source was
Painter’s tale.
102 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Painter’s novella is an almost verbatim translation of Pierre Boaistuau’s

adaptation of Bandello. As Laura Tortonese points out, Boaistuau made a
number of changes in his treatment of the tale. Specifically, he heightened
the class issue, seeing Didaco and Violente’s relationship as a mésalliance;
and he increased the role of the slave (named Janique in the French ver-
sion). In Boaistuau’s rendition it is she who proposes the revenge plan,
partly out of mercenary interests and a desire for freedom, as well as out
of loyalty to her mistress. And in his version Janique escapes Violente’s
fate, by fleeing to Africa with funds supplied by Violente. Finally, Boais-
tuau softens the cruelty of the murder, having Violente kill Didaco before
dismembering him (in Bandello, as we have seen, she dismembers him
alive and then kills him).10
Painter follows Boaistuau and Bandello in stressing the class issue:
Violenta is seen as being “of base birth,” as the daughter of a goldsmith.
Ianique (here a servant, however, rather than a slave) acknowledges the
class disparity when she lures Didaco to his final fatal rendezvous.11 The
plot follows the outlines laid down in Bandello, although the class situa-
tion of Violenta’s family is thus stressed more in Painter than in Bandello.
When Violenta’s mother and brothers find out about Didaco’s betrayal,
they realize that as lower-class people they have no chance for reparations.
“And these poore miserable creatures, not knowing to whom to make
their complainte . . . bicause they knew not the priest which did solemp-
nise their mariage . . . they durst not prosecute the lawe against two of the
greatest lordes of their citie” (212).
In another detail added by Boaistuau and used by Painter, Violenta
writes Didaco a deceptive letter, luring him to his fate, which Ianique de-
livers, adding her own disingenuous persuasions. When Didaco arrives on
the fateful day, he tells Violenta he had been pressured into marriage with
the other woman out of financial need, but that he plans to poison his
new wife in time and meanwhile to keep Violenta as his mistress. Violenta,
“which had her wittes to well sharpened to be twise taken in one trap”
(219), pretends to go along with him, saying she is grateful to be allowed
to remain as his lover (220). After he falls asleep the two women tie him
to the bed and Violenta proceeds to stab him first in the throat, then
adding ten or twelve more “mortall woundes” (221). Carried away in her
frenzy, Violenta begins dismembering the body, starting with his eyes:
“Then shee played the bocher uppon those insensible members” (221).
Ianique watches “this pageant” “with great terrour” (222). They then
throw all the pieces out the window; Violenta pays off Ianique who flees
to Africa; and she herself is apprehended, tried, and executed.
In Painter’s version Violenta appears less majestic than in Bandello’s,
and more pitiful. The class impotence of her and her family is stressed,
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 103

and, as in Boaistuau, economic motives are proposed for the servant Ian-
ique, which weakens the noble sense of cross-race, cross-class solidarity
between the two women that we find in Bandello, and which is restored
in Manley. Ianique indeed takes the upper hand in Painter: “Maistres, if
you will be ruled by mee . . .” (214). In addition, the fact that the women
deceitfully lure Didaco to his fateful rendezvous casts a sinister shadow on
their behavior. In Bandello, recall, it is Didaco who arranges the postnup-
tial assignation with Violante, which she then uses for her own purposes.
Violenta’s letter to Didaco is not only deceitful, it is lugubriously self-
pitying, which further weakens her as a character. Finally, and most im-
portantly, Painter, following Boaistuau, eliminates the feminist
motivations; his Violenta says nothing about making Didaco an example
to save future poor women from similar exploitation.
Writing in the early eighteenth century, Delarivier Manley modifies
Painter’s novella considerably by adding social, economic, and psycholog-
ical detail, by further developing Violenta as a subject (in part through the
addition of letters written by her), by making the suitor considerably
more obnoxious and thus more deserving of her revenge, and by inter-
jecting occasional feminist comment. The plot follows its sources.
Didaco is renamed Roderigo but Violenta remains Violenta. As in
Painter she is literate (not the case in Bandello), “an Accomplishment,”
Manley tells us, “which, in those Days, few Ladies aim’d at, since they be-
lieved all inferior Knowledge, as well as the Sciences, was reserv’d for the
other Sex.”12 Violenta is “a poor Orphan, kept by her Mother . . . a Widow,
her Husband no better than a Goldsmith,” who also “left two Sons, who
follow’d his Trade in great Obscurity” (180). Manley thus stresses her
lower-middle-class status.
Roderigo presses his courtship, sending her a gift of bracelets, which
she returns with a letter cited in the text (Manley’s addition) in which she
makes it clear that her honor is at stake: “That which Courage is to your
Sex, Chastity is to ours” (181). In a second letter Violenta reiterates, “I
must perish if I prove otherwise: Since I know it will be impossible for me
to live after the loss of my Honour.” She concludes: “I would see the whole
World in a Conflagration, and my self in the middle of it, before I could
be brought to do any thing contrary to the Rules of Modesty” (183)—
which serves to indicate the extremity of her temperament (thus estab-
lishing aspects of her psychology). Roderigo continues his harassment,
however, and although “the Disparity between them was so great he had
no Notion of Wedlock,” “she [resolved] he should never have Favours of
her without it” (184). It becomes a battle of wills. He continues, however,
to feel that “he could not bring himself . . . to debase his Blood so far as to
mingle by Marriage with one of her low Degree” (186).
104 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

As in the sources, Roderigo next tries to bribe the mother. While this
scene is very brief in Painter, Manley extends it and adds a touch of
humor. Significantly, the scene between Roderigo and the mother is pre-
sented in indirect discourse by Manley. This stylistic technique is, as we
have noted, particularly congenial to feminist irony, which is quite appar-
ent in this passage. Having failed to win Violente by direct courtship,
Roderigo

resolv’d to change his Battery, and knowing they were pretty poor, he made
[the mother] a Visit . . . in which he confess’d his Passion for her Daugh-
ter. . . . The old Gentlewoman, to whom this was no great news, tho’ she af-
fected to be ignorant, answer’d, That Violenta was highly honour’d . . . but
that she was a Maid unskill’d in Courts, rude of Fashion, and not us’d to the
Conversation of Persons of his Quality. (188)

Roderigo then offers a thousand ducats for her dowry; the mother “let
him know, with all Regard to his Quality, that she was offended . . . that
her House was no place to purchase Vertue in” (189). The subtle sarcasm
of the mother is unmistakable; both her and her daughter’s characters are
particularized in this scene far beyond anything in the sources.
Manley also adds a prophetic dream in which Roderigo sees Violenta
strike a daggar in his heart, telling him (in indirect discourse) “That was
the Reward of Treachery and Inconstancy” (190). The next morning
Roderigo finds Violenta sewing peacefully—an ironic juxtaposition of
scenes. He notes that “she was always employ’d,” thus following an old
adage “A vertuous Lady can never be idle” (190), a touch of comic irony,
given the plot.
Violenta finally acknowledges, amidst much blushing and many
tears, that she loves Roderigo. These have their effect and Roderigo fi-
nally determines he will marry her. At this announcement Manley in-
dulges in mock heroics—an obvious parody of the French romance:
“As we have often beheld the Sun break out with sudden Glory, in the
midst of Clouds and Rain, so darted from Violenta’s Eyes, Rays of
Light” (193). He then produces a diamond ring “and then, and not ‘till
then, had he ever presumed to kiss her” (194). The author here extrap-
olates from Violenta’s exemplum of modesty to urge that all girls
should be similarly restrained; she set “a Pattern worthy the Imitation
of young Virgins” (194). The fact that Violenta ends up as a notorious
Medean murderess ironizes this image of decorum and suggests a sub-
tle casuistry on Manley’s part: she is using Violenta (perhaps uncon-
sciously) to undermine decorous rules and expectations about female
behavior. As in other feminist uses of casuistry, the case of Violenta
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 105

destabilizes, indeed demolishes, the generality that women should be

tame, docile, and dependent.
The wedding ceremony takes place as in the sources with Roderigo pro-
viding a country priest, and with the mother, the two brothers, his valet,
and her slave, Ianthe, as witnesses. Violenta’s immediate family basks in the
experience, “as Persons suddenly raised from Poverty to Wealth, or from a
mean Degree to an exalted State of Honour” (196). As in Boaistuau and
Painter (but not in Bandello), Violenta becomes obsequious after the wed-
ding, “ambitious to please him in whatever he desired, as the poorest Slave”
(196). He became “the Lord of her Idolatry” (199), a phrase taken from
Romeo and Juliet (II.ii.114). Tortonese suggests that this slavish worship di-
minishes Violenta as a character, but it does serve to heighten her sense of
abasement after his betrayal and thus helps to motivate the rage she ex-
presses in the dismemberment orgy. As in the sources, the marriage is kept
a secret, and thus neighbors talk about his regular visits. This slanderous
gossip horrifies the proud Violenta but she comforts herself with the idea
that eventually she will be vindicated when the marriage is publicly an-
nounced (198). After about a year, as her love intensifies, his fades: “he
grew from Cool to more Cold, from Frost to Ice, from Ice to Aversion, and
a Hatred of his own Folly for so unworthily matching himself with the Lees
of the People” (200). He contracts a marriage with a more socially eminent
woman and begins to look on Violenta with contempt as “a little Mistress
with whom he condescended to squander away some superfluous Hours of
Youth” (202). Again, Manley adds a touch of contempt here that helps to
motivate Violenta’s passionate revenge.
Manley’s most telling addition to her sources is her treatment of the
family’s reaction to the news of Roderigo’s betrayal. First, she has
Roderigo reflect that he need fear no retaliation from the brothers, “those
Mechanicks . . . who dreamt of no other Notions of Honour but what
they expected to find in their Customers.” And as for the mother, “he
looked upon [her] as a Piece of old Houshold-Stuff quite out of Date”
(203). As Roderigo correctly predicted, the brothers remain true to their
petit bourgeois class attitudes: “their Souls were of a Piece with their Pro-
fession, they did not dream of Honour and Revenge, provided they could
Sell their Plate” (203). To buy them off, indeed, Roderigo purchases the
silver and gold tableware for his new household from the brothers. The
mother chastizes them but soon realizes they are “such Stocks, and
Stones” that they will not live up to the Spanish code of honor and avenge
their sister (204). She also realizes she is impotent, not knowing the name
of the priest who officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
In Manley’s conception of the brothers as petit bourgeois we see the
beginnings of a critique that dominated the realist novel—indeed, as
106 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

some (Lucien Goldmann, for example) have argued, provided its princi-
pal ethical perspective. The brothers operate, not according to principled
honor as Violenta does, but according to mercenary or “exchange-value”
considerations: what matters to them is selling their product. Where the
mother and Violenta had earlier refused a bribe, the brothers are easily
bought off. One could argue that the women are operating in terms of an
aristocratic sense of honor (despite their lower class status); the clash be-
tween aristocratic principles and bourgeois commercialism is indeed a
prime drama in the realist novel. Or, one could argue that they are oper-
ating in terms of a “use-value” ethic, that which is associated with the
home, with products that are made for use, not exchange (and therefore
valued for their personal, emotional character); it is a personalist ethic
that involves commitment to individuals as ends not means. When the
mother says “that her House was no place to purchase Vertue in” (189),
she is articulating a use-value ethic, resisting the commodification of her
daughter as a sex object. Manley here continues the important thematic
of women’s fiction, the rejection of the sexual commodification of
women, but she conceives it more clearly in economic terms than do ear-
lier treatments of sexual exploitation.
Manley’s Violenta is much more motivated, as well, by class conscious-
ness than in the sources. The sentiment expressed by the family in
Painter’s version that they cannot hope to obtain justice against such pow-
erful class enemies, is here expressed by Violenta herself. “Too well I know
there is but little Redress for so mean a Person as I am, to expect by Law,
against two of the most potent Families in Valentia” (210). Violenta also
expresses intensely bitter class resentment in recalling that Roderigo had
jokingly but contemptuously said

That Maids of my base Birth had no Pretensions to Honour, what had we

to do with such fantastick Notions? Vertue and Chastity were pretty Names
indeed for Boors to play with! As if Courage were only appropriated to Men
of Quality, or Modesty to Noble Women. (210)

Thus, Manley more fully explains Violenta’s psychological state, in par-

ticular her resentment of Roderigo’s class contempt, than do her sources
(although the idea is implicit in Bandello). Violenta’s relationship with
Ianthe is here somewhat more assertive than in Painter, which tends to el-
evate her stature. As in the sources, she asks the slave for her help but says
if that is denied, she will do the deed alone (210). But she does offer Ianthe
2,000 ducats and jewels for her assistance.
Ianthe, a servant in Painter’s version, is once again a slave in Manley’s
reconception, and her psychology is further developed. She is motivated
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 107

partly by affection for her mistress and partly out of “Covetousness and
the desire of Liberty, by which she should gain so great a Reward; with
which she meant to fly away to her own Land, and seek her Kindred and
Parents, if they were yet alive or to be found” (211). Thus, Ianthe’s de-
sire for freedom and repatriation, and reunion with her African kin, su-
percede greed in Manley’s sketch of her character, differentiating her
from Boaistuau’s otherwise similar portrait. Manley also fills in more
details about her life and her relationship with Violenta: “This poor
Creature had from her Childhood, when she was first made a Slave, been
bred up by Donna Camilla [the mother]. The Slave had brought up
Violenta, and so tenderly lov’d her, that she would have done any thing
for her Relief ” (208).
Ianthe proceeds to lay out the murder plan, which from here on fol-
lows the sources with little variation: Roderigo is cleverly lured to the
assignation by Ianthe; he tells Violenta he plans to poison his wife and re-
turn to her, his true love. This declaration is presented as deliberately de-
ceptive by Manley (more clearly so than in the sources): “He concluded
this Discourse which was only fram’d to appease her, with Protestations of
his Love, and ten Thousand Vows of Constancy, which easily sworn by
those who intend only to deceive” (217). But he retains a secret contempt
for Violenta; Manley explains his inner thoughts: “The Count was very
well satisfied that he found Violenta so well appeased; he thought he need
not give himself much Trouble about that little Maid, a Creature of no
Consequence, whom he might use as he pleased” (218). Thus, Roderigo is
set up as much more offensive a character than he is in the sources, and
thus much more deserving of his fate. Manley’s sympathies are clearly
with the woman.
The murder scene is vividly described. Violenta first stabs him in the
throat, and, while Ianthe holds him down, Violenta “like another Medea,
mad with Rage and Fury, redoubled her Stroke,” inflicting several further
mortal wounds (219). Then, addressing each member in turn (“Ah
trayterous Eyes” [220]), she proceeds to carve up the corpse. This scene is
more drawn out in Manley than in Painter. Ianthe watches in horror, and
when Violenta is through, they throw the remains out the window.
Violenta gives Ianthe her reward, and she escapes to Africa. Violenta is
brought to trial and her honor is restored; however, despite townspeoples’
sympathy, she is condemned to death because she “had presumed to pun-
ish [Roderigo’s] Offense by her own Hand” (228) and because of the bar-
barity of the dismemberment. Like Painter, Manley concludes by citing
various sources, including “Bandwell” (Bandello).
Eliza Haywood’s version of the novella, “Female Revenge; or, the
Happy Exchange,” appeared in 1727, just seven years after Manley’s.
108 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Haywood claims in her subtitle to the collection Love in Its Variety that
it is but a translation of Bandello. The subtitle reads: “Being a Collection
of Select Novels; Written in Spanish by Signior Michael Bandello. Made
English by Mrs. Eliza Haywood.” Bandello, of course, did not write in
Spanish; it seems likely that Haywood was not just being sloppy here,
but rather that her sources were probably not the original Bandello but
instead Manley and Painter (of course, she might have been familiar
with the Zayas version). Robert Day suggests that none of the novellas
in Love in Its Variety are translations of Bandello but were “almost cer-
tainly original.”13 This particular tale, “Female Revenge; or the Happy
Exchange,” was hardly original by this time, but Haywood does give it an
original twist; she transforms it into a prototype of the sentimentalist
“heroine’s text” of the seduced-and-abandoned victim.
While the setting remains Spain, the Didaco character is made an Eng-
lish gentleman, Sir William Bellcourt, who, orphaned at fourteen, has
been taken in by a rich uncle who lives in Spain. At the age of twenty Bell-
court falls for a lower-class woman, Climene. Realizing that his uncle will
never condone “such a Match,” Bellcourt agrees to “a private Marriage,”
and determines to keep it secret from his uncle lest he be disinherited.14
Climene has a mother and two sisters; it is they who persuade Bellcourt
to adopt this course. Indeed, the mother clinches his decision by forbid-
ding him to see her unless they wed. Thus, Bellcourt is considerably
milder in Haywood’s version: his behavior is coerced by his uncle and by
her mother, and he expresses no class contempt nor does he attempt to
bribe the mother. Climene is really an object of others’ determinations
throughout the first part of the novella; indeed she does not speak (in di-
rect discourse) at all in the work—in sharp contrast to the sources.
After the secret wedding, as in the sources, gossiping neighbors begin
to talk about Bellcourt’s frequent visits to Climene’s home, and someone
tells the uncle about them. The uncle warns Bellcourt against marriage
with her, threatening to cut him off, but also cautioning him against ru-
ining the reputation of a virtuous maiden. Bellcourt deceitfully assures his
uncle in no uncertain terms that he would never marry her: “had Climene
a Fortune equal to what your Bounty has confer’d on me, I wou’d not
marry her,” and he offers to swear “the deepest and most solemn” oath to
this effect (109).
Meanwhile, he continues to see Climene privately and after two years
they have two sons. Fortune begins to turn, however, when the mother,
whose “Prudence and Cunning” (110) had successfully managed the af-
fair, dies. The uncle also soon dies, leaving his estate to Bellcourt but in his
dying moments “charging him . . . to marry Julia” (112), “the daughter of
a rich Merchant” (110). Bellcourt, however, disobeys his uncle and after
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 109

his death publicly announces his marriage to Climene. Bellcourt contin-

ues thus (unlike his prototypes in the sources) to behave honorably. In a
complicated plot twist, however, Bellcourt soon falls in love with Julia, his
uncle’s choice for his spouse. Julia, however, refuses to engage in a flirta-
tion in view of his marriage. So he contents himself with a “Platonick
friendship” (131).
When Climene learns of Bellcourt’s infatuation with Julia, she mani-
fests “the extremest Flame of raging Jealousy” (133). He ignores her out-
burst, which “put her beyond all patience and she grew more like a Fury
than a Woman” (133). Thus, Climene approaches the level of wrath of her
counterparts in earlier versions of the novella. At this point Bellcourt feels
the aversion his counterparts had felt earlier (they were motivated solely
by a cooling of passion; he, however, is repulsed by her resentful behav-
ior). “He hated to be near her, took all opportunities of avoiding her
Company” (133).
Climene proceeds to carry out her revenge but it is not murder; rather
she has an affair with Octavio, a friend of Bellcourt’s. This is precisely the
kind of revenge the feminist narrator in María de Zayas’s “A Shameful Re-
venge” warned against: “I am sure that if [women] were all to seek re-
venge, fewer women would be duped and insulted, but there are many
women with such low minds that their idea of revenge, if they are de-
ceived by a man, is to deceive another man in their turn” (Shameful Re-
venge 64) [“que yo aseguro que si todas vengaran las ofensas que
reciben . . . no hubiera tantas burladas y ofendidas. Mas hay tantas mu-
jeres de tan común estilo, que la venganza que toman es, si las engaña uno,
engañarse ellas con otro (Parte segunda 189)]. Climene’s character is fur-
ther discredited when Haywood explains that she had married Bellcourt
“more out of a Principle of [economic] Interest than Love” (134).
Bellcourt feels compelled upon learning of their affair to challenge Oc-
tavio to a duel. The latter is wounded and Bellcourt discovers a letter from
Climene to Octavio in which she says of Bellcourt, “I hate and despise the
Wretch” (136). Haywood’s sympathies are by now entirely with Bellcourt;
it is his point of view that prevails: “Whoever is a Husband, may easily
conceive the Shock a Letter such as this must give Bellcourt ” (137)—
ignoring the fact that it is he who first betrayed Climene. In response,
Bellcourt divorces Climene and marries Julia. Octavio, recovered, leaves
for Constantinople, after rejecting Climene “with Scorn and Derision.”
She, then, burdened by “the Grief ” of that abandonment “together with
the Shame which her Disgrace had brought upon her” commits suicide by
taking poison (139).
The Didaco-Violante plot is thus drastically transformed in Haywood’s
hands. Didaco is turned into a romantic, sentimental hero, exonerated
110 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

because all his actions are motivated by sentiment. Violante is robbed of

her dignity and stature and turned into a conniving self-seeker who de-
serves her fate. The elements of economic realism that Manley introduced
are gone. Instead we are left with a prototype of the sentimentalist
seduced-and-abandoned novel, seen in a work like Charlotte Temple. Even
some of the characters’ names are the same: Belcour is the name of an evil
procurer in Charlotte Temple and Julia is the woman the male protagonist
marries after abandoning Charlotte with child. The differences are also
worth noting, however. Where Climene is portrayed with little sympathy,
Charlotte is designed to wrench the hardest heart; and where Bellcourt is
presented positively, Montraville, his counterpart, is portrayed by Rowson
as at least flawed and clearly exploitative of Charlotte. Thus, curiously,
Haywood lays out the sentimentalist plot but unlike most later sentimen-
talist authors whose sympathy is with the victimized female, Haywood
sides with the man. Indeed, the central focus in Haywood’s novella is on
the man rather than the woman. Bellcourt is the principal actor; Climene
says nothing and does little—she is largely in the shadows; and Julia,
though she has a few lines, is a passive conformist.
Haywood tames a powerful story of female agency and feminist re-
venge, turning it into a misogynist tale of male ascendancy and female
powerlessness, disgrace, and death. That her version of the novella accords
with the changing ideological climate of the time, in which women’s eco-
nomic and social power was in eclipse, suggests a reason for Haywood’s
capitulation.
The successive versions of the Violenta novella thus provide an inter-
esting comparative case study wherein are inscribed changing ideological
climates, as well as individual authors’ preoccupations. Bandello, writing
in the midst of the querelle des femmes, seized the feminist import of the
tale. In his treatment Violante acts for all poor women as well as on her
own behalf. María de Zayas, who wrote from a consciously feminist per-
spective, conceives her character Aminta as justly carrying out her own
socially-mandated vengeance rather than depending on a man to do it for
her. Painter, following Boaistuau, eliminates the feminist message, con-
ceiving the story primarily as bizarre entertainment. Manley restores the
feminist thesis and adds important socio-economic details that link her
work to the emerging realist novel. Finally, Haywood sentimentalized the
novella; gone is the forceful subject of female agency seen in earlier ver-
sions; gone is the contemptuous aristocratic harasser of lower-class
women. Instead the story is recast in terms of a male supremacist ideol-
ogy: the man is seen as sincere, morally pure, innocent, and the women
are dichotomized. One, Climene, is presented as a self-interested operator
who violates the patriarchal rules of the marriage-market exchange sys-
THE CASE OF VIOLENTA Í 111

tem and is thus victimized, abandoned, and doomed. The other, Julia,
conforms to the system and is thus rewarded with love and marriage.
These are the classic dysphoric and euphoric endings available to female
characters in the sentimentalist plot, the “heroine’s text,” which came to
dominate women’s literature for the next century.15
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Chapter Eight

Women against Romance

of feminist critical re-

D ESPITE THE APPARENT SUBMERGENCE AND ECLIPSE
alism by the sentimentalist heroine’s text after the first two decades
of the eighteenth century, an anti-romance undercurrent continued to
circulate in the English women’s literary tradition throughout the cen-
tury. While women have long been popularly associated with the ro-
mance, both as writers and readers, the female anti-romance tradition
that I trace in this chapter suggests that the anti-romance was at least as
important in women’s literary culture as the romance.
Many critics and literary historians have, however, overlooked
women writers’ connection with the anti-romance. Indeed, many as-
sume that it was an inherently masculine tradition to which women
were not attracted. Charles Mish, for example, speaking of a series of
late seventeenth-century “anti-romantic love stories, ironic rather than
passionate,” says they “seem [for this reason] intended for a masculine
rather than a feminine audience.”1 In a 1977 article, “Serious Reflections
on The Rise of the Novel,” which revises his theory of the novel, Ian Watt
contends that the novel of manners, exemplified in Jane Austen, reflects
a “contradiction between Augustan values on the one hand, and femi-
nine and youthful values on the other.”2 By “Augustan values” Watt
means “masculine and adult values” (102), rationalist norms of sense, as
opposed to romantic sensibility. But Watt’s association of sense with
masculinity is contradicted by the scores of sensible women characters
in women’s literature who put down excesses of sensibility as injurious
to women’s survival interests. As early as Mary Astell feminist rational-
ists were warning against the cultivation of excessively romantic sensi-
tivities in women.
114 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

In The Anatomy of Satire (1962), a classic work on the subject, Gilbert

Highet goes so far as to say “very few [women] have ever written, or even
enjoyed, satire, although,” he acknowledges, “they have often been its vic-
tims.”3 Even Northrup Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), another clas-
sic study, erroneously claims, “the female alazon is rare.”4 In fact, the clash
between a female alazon and a female eiron—in the shape of the woman
of sensibility (sometimes cast as a female quixote) versus the woman of
sense—is at the heart of the women’s bildungsroman and novel of man-
ners. There are scores of female alazons, who figure prominently in nu-
merous novels. The assumption, therefore, that women as subjects are
absent in the literary traditions of satire and the anti-romance is simply
incorrect.
There is no disputing, however, the importance of the anti-romance to
the constitution of the novel, and so it is highly relevant to establish
women’s contribution to the anti-romance tradition. Probably the most
cogent theory of the novel as an anti-romance is proposed by Maurice
Shroder in his classic article, “The Novel as a Genre” (1969). Definition-
ally, Shroder claims, the novel enacts a process of “demythification,” by
which he means something very similar to the desengaños proposed by
María de Zayas as a central purpose of her fiction. Zayas, recall, said that
she wrote her stories in order to “enlighten or disenchant women about
men’s deceptions” [“y que tuviesen nombre de desengaños”].5 (See chap-
ter five.)
The novel, according to Shroder, is concerned with disabusing gullible
innocents of illusions they hold about the world, illusions that compro-
mise their ability to survive in the world as it really is. All novels are there-
fore in a sense bildungsromane, he says, dealing with the education of the
protagonist, which means stripping her or him of false, usually romantic,
ideas or ideals.6 Shroder’s theory is congruent with the conception of the
novel laid out in chapter one, that it is an inherently anti-theoretistic
genre. For the false ideals or illusions of the disabused protagonist equate
to the abstract theories and reified ideologies that are inevitably under-
mined by the novel’s particularistic realism, according to Bakhtin and
other theorists noted in the first chapter. It is in fact by means of the ex-
periential process of disillusionment or disenchantment that the novel
debunks such theoretistic notions.
That debunking is done by means of irony. As noted in chapter two,
Shroder sees the alazon-eiron confrontation as at the heart of the novelis-
tic process of desengaño. The archetypal alazon-eiron couple is Don
Quixote, with his romantic illusions, and Sancho, who continually under-
cuts them. Irony is therefore crucial to the demythification process be-
cause, as one critic notes, irony “resists enchantment.”7 We have already
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 115

noted the critical irony and attendant desengaños women writers have
brought to bear on ideologies and institutions that wrought harm to
women, such as marriage-marketing courtship rituals.
Mikhail Bakhtin also insists on the centrality of the anti-romance in
the formation of the novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin main-
tains that the novel performs “a comical operation of dismemberment”8
by exposing heroic pieties to ridicule. “[I]n popular laughter, the authen-
tic folkloric roots of the novel are to be sought . . . [, where] flourish par-
ody and travesty of all high genres and of all lofty models embodied in
national myth” (21). Parody of “official” genres—for example, of the me-
dieval chivalric romance—was an essential gesture of the early novel (6),
and thus because of its antiestablishmentarianism, the novel in its origins
was anti-romantic to the core. Such irreverence Bakhtin traces back to an-
tiquity, to Socratic irony and the Menippean satire, whose sole purpose
was “to put to the test and to expose ideas and idealogues” (26).
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin extends his discussion of novel-
esque parody focusing on the carnivalian antiauthoritarianism in
Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel. In this work Bakhtin touches on
what is most problematic for a feminist in the men’s parodic tradition,
its virulent misogyny. Bakhtin acknowledges that there is a manifestly
“negative attitude toward women” in “‘the Gallic tradition.’”9 However,
he argues that one must distinguish between the folk representation of
women and Church misogyny. The former he claims is healthy, as op-
posed to the latter. In the former women operate as earthy eirons to male
pretentiousness: “She represents in person the undoing of pretentious-
ness, of all that is finished, completed, and exhausted. She is the inex-
haustible vessel of conception, which dooms all that is old and
terminated” (240). In short, as a representation of the earthly, woman
embodies the comic spirit of rebirth. While the first part of Bakhtin’s
thesis—that women may operate as eirons to male pretentiousness—can
certainly be appropriated to the women’s comic anti-romance tradition,
the reduction of women to earthly avatars merely reifies women into
fixed roles, which contravenes the purportedly anti-theoretistic spirit of
parody. Throughout his work Bakhtin is in fact surprisingly blind to
women as individuals and fails to incorporate their voices, as Wayne
Booth has noted, in his heteroglossal ideal.10
Bakhtin sanitizes the misogyny in Rabelais’s work, where, as Booth
notes, we are often asked “to laugh at women because they are women and
hence inferior” (160). The implied reader is male, and “not only . . . are
[there] no significant female characters; it is that even the passages most
favorable to women are spoken by and addressed to men who are the sole
arbiters of the question” (164). “The truth is,” Booth concludes,
116 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

that nowhere in Rabelais does one find any hint of an effort to imagine any
woman’s point of view or to incorporate women into a dialogue. And
nowhere in Bakhtin does one discover any suggestion that he sees the im-
portance of this kind of monologue, not even when he discusses Rabelais’
attitude toward women. (165–66)

Rabelais was not alone in exemplifying how men’s parodic satire—

particularly of the courtly love tradition with its idealization of women—
often slipped into a most brutal misogyny. Indeed, there is a long tradi-
tion of misogynist satires, beginning with Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (Highet
39, 224–28). That tradition seemed to become especially virulent in the
fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. Erich Auerbach notes a “pro-
nounced contempt for women” [“eine entscheidene Frauenverachtung”]
in the literature of the period.11 Patricia Cholakian observes that Gallic
wit in the early French novella “was practically synonymous with obscen-
ities directed at women” (105), a point echoed by Ferrier (5) and
Clements and Gibaldi (78).
Jean de Meung’s section of the Roman de la rose (ca. 1275) was one of
the first to parody courtly love at the expense of women. One of the first
feminist responses to this kind of misogynistic representation of women
(that they are sexually opportunistic, amoral, grotesquely physical
beings—in other words, the opposite of the chaste virginal courtly love
ideal) was Christine de Pizan’s Epistres sur le Roman de la rose (1400) and
Epistre au dieu d’amours (1399). In the latter she argues that if women
were writing the texts, the women characters would be different, “for they
well know they have been wrongly blamed” [“Mais se femmes eussent les
livres fait/Je sçay de vray qu’autrement fust du fait,/Car bien scevent qu’a
tort sont encoulpées”].12 Christine’s critique initiated the querelle des
femmes that continued for centuries and out of which emerged the first
tradition of women’s prose fiction, also initiated by her, the women’s
framed-novelle, which eventually produced a comic thematic of its own.
In order to better situate the women’s anti-romance it is necessary to
briefly trace the men’s version of the genre. By the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, that tradition, which derived largely from Cervantes’s Don Quixote,
was a dominant form. Considerably more benign than the misogynistic
comedy of the Rabelaisian type, it was much more amenable to adapta-
tion by women writers. The works in this tradition purported to be
strictly parodic burlesques of the romance, but, as Paul Salzman points
out in a section entitled “Anti-Romance” of his English Prose Fiction
1558–1700 (1985), they often moved beyond their original satiric intent,
especially in French literature, engaging in a new kind of social realism.13
While Salzman claims the English anti-romances tended to remain bur-
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 117

lesques rather than works of comic realism, that is not true of women
writers in the English tradition, such as Manley, Trotter, and Davys, as we
saw in chapter six.
One of the earliest anti-romances (after the originator of the genre,
Don Quixote) was Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant (1627), which
Bakhtin highlights as an important proto-novel in The Dialogic Imagina-
tion (6). Le Berger extravagant parodied the popular pastoral romance, in
particular Honoré D’Urfé’s 5,000-plus page l’Astrée (1607–27). Sorel
picked up the reading thematic from Don Quixote; his main character is
an educated Parisian who reads one too many romances about shepherds,
begins to see the world in pastoral terms, and attempts to lead such a life
himself. Sorel’s novel was translated into English by John Davies in 1653
as The Extravagant Shepherd with the significant subtitle The Anti-
Romance; Or, The History of the Shepherd Lysis.
Sorel’s perpetuation of the quixote whose vision is warped by his or
her reading laid the basis for the “female quixote” who becomes a stock
figure in the women’s anti-romance tradition. The first appearance of this
character (to my knowledge) is in Adrien Thomas Perdou de Subligny, La
Fausse Clélie (1670), translated into English (with another significant sub-
title) as The Mock Clelia, or, Madam Quixote: Being a Comical History of
French Gallantries and Novels, In Imitation of Don Quixote (1678). Here
the main character has read Madeleine de Scudéry’s lengthy romance,
Clélie, and begins behaving “in imitation of Clelia whom she believed her-
self to be.”14
The other branch of the anti-romance tradition included works that
were not so much direct parodies of specific works (as La Fausse Clélie of
Clélie) but rather comic and anti-romantic by virtue of their realistically
mundane bourgeois setting, their unromantic characters, and their social
satire. Probably the most significant of these works are Paul Scarron’s Le
Roman comique (part one, 1651; part two, 1657), translated as The Comi-
cal Romance (1665); and Antoine Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois (1666),
translated as Scarron’s City Romance (1671).
As indicated in chapter four, Scarron incorporated four María de
Zayas novellas in his Roman comique and in his Nouvelles tragi-comiques
(1655); these were included in the John Davies 1665 translation, which
was entitled Scarron’s Novels. The Zayas novellas clearly influenced the
British women writers, but Scarron’s comical frame story in the Roman
comique undoubtedly had an important effect on them as well. Jane
Barker in fact acknowledges in her preface to The Lining of the Patch
Work Screen (1726) that she “hunt Scaron [Scarron] through all his
Mazes, to find out something to deck this my Epistle, till I made it as fine
as a May day Milk Pail.”15
118 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The Roman comique has a travel frame and focuses on a troop of come-
dians who go from town to town encountering various people and adven-
tures. The setting and manners are described in realistic detail, but the
adventures are largely slapstick buffoonery. The anti-romantic opening sen-
tence burlesques the pseudoclassical personification of the sun, seen in
many romance openings, and sets the novel’s satirical tone. That tone is
what writers like Catherine Trotter, Mary Davys, Delarivier Manley, and
Jane Barker appear to have picked up, but their satire was more pointedly
focused, as we have seen, on the marriage-market. Unlike Scarron, in other
words, whose humor is largely farcical, theirs has a precise political message.
The women’s anti-romance tradition has in fact two components: one
the satire of male-serving, marriage-market rituals we have touched on in
earlier chapters; the other, a kind of subdivision of the first, is the female
quixote tradition, in which a mystified female alazon is disabused of her
illusions by a sensible sister eiron. Both have as their principal purpose the
desengaño or demythification that Shroder posited as the essential action
of the novel.
As early as the women troubadours noted in chapter five, women cri-
tiqued the unreality of courtly love notions, especially the idealistic con-
ception of women therein. There are also a number of sarcastic
anti-romantic comments made by the frame characters in the Hep-
taméron. Parlamente, for example, debunks the idea that one can actu-
ally die from unconsummated desire—a commonplace of courtly love
ideology—putting down the idea as a male ploy often used in seduction
schemes (95; 164). This kind of demasking satire is the governing point
of view in Zayas’s works, as it is in Christine de Pizan and many subse-
quent women writers.
One of the first extended comical treatments of marriage-market ritu-
als appears in Les Nouvelles françaises (1656), written, according to Joan
DeJean, by Anne-Marie-Louise-Henriette d’Orléans, the duchess of
Montpensier, known as the “Grande Mademoiselle” because of her mili-
tary exploits in the Fronde, an uprising against Louis XIV (1648–53).16 Les
Nouvelles françaises, a minor work in the women’s framed-novelle tradi-
tion, has a frame of several noble women in exile who tell one another sto-
ries, which are transcribed (somewhat on the order of Les Évangiles des
quenouilles) by a male scribe, Jean Segrais. Segrais is in fact usually given
as the author. While most of the inset novellas are flat stereotypical ex-
amples of the genre, one replicates the comic realism emerging in Scarron
and others at the time. (There are also several theoretical discussions of
realism that are of some significance.)17
“Honorine” concerns a woman who is seeking a husband who is in-
telligent, noble, and rich. She finds three men, but each has only one of
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 119

the characteristics, and it is canceled out by the lack of the others (the
rich man is stupid, etc.). She ends up in a convent. What is new about
this story is its everyday realism and the realistic description of the
characters. Honorine is described satirically as being “of passable looks;
she was small but well proportioned for her size. She was white and
blond, and being a woman of quality and rich was more than enough
to assure her a husband. . . . But she was so conceited and full of
amour-propre that she thought no man could look at her without
being immediately struck by her” [“Elle était médiocrement belle; elle
était petite, mais assez bien faite en sa taille; elle était blanche et blonde,
et, étant de qualité et riche, cela ne suffisait que trop pour lui donner
un mari. . . . Mais elle avait tant de bonne opinion de soi-même et tant
d’amour-propre qu’elle ne croyait pas qu’un homme pût la regarder
sans en être aussitot épris” [202]). We are not far here from the satiri-
cal novel of manners.
In England the women’s anti-romantic tradition was initiated by
Margaret Cavendish, if one excludes The Countesse of Montgomeries Ura-
nia (1621) by Lady Mary Wroth, which, although it is in many ways crit-
ical of romance conventions, nevertheless itself remains within the genre
of the sophisticated political romance (to some extent a roman à clef
chronique scandaleuse). We have seen that in a philosophical allegory in
Natures Pictures Cavendish had Jove order all romances thrown out of
Heaven’s library (see chapter one), excepting Don Quixote “by reason he
hath so wittily abused all other Romances, wherefore he shall be kept, and
also have his Books writ in golden letters” (360).
In her 1671 preface to Natures Pictures, Cavendish emphatically rejects
the romance, saying, “I would not be thought to delight in Romances,
having never read a whole one in my life; and if I did believe that these
Tales . . . could create Amorous thoughts in idle brains, as Romances do,
I would never suffer them to be printed.”18
Among the numerous anti-romance comments in the Sociable Letters
(1664) is this adumbration of the female quixote articulated in a critique
of women’s failings: “the truth is, the chief study of our Sex is Romances,
wherein reading, they fall in love with the feign’d Heroes and Carpet-
Knights, with whom their Thoughts secretly commit Adultery, and in
their Conversation and manner, or forms or phrases of Speech, they imi-
tate the Romancy-Ladies.”19 In her preface to the Sociable Letters,
Cavendish says she abjured the use of a romantic style, noting that she has
not “written in a Mode-style, that is, in a Complementing, and Romanci-
cal way, with High Words, and Mystical Expressions”; rather “I have En-
deavoured . . . to Express the Humors of Mankind” (C2r). In other words,
she is opting not for romance but social satire.
120 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Cavendish’s genius at satiric realism is displayed throughout. This vi-

gnette description of a woman who prays too much is representative. “I
can hardly believe,” the writer exclaims, that “God can be Pleased with so
many Words, for what shall we need to Speak so many Words to God, who
knows our Thoughts, Minds and Souls better than we our selves?” Far bet-
ter, she concludes, are “Good Deeds . . . than Good Words. . . . Indeed
every Good Deed is a Prayer” (121).
We have seen that Delarivier Manley and Mary Davys wrote two of the
most important early modern critiques of the romance and defenses of
realism (Manley in her 1705 preface to Queen Zarah and Davys in the
1725 preface to her works; see chapters one and six above). And we have
noted how the writers of the nineties generation furthered anti-romantic
realism through their use of feminist critical irony, creating a feminist
prosaics. In her dedication to The Fugitive in 1705 Davys explicitly states,
“I had a Mind to make an Experiment, whether it was not possible to di-
vert the Town with Real Events, just as they happen’d, without running
into Romance,”20 thus following in the footsteps of Scarron and d’Aulnoy.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, this tradition had been largely
eclipsed by the sentimentalist novel. For in the 1730s and 1740s writings
by and about women began to adhere to what Nancy K. Miller labeled the
“heroine’s text,” a sentimentalist form “crucially dependent,” she notes,
“upon the uses and abuses of [the heroine’s] chastity.”21 In fact, these nov-
els are as well crucially concerned with the heroine’s economic situation,
her chastity being her ticket to economic security. If she loses it, her mar-
ket value on the marriage exchange plummets, and her chances of sur-
vival similarly plunge. Scores of novels, beginning with Marivaux’s La Vie
de Marianne (1731–41), replicated the basic pattern: an orphaned girl,
who is disinherited and/or abused by a series of guardians and/or suitors,
finally recovers her father and patrimony or marries, thus establishing her
economic security. If, however, she is raped, she loses her market value, as
well as her honor, and she must die. The former plot, seen, for example,
in Pamela (1740–42) by Samuel Richardson, is labeled “euphoric” by
Miller; and the latter “dysphoric” (xi). Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) is
a good example of the latter. This sentimentalist tradition continued un-
abated into the early twentieth century and included, as noted, one of the
first American novels, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791 in England;
reprinted in the United States in 1794), later known as Charlotte Temple.
It and later American examples of the genre were extremely popular.
In this sentimentalist tradition the woman protagonist—the “hero-
ine”—is really a victim, a passive object, whose subjective decisions or
opinions count for little. We have seen this kind of character in Hay-
wood’s Climene in her novella “Female Revenge,” discussed in the last
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 121

chapter. Charlotte Temple, for example, is almost entirely at the mercy

of others’ wills. She is manipulated, coerced, kidnapped, raped, aban-
doned pregnant, and dies without ever expressing a coherent opinion or
exercising even a modicum of will power. She represents an unfortunate
opposite to the active, assertive, satirical women characters created by
the realist women writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries.
That realist tradition, with its inherent social satire and anti-romantic
bent, did, however, continue through the eighteenth century in an almost
subterranean stream, largely overshadowed by the dominant sentimental-
ist genre. But even the realist tradition, seen most significantly in the
works by Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Maria Edgeworth dis-
cussed below, became crucially focused on the issue of women’s economic
survival. Since, realistically, this meant for most women attracting an eco-
nomically stable mate, these mid- to late-century works are less critical of
the marriage-market as a system than was the case with the earlier writ-
ers. These (and other) women writers of the period nevertheless paved the
way for the great women novelists of the nineteenth century.
Margaret Doody has noted that while the period from the death of
Richardson to Jane Austen has (until recently) been considered a “dead
period” in English literary history, in fact it was a period in which “the
paradigm for women’s fiction of the nineteenth century” was being pre-
pared; “to this enterprise . . . Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George
Eliot are deeply indebted.”22 This paradigm is that of a woman of sense
who is economically deprived, who seeks to establish her economic secu-
rity—but not at any cost. She is usually paired with a more conventional
female foil, often a sister, who is more of a flirtatious “belle” or coquette
and/or who is a silly romantic, a girl of “sensibility” as opposed to sense.
Jane Austen’s title Sense and Sensibility (1811) highlights this contrast with
two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, representing sense and sen-
sibility, respectively. While sensible characters like Elinor (and Elizabeth
Bennet in Pride and Prejudice [1813]) make tart and ironic observations
about various aspects of courtship mores, the marriage-market system it-
self remains the norm within which characters operate. “Sense” thus has
become the facility of knowing how to operate in the system, how not to
take risks, how to avoid becoming prey to rakes who would ruin one’s
marketability. Hyper-romantic heroines are criticized because their fan-
tasies make them vulnerable to would-be rakes, blinding them to eco-
nomic reality, a knowledge of which was crucial for their survival. Thus,
while the Austenian novel of manners resembles the sentimentalist hero-
ine’s text in that both are concerned with the female protagonist’s eco-
nomic survival, it differs in that it has absorbed (in somewhat muted
122 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

form) the active, satirical woman of sense created by the realist writers of
the late seventeenth century. It also differs in other significant ways that I
will not pursue here, such as being more secular in outlook (whereas the
sentimentalist text inscribes uncritically a Christian world-view) and in
using a comparatively plain style (the sentimentalists used a highly emo-
tional, hyperbolic rhetoric).
Jane Spencer is right therefore to highlight Mary Davys’s Reform’d Co-
quet (1724) as a harbinger of the Austenian novel of manners. The female
protagonist is transformed in that work from being a silly coquet, blinded
by romantic illusions and thus easily gulled by enterprising rakes, to a
woman of sense. Once disabused of her wrongheaded notions she can
marry a sensible husband, and thus her economic well-being is secure. (In
her case, since she is already well-off, it is principally a matter of making
sure that an inappropriate fortune-hunter not get her wealth.) The bois-
terous satire of marriage-marketing seen, however in Davys (particularly
in her other works) and the other women writers of her era is no longer
present in Austen, indeed is no longer prevalent after the 1720s.
It does, however, continue in selected works by Fielding, Lennox, and
Edgeworth, whose versions of the women’s anti-romance kept the tradi-
tion alive, if not flourishing. I have argued elsewhere that these women
writers became an important source for the first significant American
women’s tradition, itself anti-romantic and realist, so their eclipse by sen-
timentalism was by no means total or permanent.23
Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), while largely a
work of sentimentalist didacticism, includes an important woman of
sense in Cynthia, who harks back to Jane Barker’s Galesia. She provides a
feminist critical perspective on women’s lot. Like Barker and other prede-
cessors, Fielding uses indirect discourse for ironic effect, as in the follow-
ing autobiographical passage.

I loved reading, and had a great Desire of attaining Knowledge; but when-
ever I asked questions of any kind whatsover, I was always told, such Things
are not proper for Girls of my age to know. If I was pleased with any Book
above the most silly Story or Romance, it was taken from me. For Miss must
not enquire too far into things, it would turn her Brain; she had better mind
her Needlework, and such Things as were useful for Women; reading and por-
ing on Books would never get me a Husband.24

Cynthia especially resents the fact that her brother “hated reading to such
a degree, that he had a perfect Aversion to the very Sight of a Book; and
he must be cajoled or whipp’d into Learning, while it was denied me, who
had the utmost Eagerness for it” (102). She had a close female friend who
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 123

also loved reading but Cynthia’s mother forbade them to spend too much
time together. “My Mother was frighten’d out of her Wits, to think what
would become of us, if we were much together. I verily believe, she
thought we should draw Circles, and turn Conjurers” (107).
David Simple continues (via Cynthia) the extended critiques of the
marriage-market rituals established as the dominant theme in the earlier
women’s realist tradition. When Cynthia’s father decides she should be
married, she remarks sarcastically that she hopes she will get to see her
husband-to-be “at least an Hour before-hand” (107). When the selected
future husband informs her that he and her father had agreed to the
match, she retorts, “I did not know my Father . . . had any Goods to dis-
pose of ” (108). When the suitor reveals that he has a traditional concept
of wifedom—she must keep house, etc.—she responds that she had “no
Ambition to be his upper Servant” (109) and calls such an arrangement
“Prostitution.” She also rejects the use of the wife as a status symbol,
analogizing her to a “Horse who wears gaudy Trappings only to gratify his
Master’s Vanity” (110). Cynthia is punished for her rebelliousness. Her fa-
ther disinherits her, and after he dies she must make her own way in the
world. After various misfortunes, however, she finally inherits some
money and marries the brother (Valentine) of her old friend Camilla,
whom David, the novel’s protagonist, marries.
Henrietta (1758) by Charlotte Lennox is another important novel (sur-
prisingly neglected, however) whose “heroine” is a woman of sense strug-
gling to survive economically and morally in a world where she is beset at
every turn by conniving operators. Henrietta is contrasted to a female
quixote type, Miss Woodby. Significantly, the satirized woman of sensibil-
ity is upper-class, which connects to the historical link between romance
as a genre and the aristocracy. The novel as anti-romance has indeed been
seen as reflecting a class clash between the emerging bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy. Don Quixote in his adopted identity as knight is of the nobil-
ity, whereas Sancho is of the lower middle class and expresses its charac-
teristically anti-romantic realism. In Henrietta a class distinction between
the romantic figure (the woman of sensibility, Miss Woodby) and the re-
alist cohort (the woman of sense, Henrietta) is evident.
When Henrietta first meets Miss Woodby in a stagecoach, the gentle-
woman immediately perceives their relationship in terms of the literary
romance. They must, she suggests, call each other Clelia and Celinda and
consider that they have “contracted a violent friendship.” Henrietta re-
sponds, “Call me what you please . . . but my name is Courtenay.” Miss
Woodby hopes aloud that her new friend does not have an “odious vul-
gar christian name; such as Molly, or Betty, or the like.”25 Later they dis-
cuss shepherds and shepherdesses, stock articles in the pastoral romance.
124 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Henrietta acknowledges that when she was fourteen she had hoped to see
one “in a fine green habit, all bedizened with ribbons” (1:72). The reality
she found, however, was that “the shepherd was an old man in a ragged
waistcoat . . . the shepherdess looked like a witch” (1:73).
Henrietta’s sensible realism contrasts to Miss Woodby’s sensibility; the
latter trait proves to be so impractical as to be treacherous, and Henrietta
learns that hardheaded perseverance is the primary means to survival. In
the course of her trials Henrietta is reduced to working as a servant, per-
ceived as a fate almost worse than death. Nevertheless, Henrietta has cho-
sen a servant’s life in preference to others even more disagreeable—being
married to an evil rake or being confined in a convent—and therefore her
voluntary servitude gives evidence of her basic integrity, as well as her for-
titude. Her spirit of independence is seen in her proud comment: “since I
have learned not to fear poverty, my happiness will never depend upon
others” (2:123). And in her rejection of a disagreeable suitor, “if you had
worlds to bestow on me, I would not be your wife” (2:158), Henrietta is
another direct descendent of Galesia.
The first book-length satire of the “female quixote” was presented in
Lennox’s 1752 work of that title. This novel satirizes the seventeenth-
century romances by de Scudéry and La Calprenède in much the same
way that Cervantes had ridiculed Amadís de Gaula in Don Quixote. As in
other quixote burlesques, the heroine, Arabella, steeped in the romances
she has been reading, comes to see the world in their terms. She expects
all men to behave as the heroes of romances, to contract “violent passion”
for her, to write her secret gallant letters, to carve her initials on trees, etc.
An assistant gardener, for example, is taken by Arabella to be a “Person of
Quality” who has dressed up as a gardener in order to be near her. “She
often wondered . . . that she did not find her Name carved on the trees . . .
that he was never discovered lying along the Side of one of the little
Rivulets, increasing the Stream with his Tears.”26
Lennox’s novel is especially important because its influence may be
traced in a direct line to the American women’s literary tradition. Its suc-
cessor is Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), a popular American
novel. This rollicking work recaptures the carnivalesque exuberance seen
in the writings of the nineties generation.27 The anti-romance mood is
early established by the narrator:

Now I suppose it will be expected that, in imitation of sister novel writers

(for the ladies of late seem to have almost appropriated this department of
writing) I should describe [Dorcasina, the heroine] as distinguished by the
elegant form, delicately turned limbs, auburn hair, alabaster skin, heavenly
languishing eyes, silken eyelashes, rosy cheeks, aquiline nose, ruby lips,
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 125

dimpled chin, and azure veins, with which almost all our heroines of ro-
mance are indiscriminately decorated. In truth she possessed few of those
beauties. . . . She was of a middling stature. . . . Her complexion was rather
dark; her skin somewhat rough; and features remarkable neither for beauty
nor deformity.28

Like other female quixotes Dorcasina shapes the world according to the
romance ideology she has imbibed from reading novels, and is slowly dis-
abused of her fantasies by various sensible characters (including her ser-
vant Betty) and adventures.
Lennox also had a direct influence on Irish writer Maria Edgeworth,
who herself was perhaps the most important influence on American
women writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. As with her Irish
predecessor Mary Davys, the leverage point for Edgeworth’s critical irony
is an ethnic Irish standpoint. In Edgeworth’s case that standpoint merges
with a lower-class position and with a feminist viewpoint to provide a cri-
tique of upper-class English attitudes, mores, and behavior, which are
seen as pretentious, artificial, and destructive. The English—often absen-
tee landlords—serve thus as alazons to the Irish eirons.
The latter role is taken by Thady Quirk, an “illiterate old steward,” who
narrates Castle Rackrent (1800), Edgeworth’s first and probably greatest
novel.29 Thady speaks in a “vernacular idiom” (11) and from the point of
view of the Irish underclass in this satirical critique of the landlords (in
Ireland “rackrent” meant land rent paid to absentee landlords, a colonial
economic system). Thady is in fact a kind of Irish Sancho Panza who
ironizes the behavior of the dominant class, thus demythifying their pre-
tenses at nobility and legitimacy.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested that Castle Rackrent
entails “a subversive critique of patriarchy.”30 Indeed, at times Thady does
express a kind of feminist critical irony; in particular in the satirical de-
scription of Miss Isabella Moneygawls, a pretentious sentimentalist, who
becomes the wife of Sir Connolly Rackrent. She is a reincarnation of the
female quixote, who threatens to faint at every step, wears a veil, uses pre-
cious sentimental language, and of course reads romances (The Sorrows of
Young Werther in her case).
Edgeworth also followed the anti-romance female quixote tradition in
her moral tale “Angelina; or l’Amie Inconnue.” Here again the heroine im-
bibes romances to the point where she functions in their terms. Here as
well a contrast is drawn between a common-sense world, peopled by
provincials who speak in dialect and do not act like heroes in romances,
and those who engage in romantic pretenses. The climax is the meeting
between Angelina and Araminta, a woman she has known only through
126 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

gallant correspondence. Araminta turns out to be an unromantic, “coarse,

masculine, brandy-loving creature, engaged to an equally coarse, vulgar
man, Nat Gazebo,” whose epistolary name had been Orlando. An aunt
rescues Angelina from her folly and has her read The Female Quixote as
penance.31
Edgeworth’s debunking of romance preciosity, which she sees as En-
glish and upper-class, continues in The Absentee (1812). In this novel the
upper-class establishment world of London society is satirized from the
standpoint of the Irish outsider. The novel revolves around the figure of
Lady Clonbrony, who has convinced her family to live in England, leaving
behind their Irish homeland (and hence operating as “absentees”) and
denying their Irish heritage. Lady Clonbrony affects an English haut
monde accent; one observer notes facetiously, “you cawnt conceive the
peens she teekes to talk of the teebles and cheers . . . and with so much teeste
to speak pure English.”32 Lady Clonbrony is struggling between two
selves: one is her natural, “real,” sensible Irish self; the other, her preten-
tious, novelesque, English self. In this sense she is another version of the
female quixote. “A natural and unnatural manner seemed struggling in all
her gestures . . . —a naturally free, familiar, good-natured, precipitate,
Irish manner, had been schooled, and schooled late in life, into a sober,
cold, still, stiff deportment, which she mistook for English” (5). Eventually
she comes to her Irish senses, and the family returns to Ireland.
In Edgeworth, a political purpose of delegitimization is clearly at
work—of both English and patriarchal dominance (one of the characters
in Castle Rackrent is kept imprisoned in a room for several years by her
husband, a signal instance of patriarchal oppression). Such delegitimiza-
tion of dominant, oppressive ideologies and institutions is what the
novel’s demythification or desengaño process is all about.
To the extent that romance ideology worked as an opiate that pre-
vented women from thinking critically and realistically about their situa-
tions, the women writers who took a stand against romance were
furthering the feminist cause. But many women writers of the latter half
of the eighteenth century may be faulted for encouraging a kind of con-
formist behavior. Particularly in the novels of manners of Fanny Burney
and Jane Austen, the woman of sense has become the woman who best
knows how to operate the marriage-market system to her advantage. Nev-
ertheless, insofar as the women’s resistance to female quixotism encour-
aged a strengthening of women’s rational, critical faculties, it must be seen
in positive terms.
In a recent analysis of Tenney’s Female Quixotism, Sharon M. Harris
suggests that it exhibits the carnivalesque satire lauded by Bakhtin in
Rabelais and His World. Such satire, Harris notes, “exposes the two-world
WOMEN AGAINST ROMANCE Í 127

condition” of Western society where one has a culture of “officialdom and

a world outside that officialdom, that is, a world of the people” (2). The
carnivalesque undermines and delegitimizes the world of officialdom
from the point of view of the marginalized—whether that marginaliza-
tion be due to gender, class, or ethnicity. Women writers’ early and long-
standing critique of marriage-market rituals and continuing critique of
the female quixote contributed to this project of destabilizing dominant
and oppressive ideologies and institutions from the standpoint of the
marginalized and oppressed.
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Chapter Nine

Women and the

Latin Rhetorical Tradition

THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN notes that through

I N
much of Western history there has been a kind of linguistic dialectic be-
tween centripetal and centrifugal forces: the former tending toward a uni-
tary “Cartesian,” “official” language; the latter toward diffused regional
dialects and vernaculars.1 Underlying this linguistic struggle were imperi-
alistic political movements—beginning with the Romans and continuing
with the establishment of the modern nation-states—and regional resis-
tances to them.
Throughout the Middle Ages and until the early modern period Latin
was the language of the official culture. Vernaculars were unofficial, oral
languages used in regional, rural, and domestic environments. Latin was
employed in official institutions, such as the Church and the university.
Walter J. Ong has noted that by the eighth century, C.E.,

Learned Latin, which moved only in artificially controlled channels

through the male world of the schools, was no longer anyone’s mother
tongue, in a quite literal sense. Although from the sixth or eighth century
to the nineteenth Latin was spoken by millions of persons, it was never used
by mothers cooing to their children. There was no Latin baby-talk or nurs-
ery language.2

Because they were barred from “the male world of the schools,” women
were in short denied access to the language of official culture for a very
long time. Indeed, Ong points out that until the nineteenth century
130 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

learning Latin meant entrance into the male-educated elite. Latin had be-
come a “sex-linked language, a kind of badge of masculine identity” (250).

Under these circumstances learning Latin took on the characteristics of a

puberty rite, a rite de passage or initiation rite; it involved isolation from the
family, the achievement of identity in a totally male group (the school), the
learning of a body of relatively abstract tribal lore inaccessible to those out-
side the group. . . . The Latin world was a man’s world. (251)

Women’s exclusion from the language of official culture does much to ex-
plain why so few of them were writing during this period. Until serious
written literature was being composed in the vernaculars (that is, until the
fourteenth century) women were simply denied access to the modes of lit-
erary production. The gradual weakening of the Latin rhetorical influence
was a major reason that women began to write.
The framed-novelle and the novel (along with the romance) were the
first forms in Western prose fiction that did not require training in classi-
cal rhetoric. Ong theorizes that the characteristic conversational style of
the novel is one of women’s main contributions to the genre, deriving
from their historical location in the unofficial world of oral, vernacular
traditions. “Into the nineteenth century,” Ong notes,

most literary style throughout the west was formed by academic

rhetoric . . . with one notable exception: the literary style of female authors.
Of the females who became published authors, as many did from the 1600s
on, almost none had any such training. . . . Women writers were no doubt
influenced by works they had read emanating from the Latin-based, acad-
emic, rhetorical tradition, but they themselves normally expressed them-
selves in a different, far less oratorical voice, which had a great deal to do
with the rise of the novel.3

Ong goes on to suggest that “a great gap in our understanding of the in-
fluence of women on literary genre and style could be bridged or closed
through attention to the orality-literacy-print shift. . . . Certainly, non-
rhetorical styles congenial to women writers helped make the novel what
it is: more like a conversation than a platform performance” (159–60).
Women’s struggle with and eventual repudiation of the Latin rhetori-
cal tradition is an important but overlooked chapter in the history of the
emergence of novelistic discourse. Paratactic syntax; the use of the plain
style in prose (and its spin-off, the familiar “dashaway” epistolary mode);
and the ironic use of indirect discourse or reported speech—the most im-
portant constituent elements of a prosaic stylistics—were all pioneered by
and identified with early modern women writers.
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 131

In his survey of medieval women writers Peter Dronke notes the prob-
lematic relationship most of these women had with Latin rhetoric, be-
cause of their lack of training in it. Their Latin “may remain not only
unclassical . . . but awkward or unclear.”4 Yet out of these “unconventional
modes of Latin” (viii) emerged what is clearly an anti-theoretistic procliv-
ity. In women’s writing “there is,” Dronke notes,

more often than in men’s writing, a lack of apriorism, of predetermined

postures: again and again we encounter attempts to cope with human
problems in their singularity—not imposing rules and categories from
without, but seeking solutions that are apt and truthful existentially. (x)

In other words, these medieval women writers were inclined toward a

novelistic prosaics, which suggests that the use of a nonclassical Latin may
encourage a prosaic rhetoric.
One of the earliest of these women, the martyr Perpetua (d. 203 C.E.),
known for her vivid account of her persecution and martyrdom, the “Acts
of Perpetua” (Passio SS. Perpetua et Felicitas), wrote in a “colloqual and
homely” style (Dronke 1). She “records her thoughts in an informal,
graphic way . . . she is not striving to be literary” (6). In commenting on
the same text Erich Auerbach notes, “there is no rhetorical art in Per-
petua’s narrative. . . . Her vocabulary is limited; her sentence structure is
clumsy, the connectives (frequent use of tunc [then]) are not always
clear. . . . [There are] many vulgarisms. . . . The language in general is
brittle, quite unliterary, naïve, almost childlike.”5
Subsequent medieval women writers similarly broke with classical Latin
models. Hrotsvitha, an important tenth-century dramatist, had manifest
difficulty with Latin construction and in a preface apologized for “the boor-
ishness of my flawed style” (Dronke 69). Even the great Hildegarde of Bin-
gen (1098–1179) wrote in a highly unorthodox Latin, “her command of
Latin . . . [remaining] uncertain,” according to Dronke (148). In a letter
written in 1175 Hildegarde explained how she transcribed her visionary ex-
perience in immediate language without rhetorical embellishment:

I am not educated, but I have simply been taught how to read. And what I
write is what I see and hear in the vision. I compose no other words than
those I hear, and I set them forth in unpolished Latin just as I hear them in
the vision, for I am not taught in this vision to write as philosophers do.6

As Barbara Newman comments, “Hildegarde, despite her encyclopedic

knowledge, never mastered Latin grammar well enough to write without
a secretary to correct her cases and tenses” (23).
132 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

One senses, however, in Hildegarde’s interesting comment not so

much an expression of inferiority or inadequacy about her Latin con-
structions, but rather a rejection of the Latin tradition. “I am not
taught . . . to write as philosophers do” certainly could be read as harbor-
ing a complaint about her lack of education but there is also a note of de-
fiance; “I don’t need Latin training,” she seems to be saying, “because the
authority of my vision is so compelling, it transcends such trivial con-
cerns as grammar and syntax.”
This ambivalence about the Latin rhetorical tradition continues in the
women writers of the early modern period. On the one hand, they often
apologize for their lack of Latinate sophistication; on the other hand, they
often put down Latinate rhetoric as obfuscatory and mystifying. In a 1589
critique, for example, of John Lily’s Latinate euphuistic style, “Jane Anger”
(presumably a pseudonym) characterizes it as unnecessary and typically
male bombast: “their minds are so carried away with the manner, as no
care at all is had of the matter. They run so into rhetoric as often times
they overrun the bounds of their own wits and go they know not
whither.”7
Beginning with Marguerite de Navarre, women writers seem to have
consciously favored a non-Latinate, even an anti-Latinate rhetoric.
Marguerite used a familiar, conversational plain style in the Heptaméron,
and indeed specifically excluded the participation of men of letters from
storytelling lest they engage in “rhetorical ornament [that] would . . . fal-
sify the truth of the account” (69; see chapter three). Significantly, the first
unauthorized editor of the Heptaméron, Pierre Boaistuau, took it upon
himself to “correct” its style (as well as to eliminate the frame and de-
visants and to rearrange the order of the novellas). Correcting the style
meant Latinizing it; imposing an “eloquent” style that was “ornamented
with Latin turns of phrase.”8 In his preface to the work Boaistuau claimed
he only “cleaned it up,” correcting “an infinity of manifest errors” (xxxvii).
But a modern critic has noted that Boaistuau employed a self-consciously
Latinate syntax: “He affects certain turns and constructions inspired by
Latin eloquence”; it is a “sinuous syntax” with “sentences studded with
subordinate and relative propositions couched one upon another”
(lxxii)—in other words, the hypotactic constructions of classical Latin.
Other early modern women writers explicitly reject Latin rhetoric.
Margaret Cavendish is one of the most emphatic and insistent in her ab-
jurement. In the Preface to her biography of her husband, The Life of the
Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish (1667),
Cavendish announces that she is “resolved to write, in a natural plain
style, without Latin sentences.”9 Like Marguerite de Navarre and, to some
extent, Hildegarde of Bingen, Cavendish sees rhetoric as obscuring the
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 133

truth, not enhancing it. Her lack of education or training in what she calls
“the rules” thus is seen as a virtue because it allows her to speak the truth
directly without false ornamentation.

When I first intended to write this History [biography of her husband],

knowing my self to be no scholar, and as ignorant of the rules of writing
histories, as I have in my other works acknowledged my self to be of the
names and terms of art, I desired My Lord [her husband], that he would be
pleased to let me have some elegant and learned historian to assist me. (9)

The duke, however, says he would have her write it in “my own plain style,
without elegant flourishings, or exquisite method, relying intirely upon
truth” (9). “[R]hetorick,” he claims, “was fitter for falsehoods then [sic]
truths” (9). Margaret follows his counsel and employs the non-Latinate,
plain style in the work.
Elsewhere, she is even more emphatic in her repudiation of learned
rhetoric. In her Preface to the Sociable Letters, for example, she offers this
defiant apology for her style:

[T]hey may say some Words are not Exactly Placed, which I confess to be
very likely, and not only in that, but in all the rest of my Works there may
be such Errors, for I was not bred in an University, or a Free-School, to
learn the Art of Words; neither do I take it for a Disparagement of my
Works, to have the Forms, Terms, Words, Numbers or Rymes found fault
with . . . for I leave the Formal, or Worditive part to Fools, and the Mater-
ial or Sensitive part to Wise Men. (C1r)

While she similarly acknowledges in Natures Pictures that it is not

“learned, studious, or methodical” (106), she nevertheless in that work
has Jove throw into hell all works that are “Sophisterious, Tedious, Ob-
scure, Pedanticall” (362).
Cavendish draws a clear distinction between what she calls the “For-
mal” or symbolic, on the one hand, and the “Material” or natural, on the
other. The Formal aspects are the “rules” of rhetoric, logic, mathematics,
which she has never learned; whereas the material or natural refers to the
empirical aspects of reality available to the senses or to intuitional, Carte-
sian “reason.” Like many women writers, Cavendish sees symbolic forms
as impediments; she desires instead to connect to reality directly in as
unmediated a way as possible. In my article “Ecofeminist Literary Criti-
cism,” I proposed that a number of later (nineteenth- and twentieth-
century) women writers expressed a similar fear that figurative, symbolic
representations obscure the literal, inscribing it in a dominative “chain of
134 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

signifiers.” Their own style, I contended, manifests an anti-theoretistic

attempt to reconnect with the real, with the literal.10 Cavendish’s theory
is strikingly similar to theirs.
In her “Epistle to the Reader” of her Philosophical and Physical Opin-
ions (1663) she rearticulates her conception:

It is Plain and Vulgarly Express’d, as having not so much Learning as to

Puzle the Reader with Logistical, Metaphysical, Mathematical, or the like
Terms; Wherefore you shall onely find therein Plain Sense and Reason,
Plainly Declared, without Geometrical Demonstrations, Figures, Lines, and
Letters; Nevertheless, since it concerns Sense and Reason in all Matter . . . it
doth not Hinder or Obstruct.11

Cavendish elaborates that “Art proceeds from Nature, not Nature from
Art, and Logick, Metaphysick, Mathematick, Chymistry, and the like”
(b4v)—a clear repudiation of deductive reasoning in favor of induction.
Like Virginia Woolf she would “record the atoms as they fall upon the
mind in the order in which they fall” (see chapter one). Unlike the formal
branches of knowledge enumerated above, Cavendish claims, “my Philos-
ophy doth not Obstruct Art” (c1r).
In “Another Epistle to the Reader” in Philosophical and Physical Opin-
ions, Cavendish amplifies, drawing a distinction between “Natural Philos-
phers” whose knowledge is derived from “the Clearest, Natural
Observation, and the Least Artificial Learning” and “Scholars [who] are so
in Love with Art, that they Despise or at least Neglect Nature” (d2v). They
thus fail to realize Cavendish’s cardinal principle, which is that “Art pro-
ceeds from Nature, yet Nature doth not proceed from Art” (d2r). Signifi-
cantly, Cavendish’s view of nature is animist (like the women artists I treat
in “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism”); the literal is thus animated with a
presence, and indeed much of Cavendish’s writing is devoted to revealing
the aliveness of the material world.
The gist of Cavendish’s philosophy of style is given neatly in a 1653
poem:

Give me a Stile that Nature frames, not Art:

For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part.
And that seemes Noble, which is Easie, Free,
Not to be bound with ore-nice Pedantry.12

Cavendish was part of and contributed to the breakaway from classical

rhetorical models and the transition to the “plain style” in prose that oc-
curred during the seventeenth century. A number of factors encouraged
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 135

the demise of classical rhetorical authority. The gradual replacement of

literary patrons by capitalist booksellers as the primary source of remu-
neration for writers was one. Booksellers themselves generally had scanty
classical training and were in any event primarily interested in marketing
their products, not enforcing classical rules. They were quite willing to
pander to a reading public that was by the turn of the seventeenth century
increasingly dominated by women, who themselves, of course, knew little
about and had little interest in Latin constructions.13
Another important factor in the transition to a non-Latinate rhetoric
was the rise of the new scientific epistemology, the Baconian “new philos-
ophy,” which emphasized “the denotative function of language—‘obser-
vation, fact-collecting, and classification.’”14 Thomas Sprat called for the
use of a plain simple prose in scientific treatises in his History of the Royal
Society in 1667.
By then the battle had been joined between those who favored the use
of classical rhetoric, the Ciceronian, “grand,” or “Asiatic” style, exemplified
by John Lily’s Euphues and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and the anti-
Ciceronians Montaigne and Bacon, who adopted a more conversational,
less artificial rhetoric. Their style was “Senecan, terse, plain,” as opposed
to the “periodic, ornate” Ciceronianism (Adams 244).
One feature of the new style was the “loose period.” Unlike the Ci-
ceronian rounded period, which is hypotactic and subordinative, the
loose period attempts

to express . . . the order in which an idea presents itself when it is first

experienced. It begins, therefore, without premeditation, stating its idea
in the first form that occurs; the second member is determined by the
situation in which the mind finds itself after the first has been spoken;
and so on throughout the period, each member being an emergency of
the situation.15

In the loose period, “everything was subordinated to the aim of express-

ing the ideas passing in the mind at the moment of writing” (Watt 194).
Such a stylistic method implies an inductive, empirical epistemology,
in accordance with the seventeenth-century shift toward the experien-
tially verifiable and away from received axioms as sources of truth. As Ian
Watt notes, the novel was in part a response to these stylistic and philo-
sophical shifts. “Previous literary forms had reflected the general ten-
dency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the
major test of truth. . . . This literary traditionalism was first and most
fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to indi-
vidual experience” (13).
136 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

The loose period also allows for the relatively unmediated spontaneity
that Cavendish (and Hildegarde of Bingen) saw as more truthful than la-
bored artificial syntax. And it opened literary doors to uneducated out-
siders because it required little or no rhetorical training to produce it.
When used in an epistolary format, the loose period became known as the
“dashaway” style. Its “breathless, disorganized, ‘artless’ informality” came
to be identified as a feminine style.16
Samuel Richardson was perhaps the first male writer to capitalize on
this “feminine” style in his novel Pamela, which became a model for sub-
sequent writers, including Fanny Burney. Evelina’s mentor enjoins her, for
example, against writing letters that are “correct, nicely grammatical, and
run in smooth periods.” Rather, he urges her to “dash away, whatever
comes uppermost” (Moers 97). Similarly, Anna Howe in Richardson’s
Clarissa “tells us that ‘mere scholars’ too often ‘spangle over their produc-
tions with metaphors; they rumble into bombast . . . ’ while others ‘sinking
into the classical pits, there poke and scramble about, never seeking to
show genius of their own.’”17
The demise of classical rhetorical authority also entailed the break-
down of the classical doctrine of separation of styles (Stiltrennung)—an
issue that still greatly concerned theorists in the Renaissance and neoclas-
sical periods. According to this Aristotelian doctrine, genres are ranked by
the social class of the characters. The highest forms—tragedy and epic—
dealt with royalty or the nobility; where comedy dealt with the middle
and lower classes. The style of a work had similarly to correspond to the
social level, with the grand style appropriate for tragedy and epic, and the
low style for comedy. Under this doctrine the domestic world—women’s
everyday world—was not considered appropriate matter for serious liter-
ary attention, and thus a Bakhtinian prosaics—the kind of realism seen in
the novel—is impossible in these genres, according to Aristotelian and
neo-classical theory. Indeed, Erich Auerbach in Mimesis connects the
breakdown of Stiltrennung with the rise of realism.18 The novel thus rep-
resented a break with the classical doctrine of Stiltrennung, and it was so
censured in the early years.
But women and others not trained in the classical tradition were ad-
vantaged by this development because it enabled them to use the plain
style or low style to treat domestic matter seriously, and it freed them
from the necessity of having to know classical “rules” in order to write.
While the attempt to evaluate the novel in Aristotelian terms persisted—
Samuel Johnson called it a “comedy of romance” and Henry Fielding “a
comic epic in prose”—it was ultimately unsuccessful. Critical judgments
on the novel could not be rooted in ancient authority. Women readers
were known to be particularly receptive to nonclassical genres such as the
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 137

heroic romance, the framed-novelle, and the novel, and as early as 1594,
according to Torquato Tasso, defended them against the classicists.19
One of the characteristics of Ciceronian periodic rhetoric is its hy-
potactic syntax, as opposed to the parataxis seen in the low, familiar, or
plain style with its loose period. Hypotaxis is a style or structure that in-
volves subordination (it stems from the Greek hypotassein [to arrange
under]), whereas parataxis entails a lateral, conjunctive, but nonsubordi-
native arrangement (from the Greek paratassein [to place side by side]).
As Auerbach describes it, hypotaxis “looks at and organizes things from
above” (Mimesis 62) unlike parataxis where no such subordination or
ranking occurs. In his discussion of plot in the Poetics, Aristotle distin-
guishes between a complex propter hoc [because of which] plot and a sim-
ple post hoc [after which] pattern.20 Hypotaxis corresponds to the former
and parataxis the latter. Parataxis often proceeds by a string of ands or
thens (Perpetua’s style) where hypotaxis uses a lot of thats and whiches.
The celebrated distinction Virginia Woolf made in A Room of One’s
Own between a “man’s sentence” (79) and a woman’s is largely a contrast
between a hypotactic, Ciceronian period and paratactic syntax. Interest-
ingly, in an earlier typescript version of A Room Woolf included as her ex-
ample of a characteristically woman’s sentence a Jane Austen passage that
is strikingly paratactic. “She examined into their employments, looked at
their work, & advised them to do it differently; found fault with the
arrangement of the furniture, or detected the housemaid in negligence; &
if she accepted any refreshment, seemed to do it only for the sake of find-
ing out that Mrs. Collins’s joints of meat were too large for her family.”21
This example was deleted for the published version of A Room.
Much oral literature is essentially paratactic in structure. As Walter J.
Ong remarks in Orality and Literacy it tends to be “additive rather than
subordinative” and “aggregative rather than analytic” (37–38). In an in-
triguing study of the thought-patterns of illiterate Russian peasants done
in the 1930s, which Ong summarizes and Mary Belenky et al. refer to in
Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986), A. R. Luria notes that they exhibited an
unfamiliarity with abstract analytical thought, such as the deductive syllo-
gism, and use instead situational, pragmatic identifying patterns. Items are
located in immediate operational contexts and not abstracted into generic
categories (Ong 49–57). (Thus, when given four terms such as hammer,
saw, log, hatchet, the illiterate subject would not group them under the
generic term tool, excluding the log, but rather would envisage an opera-
tional narrative using the tools on the log [51]). While the latter provides
for practical understanding, it does not allow for causal theorizing. Be-
lenky et al. associate this kind of thinking with the extreme passivity of the
disempowered.22 For women such thinking does not allow them to name
138 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

their pain or to theorize about its causes. Events are perceived to happen
single file, as it were, one thing after another, in paratactic fashion.23
The women writers I treat in this study were not on the level of illiter-
ate peasants because they were at least literate in the vernaculars (and
some in Latin), but those who were not trained in the Latin tradition were
inclined to use paratactic syntax. Indeed, in her study of seventeenth-
century women poets Germaine Greer notes a pervasive use of paratactic
syntactic patterns: “endless chains of clauses which may be related back
and forwards with equal justification, rather than a hierarchy of main
clauses with obvious subordinates.”24
On the question of structure, however, the women writers treated here
were torn between parataxis and hypotaxis. In fact, their structures appear
to have been hypotactic to the extent that their feminist standpoint had
crystalized. In the works of Christine de Pizan and María de Zayas, for ex-
ample, a strong feminist thesis subordinates the inset material or novellas.
At the same time one senses in Marguerite de Navarre, for example, a re-
luctance to subordinate everything to one governing thesis. A solution ap-
pears to have been reached by the later women writers in the
framed-novelle tradition who reconceptualized the organizing principles
of the genre. In particular, the British women (Cavendish, Manley, Barker,
and Davys) came to focus on individual life-stories as their unifying plot.
Episodes are arranged as “cases” or parts of a case that is designed to de-
fend the woman; they are not ordered simply as one thing after another
but are linked propter hoc to a feminist thesis or standpoint.
Those women trained in Latin rhetoric—for example Christine de
Pizan and (perhaps) Jeanne Flore—do exhibit hypotactic syntax. The for-
mer, although one of the first to write a serious treatise in a vernacular
language, used “Latin prose as her model, [employing] complicated peri-
odic syntax,” according to a recent translator.25 Similarly, although Jeanne
Flore apologized for her “rude and poorly managed language,” a modern
editor, Michel LeGuern considers the Comptes amoureux the work of a
person trained in the classical tradition. The structure of the stories is not
based on an “and-then” sequence but rather is organized hypotactically
according to the principle of causality.26
LeGuern, correctly I believe, contrasts Flore to Marguerite de Navarre
in this respect. Where Marguerite’s stories unfold paratactically—one
thing after another—with the thesis extracted metanarratively; in the
Comptes amoureux the thesis is built into the story at the beginning, so
that the story works to exemplify the thesis. In story number three, for ex-
ample, which concerns an adolescent married to a decrepit elderly man
after she has “scorned” Love by holding herself aloof from several youth-
ful suitors, the deity’s vengeance is introduced causally at the beginning of
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 139

the story: “Cupid . . . not having forgotten the irreverence which she dis-
played toward him” [“non ayant mis en oubly l’irreverence que celle luy
portoit” (159)], takes action. The rest of the story then flows from this
cause, and acts as an exemplum of the thesis that you cannot scorn Love.
As a genre the framed-novelle is an interesting combination of paratac-
tic and hyptactic structures, as Katherine S. Gittes points out in her study
of the genre’s history.27 The stories are arranged paratactically but the
frame can (but does not always) provide a unifying hypotaxis. Indeed, the
genre seems to teeter between a centripetally ordered work and one that
has yielded to centrifugal forces; providing a kind of synecdoche of the
centripetal-centrifugal tension that underlies much of Western Europe’s
cultural history, as noted by Bakhtin. Where Bakhtin champions the novel
as the form that retains a locus of resistance to the “centripetal forces in
socio-linguistic and ideological life” (271) because of its “heteroglossia,”
which effects the work of “decentralization and disunification” (272); in
fact, as Bakhtin himself acknowledges, the novel “combin[es] these subor-
dinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities . . . into the higher unity of
the work as a whole” (262). It is really the framed-novelle that retains the
resistance to dominative subordination that Bakhtin extols in the novel. Its
paratactic character may well be another reason, as we suggested in chap-
ter three, that women writers were attracted to the genre.
After Marguerite de Navarre, women writers in this tradition generally
used a familiar paratactic, conversational style. Margaret Cavendish’s style
is determinedly paratactic and “dashaway.” It is characterized by a heavy
use of asyndeton (omission of conjunctions) as well as polysyndeton (rep-
etition of conjunctions), characteristics of a paratactic style. As Mary
Hyatt notes in her study of women’s style, these devices “indicate a lack of
subordination.”

A predilection for polysyndeton lessens the opportunity for grammatical

subordination, for if a string of items is joined equally by the same con-
nective, there can be no hierarchical value assigned to the items. And the
emphasis is . . . of unpredictability, for the reader does not know when the
list will end. But it is also the emphasis of sameness. The effect is often one
of childishness and naiveté simply because no judgment is being made
about the relative importance of the items.28

An example of Cavendish’s use of asyndeton follows. Note, however,

how she uses it to establish an ironic tone, which enables the expression
of her (feminist) standpoint. This passage, which is very typical of
Cavendish’s style, occurs in “The Discreet Virgin,” a feminist novella in
Natures Pictures:
140 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

[A]nd do not Men take more delight in idle pastimes, and foolish sports,
than Women: and in all this time of their visiting, club, gossiping, news,
travelling, news venting, news making, vain spending, mode fashioning,
foolish quarrelling, and unprofitable journeying, what advantage do they
bring to the Commonwealth [?]29

The cumulative effect of this catalog of men’s “idle pastimes” is satirical

and has the effect of undercutting masculine authority, which is the point
of the story. Thus, here we see parataxis, but being used to a coherent po-
litical effect.
By the 1690s women writers were beginning to realize some of the lim-
itations of a strictly paratactic structure. Delarivier Manley in her preface
to The Secret History of Queen Zarah criticizes romances for their failure
to concentrate on “one Principal Event”; they “overcharge [the work] with
Episodes.”30 At the same time Manley urges the use of natural conversa-
tion; “for if it be the Heroe that speaks, then he ought to express himself In-
geniously, without affecting any Nicety of Points or Syllogisms, because he
speaks without any Preparation” (1:a4v). And, although the body of the
work may be written “in a more nice language,” Manley stipulates, con-
versations of characters “ought to be writ after an easie and free Manner;
Fine Expressions and Elegant Turns agree little to the Stile of Conversation
whose Principal Ornament consists in the Plainness, Simplicity, Free and
Sincere Air” (1:a5r).
Mary Davys also indicates a concern about plot unity in various theo-
retical statements. In her important Preface to the Works (1725), she ar-
gues that one of the advantages of fictional “invention” is that it allows
one to better order episodes than as they occur in reality, randomly and
by happenstance: it “gives us room to order Accidents better than For-
tune.”31 “This I have endeavour’d to do,” she claims. “I have in every Novel
propos’d one entire Scheme or Plot, and the other adventures are only inci-
dent or collateral to it; which is the great Rule prescribed by the Criticks”
(1:v). The great rule is, of course, the Aristotelian one of plot unity.
Davys’s theory thus heralds the novel, where there is generally “one en-
tire scheme or plot” with all episodes subordinate in one way or another
to it—a hypotactic arrangement. Davys’s awareness of and concern about
narrative structure is also expressed, as we have noted, in The Lady’s Tale
and The Merry Wanderer (see chapter six). And, although she puts down
pedantic use of “Greek and Latin Motto’s” in her Introduction to The Re-
form’d Coquet,32 both The Accomplished Rake and The Reform’d Coquet are
distinguished by their plot unity and coherence.
It may be that Davys was in this influenced by Mary Astell, who is said
to have mastered “the art of eloquence” with a “bold invasion of the mas-
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 141

culine stronghold of traditional rhetoric.”33 Her treatises were carefully or-

ganized according to classical rhetorical doctrine (99), but her principal
rhetorical theory derived from Descartes and other Cartesian rhetoricians,
who maintained that rational order is something that is innate in the mind,
and therefore one has only to look within rather than to classical models to
discover the elusive “rules” that so exercised Margaret Cavendish.
As Astell states in her Serious Proposal: “And since Truth is so near at
hand . . . we are not oblig’d to tumble over many Authors . . . but may
have it for enquiring after in our own Breasts” (as cited in Sutherland,
106). She continues, “All have not leisure to Learn Languages and pore on
Books, nor Opportunity to Converse with the Learned; but all may Think,
may use their own Faculties rightly, and consult the Master who is within
them” (106). Like Cavendish, Astell concludes that “Nature . . . instruct[s]
us in Rhetoric much better than Rules of Art, which if they are good ones
are nothing else but those Judicious Observations which Men of Sense
have drawn from Nature” (110). The only difference is that the Nature
Astell is speaking of is “Nature methodized,” to use Pope’s term, a nature
that is in the rationalist world-view of Newtonian and Cartesian mecha-
nism itself classically ordered and unified.
Women writers thus struggled with the conflicting claims of hypotaxis
and parataxis. They were, of course, influenced by the philosophical cur-
rents of their day, moving in the early eighteenth century away from the
more paratactic structure of the framed-novelle toward the more hyptac-
tic organization of the novel; Jane Barker being the last to manifest a
strong attachment to the former. To the extent that hypotaxis is a subor-
dinative dominative mode this abandonment of the framed-novelle
structure may have been unfortunate. However, variations of the genre
have resurfaced from time to time—for example, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The
Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). And it may be that we are now seeing
a revival of the form with works like Julia Voznesenskaya’s The Women’s
Decameron (1985), Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt
(1991), or Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), which Rachel Blau
DuPlessis cites as an example of “radical parataxis,” a form of “verbal
quilt . . . everything joined with no subordination, no ranking.”34
The final non-Latinate device seventeenth-century women writers
helped to pioneer, undoubtedly contributing to its pervasive use in the
novel, was the practice of indirect discourse, overheard or reported
speech, the style indirect libre. We noted in chapter two an important in-
stance of its use in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters in which she ironically re-
ports the conversation of the pundits about the origins of the universe.
The inherent irony in indirect discourse, as seen in the Cavendish and
other examples, did much to establish the novel’s inherently ironic mood.
142 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

As Ann Banfield notes, indirect discourse or what she calls represented

speech, was largely unknown in Latin texts; there are few, if any, examples
of it in classical or medieval literature.35 While the form has an oral con-
text, a conversation, and in this way connects to oral culture, it is, accord-
ing to Banfield, a strictly literary form, reflecting the advent of a literate
culture; it is a “novelistic” device (241). While Jane Austen is often thought
to have invented it, as I have indicated throughout this study, it was widely
and effectively deployed by women writers over a century before her.
In his discussion in The Rape of Clarissa of the language used by
Richardson’s heroine Pamela, Terry Eagleton accentuates the political sig-
nificance of the novel’s rhetorical modes. By monitoring the transforma-
tion of her diction, one can trace Pamela’s political subdual. In part two,
“Pamela the pert colloquialist has become Pamela the genteel house-
wife—tirelessly producing anonymous platitudes.” The transformation of
her rhetoric indicates her “linguistic absorption into the ruling class,” her
domination as “collusive victim of patriarchy.”36
The “epistemic choices”—to use Richard Ohmann’s characterization
of writers’ prose styles37—made by the women writers of the early mod-
ern period were in part a result of practical pressures and in part similarly
a manifestation of their own political position. The practical factors in-
cluded the fact that, having been excluded from training in official Latin
modes for centuries, women had no recourse but to use the vernacular,
oral modes they knew.
It may also be that these and other women’s inclination toward
parataxis may have been rooted in their own domestic material practices,
in use-value production, which does not entail a rigidly hierarchical divi-
sion of labor. In their personal domestic practice these women performed
a variety of tasks sequentially but none of these was necessarily given pri-
ority (unlike in exchange-value production where intellectual and man-
ual labor are separated with the former held in higher esteem and with
labor acutely specialized and repetitive). Cavendish’s equation of spinning
and writing, which we discussed earlier, suggests a refusal to rank one
above the other. And Jane Barker’s Patch-Work Screen, in which no rank-
ing is given to the different patches, which are labor products, also sug-
gests an aesthetic based on the nonhierarchical character of use-value
production. While most of the women in this study were of the upper
ranks in a highly stratified society, their own personal labor was produc-
tion for use, as characterized above. To the extent that one’s material prac-
tices impinge on one’s epistemology and one’s aesthetics (as held in
Marxist theory), such nonhierarchical labor may have influenced their
rhetorical modes, their epistemic choices.
WOMEN AND THE LATIN RHETORICAL TRADITION Í 143

Beyond this, it is clear that these women’s political location in the un-
official margins and their resentment of and resistance to such subordi-
nation were determining factors in the epistemic choices they as a group
made. Their style—characterized as we have seen by paratactic syntax, the
plain style in prose, and the ironic use of indirect discourse (all non- or
anti-Latinate forms)—reflects a political resistance both to their domina-
tion by official cultures and to hierarchical subordination. In this way, the
rhetorical modes that characterized this body of women’s writing pro-
vided a resistance to the official “word of the fathers,” thereby enriching
the subversive prosaics of the early modern era, which paved the way for
the rise of the novel.
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Conclusion

Had she been born in 1827, Dorothy Osborne would have written nov-
els; had she been born in 1527, she would never have written at all, but
she was born in 1627, and at that date though writing books was ridicu-
lous for a woman there was nothing unseemly in writing a letter. And so
by degrees the silence is broken.
—Virginia Woolf
“Dorothy Osborne’s Letters”1

HIS BOOK HAS ATTEMPTED TO CHART THE DEGREES by which Western

T women’s literary silence was broken. Woolf dates the emergence of the
middle-class woman writer to the end of the eighteenth century, an event
she considers “of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the
Roses. . . . For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette
and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters . . . that women gener-
ally . . . took to writing.”2
In this study I have traced the origins of women’s literary writing in the
West back much farther than the end of the eighteenth century, and have
claimed implicitly that not only do Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch
matter; so too do the Heptaméron by Marguerite de Navarre, the Novelas
amorosas by María de Zayas, the Sociable Letters by Margaret Cavendish,
The Fugitive by Mary Davys, and A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies by
Jane Barker—and many more.
In their pioneering works not only did these women break women’s lit-
erary silence, they also articulated a feminist position or standpoint in one
of the greatest dialogues in Western history, the querelle des femmes. In ex-
pressing a critical position against abusive and pejorative treatment of
women—realized through modes of critical irony, satire, and burlesque—
these women contributed to the subversive antiauthoritarianism of the
early modern period that helped to define the novel’s ethos. In their use
146 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

of casuistry to particularize individual women’s realities, these women en-

couraged attention to the detailed circumstances of individual lives,
which helped to shape the novel’s prosaics; its dense, anti-theoretistic and
ultimately subversive realism.
The ethical hope behind such realistic presentations is that, as Iris
Murdoch pointed out,

the more the separateness and differentness of other people is realized, and
the fact seen that another . . . has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s
own, the harder it is to treat a person as a thing.3

These women hoped to establish through their literary presentations the

awareness that women were people, not things; that they were subjects of
needs and desires, not objects to be used for others’ purposes.
As noted in the beginning of this study, neocasuistry is an important
branch of contemporary ethics. It is premised on the idea that focusing
attention on an individual’s reality helps to foster ethical awareness of that
individual. In The Waves, perhaps Virginia Woolf ’s greatest novel, one
character muses, “I am no mystic; something always plucks at me—
curiosity, envy, admiration, interest in hairdressers and the like bring me
to the surface.”4 It is this aesthetic and ethical attitude—interest in hair-
dressers and the like—that characterizes the novel’s prosaics. The women
writers of the early modern period contributed much to its emergence in
Western culture.
Notes

Introduction

1. See Josephine Donovan, “From Avenger to Victim: Genealogy of a Renais-

sance Novella,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no. 2 (1996): 248 n. 1.
For a similar definition, see Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 17–18; also, Constance Jordan, Re-
naissance Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 2–9.
The term early modern, which I use throughout, is also an imperfect des-
ignation, but I think the best currently available. See Heather Dubrow, “The
Term Early Modern,” PMLA 109, no. 5 (Oct. 1994):1025–26.
2. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Newcastle, Poems, and Fancies (London: J.
Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), p. A3v.
3. Predecessors here include especially Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman
Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (Lon-
don: Pandora, 1986); Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Ori-
gins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and
John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
4. See especially Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, and Richetti, Popular
Fiction.

Chapter One

1. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1920; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971),
p. 88.
2. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957), p. 15. Further references follow in the text.
3. Clara Reeve, The Progress of the Novel (New York: Facsimile Text Society,
1930), p. 111.
4. Arthur Herrold Teije, The Theory of Characterization in Prose Fiction Prior
to 1740, University of Minnesota Studies in Language and Literature, no. 5
(1916), pp. 16–18.
5. [Delarivier Manley], “To the Reader,” The Secret History of Queen Zarah, and
the Zarazians in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, ed. Patricia Koster.
148 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

2 vols. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), 1:A5r. Fur-
ther references follow in the text.
6. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Pro-
saics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 33. Further references
follow in the text.
7. [Margaret Cavendish], the Marchioness of Newcastle, CCXI Sociable Letters
(1664; facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1969), p. 257.
8. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, Natures Pictures
Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye,
1656), p. 349. Further references follow in the text.
9. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 20. Further references follow in the
text.
10. An interesting theory proposed by Giovanni Dotoli, Letteratura per il popolo
in Francia (1600–1750) (Fasano, Italy: Schena, 1991) is that the formation
of the nation-state during the seventeenth century required the extirpation
of regionalist, folk loyalties, many of which were ancient traditions con-
nected to women. The forces of modernity too worked to marginalize these
feminine, folk traditions. See also Benedetta Craveri, “Women in Retreat,”
New York Review of Books, 19 December 1991.
In various works, especially Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1984), Bakhtin locates the resistance to translocal offi-
cialdom in folk traditions of parody. Joan DeJean in Tender Geographies
details French women’s resistance to the absolutism of Louis XIV (though
these were aristocratic women, not “folk” women), which is seen in some of
their literature.
Certainly, several English women writers took aim at the political
machinations of early modern statecraft, particularly Delarivier Manley in
her romans à clef. See Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The
Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1
(Spring 1988):24–39, and Jerry C. Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism: The
Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists,” in Fetter’d or Free: British
Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Mach-
eski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 216–36.
11. See especially G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1971).
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics (n. p.: Ardis, 1973), p. 47.
Further references follow in the text.
13. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992),
p. 196. Further references follow in the text.
14. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 66.
Further references follow in the text.
15. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to
the Love of God,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New
York: David McKay, 1977), p. 51.
NOTES Í 149

16. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Yale Review 69
(Dec. 1959): 257.
17. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review 13 (Autumn
1959):51, 54.
18. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. xvii.
Further references follow in the text.
19. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 441. Further references follow in the text.
20. Margaret Anne Doody, “Women’s Novels and the Femaleness of the Novel,”
The World and I, November 1987, 366, 370.
21. Josephine Donovan, “Everyday Use and Moments of Being: Toward a Non-
dominative Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, ed. Hilde Hein
and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp.
53–67.
22. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957), p. 25.
Further references follow in the text.
23. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth
Press, 1966), p. 107.
24. Josephine Donovan, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange,”
Hypatia 11, no. 2 (1996):161–84.
25. Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville,
Maine: Colby College Press, 1967), p. 120.
26. On Gnosticism in Existentialist literature see Josephine Donovan, Gnosti-
cism in Modern Literature (New York: Garland, 1990); for critiques of post-
structuralism from the point of view suggested here, see Carol Bigwood,
Earth Muse (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Murdoch, Meta-
physics as a Guide to Morals, and Doody, The True Story of the Novel.
27. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982), p. 19.
28. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), pp. 166–75.
29. Emile V. Telle, L’Oeuvre de Marguerite d’Angoulême, Reine de Navarre et la
querelle des femmes (Toulouse: Lion et Fils, 1937), p. 75. My translation.
30. Marie de Gournay, Egalité des hommes et des femmes; Grief des dames; suivi
du Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, ed. Constant Venesoen (Geneva:
Droz, 1993), p. 85. My translation.
31. María de Zayas, The Enchantments of Love, trans. H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), p. xvii; Zayas, Parte segunda del Sarao
y entretenimiento honesto [Desengaños amorosos], ed. Alicia Yllera (Madrid:
Cátedra, 1983), p. 118.
32. [Margaret Cavendish], the Duchess of Newcastle, Preface, Natures Picture
[sic] Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, 2d ed. (London: A. Maxwell, 1671),
p. C1r.
33. See Josephine Donovan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive
Love (Boston: Twayne, 1991).
150 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Chapter Two

1. Douglas Hay, as cited in Ellen Pollak, “Moll Flanders, Incest, and the Struc-
ture of Exchange,” Eighteenth Century 30, no. 1 (1989): 9.
2. See ibid., and chapter five.
3. Ibid., p. 7
4. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1971), p. 166. Further references follow in the text.
5. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure
under Patriarchy’,” in Feminism and Philosophy, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rose-
marie Tong (Boulder: Westview, 1995), p. 135.
6. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), p. 389.
7. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the
Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discover-
ing Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Rei-
del, 1983), p. 303.
8. Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist
Theory,” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 441–62. Portions of the remainder of this
chapter were originally presented in a somewhat different form in this arti-
cle. ©1991 by the University of Chicago.
9. Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
pp. 21–57. Further references follow in the text. My translations throughout.
10. Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in Women and Fiction, ed. Susan Cahill (New
York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 364–72.
11. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 30–31. Further references follow in the text.
12. Maurice Z. Shroder, “The Novel as a Genre” (1963), in The Novel: Modern
Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Murray Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 43–58.
13. John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. 259. Further references follow in the text.
14. Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; Or, Love and Virtue Recom-
mended (1723; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland, l973), p. 7. Further ref-
erences follow in the text.
15. [Margaret Cavendish], the Marchioness of Newcastle, CCXI Sociable Letters
(1664; facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1969), pp.
311–12. Further references follow in the text.
16. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Newcastle, Poems, and Fancies (London: J.
Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), p. A5r. Further references follow in the text.
17. Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, l980), pp.
50, 52.
18. Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in
British Fiction, 1778 - 1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 10.
NOTES Í 151

19. V. N. Volo%inov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 2d ed., trans.

Ladislav Metejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press,
l973), pp. 141 n. 1, 144.
20. Gary Saul Morson, “Tolstoy’s Absolute Language,” in Bakhtin: Essays and
Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, l986), p. 130.
21. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, “To the Two
Universities,” Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: J. Martin and J.
Allestrye, 1655), p. B2v.
22. [Delarivier Manley], The Adventures of Rivella (1714; facsimile reprint, New
York: Garland, 1972), pp. 53–57, 72–81. Further references follow in the
text.
23. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English
Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
24. Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und
Frankreich, 2d ed. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), p. 31. My translation.

Chapter Three

Note: An earlier version of this and the next chapter appeared as “Women
and the Framed-Novelle: A Tradition of Their Own,” Signs 22, no. 4 (Sum-
mer 1997). ©1997 by the University of Chicago.
1. Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella (New York:
New York University Press, 1977), p. 183. Further references follow in the text.
2. Victor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmond Park, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), pp. 65–71.
3. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Pro-
saics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 274.
4. See Katherine S. Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1991).
5. See Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und
Frankreich, 2d ed. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), pp. vi, 19–20, 24–28; Pa-
tricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the “Heptaméron” of Mar-
guerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991),
pp. 7, 105; Janet M. Ferrier, Forerunners of the French Novel (Manchester,
England: Manchester University Press, 1954), pp. 5, 26; Margaret Schlauch,
Antecedents of the English Novel 1400–1600 (From Chaucer to Deloney)
(Warsaw: PWN Polish Scientific Publishers; London: Oxford University
Press, 1963), pp. 101, 123, 138.
6. For more on these transitions see Charles C. Mish, “English Short Fiction in
the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1968–69): 247–59,
279–316; B. G. MacCarthy, The Female Pen (1946–47; reprint, New York:
New York University Press, 1994), pp. 126–29; Corradina Caporello-
Sykeman, The Boccaccian Novella (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 2–5.
152 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

7. It is appears likely that Bakhtin had not read even the best known of these
works, the Heptaméron. In Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), he dismisses it as an expression of “official” court
society (184, 138–39), contrasted to the folk “marketplace” or “billingsgate”
roots of Rabelais’s work. In fact, several of the Heptaméron stories exhibit
the scatological humor that Bakhtin so admires in Rabelais as subversive;
and many of the stories deal with peasants and the middle classes, which
suggests that Bakhtin had not in fact read the Heptaméron.
The frame characters in the Heptaméron are aristocrats, but their dis-
cussion, which expresses a number of different points of view, is by no
means a monolithic representation of upper-class interests. Indeed, the in-
tellectual depth of their discussion is an aspect of dialogic discourse that
Bakhtin neglects. In Rabelais and His World, in particular, Bakhtin’s con-
ception of the dialogic becomes a somewhat adolescent “in-your-face” anti-
intellectualism. The concept itself would have been considerably enriched
had he relied more upon Marguerite de Navarre than on Rabelais.
8. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 342. Further references follow in the text.
9. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 103; Mar-
garet J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1993), pp. 37–38, 55–57; Clements and Gilbaldi,
Anatomy, pp. 5–6.
10. Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 51.
11. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1975), p.
408. Emphasis in original.
12. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Exclusive Conversations” (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press,1988), p. 11.
13. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, Natures Pictures
Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye,
1656), p. 104.
14. Cholakian, Rape and Writing, p. 217. Further references follow in the text.
15. The editor of the most recent critical edition of her work, Constant Vene-
soen (see chap. 1, n. 30) says she was familiar with both of their works.
16. Domna C. Stanton, “Women as Object and Subject of Exchange: Marie de
Gournay’s Le Proumenoir (1594),” L’Esprit créateur 23, no. 2 (1983): 17. Fur-
ther references follow in the text.
17. Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1966), p. 157; The
Decameron, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 167. Fur-
ther references follow in the text.
18. Mihoko Suzuki, “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader: Boccaccio’s De-
cameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron,” Comparative Literature
Studies 30, no. 3 (1993): 232.
19. Madeleine Jeay, ed., Les Évangiles des quenouilles, (Paris: J. Vrin; Montréal:
Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1985), p. 77. Further references follow in
the text. My translations throughout.
NOTES Í 153

20. See Denis Baril, “Des ‘Quenouilles’ aux ‘Caquets’: 150 ans de commérages,”
Recherches et travaux (University of Grenoble, France), no. 22 (1982):
53–64, for a discussion of Les Évangiles and a later similar work, Les Caquets
de l’accouchée (1622). Like Jeay, Baril feels that despite the frame of “mascu-
line derision” these works manifest a kind of “feminine affirmation” (63, my
translation).
21. Denis Baril and Gabriel-André Perouse, “Histoire du Texte,” Contes
amoureux par Madame Jeanne Flore, ed. Gabriel-A. Perouse et al. (Lyon:
Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980), pp. 9–15. Further references to this
edition follow in the text. My translations throughout.
22. Florindo Cerrata, “Jeanne Flore and Early French Translations from Boiardo
and F. Bello” in La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi and
V. L. Saulnier (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), p. 256; for the former position see
Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Parodic Didacticism in the Contes Amoureux par
Madame Jeanne Flore,” French Forum 20, no. 1 (1995): 5–21.
23. Nazli Fathi-Rizk, “La Moralité finale dans les ‘Comptes amoureux’ de
Jeanne Flore,” in La Nouvelle française, ed. Sozzi end Saulnier, p. 268. My
translation.
24. Ferrier, Forerunners, pp. 6, 86–91.
25. Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême (Paris: Champion, 1930), pp. 1288,
518, 534. Further references follow in the text. My translations throughout.
26. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, ed. and trans. P. A. Chilton (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1984), p. 68; L’Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Garnier,
1991), p. 9. Further references follow in the text.
27. Ferrier, Forerunners, pp. 93–103, compares novella six with its source in the
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles; Cholakian, Rape and Writing, p. 46, 73–75, analy-
ses novellas one, eight, and forty-eight. On the use of exempla in the Hep-
taméron, see John D. Lyons, Exemplum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1989).

Chapter Four

1. Edwin B. Place, “María de Zayas, an Outstanding Woman Writer of Seven-

teenth-Century Spain,” University of Colorado Studies 13(1923): 10.
2. H. Patsy Boyer, Introduction to The Enchantments of Love (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1990), p. xxxvi.
3. Zayas, “El prevenido engañado” and “El imposible vencido” in Novelas
amorosas y ejemplares (Madrid: Aldus, 1948); “Forewarned but Not Fore-
armed” and “Triumph over the Impossible” in Enchantments of Love, trans.
Boyer.
4. María de Zayas, “Too Late for Disillusionment,” trans. Peter Cocozzella, in
Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Katharine M. Wilson and
Frank J. Warnke (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 225; María
de Zayas, Parte segunda del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto [Desengaños
154 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

amorosos], ed. Alicia Yllera (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), pp. 254–55. Further
references follow in the text.
5. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, ed. and trans. P. A. Chilton (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1984), p. 371; L’Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Garnier,
1967), p. 278. Further references follow in the text.
6. María de Zayas y Sotomayor, A Shameful Revenge and Other Stories, trans.
John Sturrock (London: Folio Society, 1963), p. 108; María de Zayas, Parte
segunda, p. 374. Further references follow in the text.
7. Enchantments of Love, p. 1; Novelas amorosas, p. 21. Further references fol-
low in the text.
8. With the possible exception of the heroic romance. See Mish, “English Short
Fiction,” pp. 308–9, for the use of the frame in the romance.
9. Alicia Yllera, Introduction to Parte segunda, pp. 83–88; J. E. Tucker, “The
Earliest English Translations of Scarron’s Nouvelles,” Revue de Littérature
comparée 24 (1950): 557–63; Frederick Alfred de Armas, The Four Interpo-
lated Stories in the “Roman Comique”: Their Sources and Unifying Function
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); A Week’s Entertain-
ment at a Wedding, Containing Six Surprizing and Diverting Adventures
Written in Spanish by the Author of Don Quixot (London: J. Woodwart,
1710). Armas, pp. 103–05, and Place, “María de Zayas,” p. 25, note that Scar-
ron’s translations are loose; he added and deleted episodes but retained the
gist of her plots. Armas also comments, pp. 98–99, however, “Maria de
Zayas, a believer in the superiority of woman . . . has no problem believing
that a lady can surpass a man in battle. Scarron must find a plausible mo-
tive for the capacity” (in “Le Juge de sa propre cause”). See also Etienne Ca-
billon, “A Propos d’une traduction des Novelas amorosas y ejemplares de
Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor,” Les Langues neo-latines, no. 183–84 (1968):
48–65. In “Aphra Behn’s Progressive Dialogization of the Spanish Voice”
(Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1992), Delors
Altaba-Artal proposes that Zayas had a strong and direct influence on Behn.
10. [Mary Carleton], The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (London: Speed and
March, 1663), p. A4v. Further references follow in the text.
11. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, Natures Pictures
Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye,
1656), pp. 47–48. Further references follow in the text.
12. [Delarivier Manley], Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Qual-
ity, of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, 2 vols. (London: John Morphew
and J. Woodward, 1709), 1:1. Further references follow in the text.
13. [Delarivier Manley], The Adventures of Rivella (1714; facsimile reprint, New
York: Garland, 1972), p. 7.
14. [Delarivier Manley], The Power of Love: In Seven Novels ([London]: John
Barber and John Morphew, 1720), pp. 276–77. Further references follow in
the text.
15. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272.
NOTES Í 155

16. Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; Or, Love and Virtue Recom-
mended (1723; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland, 1973), pp. v-vi. Further
references follow in the text.
17. See Jacqueline Pearson, “History of The History of the Nun,” in Rereading
Aphra Behn, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1993).
18. Jane Barker, The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (London: A. Bettisworth,
1726), p. 201.

Chapter Five

1. Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renais-

sance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 4. Further references
follow in the text. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin in The Abuse of Ca-
suistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988) and Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctor’s Stories: The Narra-
tive Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991) revalidate casuistry as a form of moral reasoning.
2. Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition: In Shakespeare, Donne, Her-
bert, and Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8;
Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, p. 137.
Other useful works on the history of casuistry consulted but not cited
elsewhere include E. Dublanchy, “Casuistique,” in Dictionnaire de théologie
catholique, ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, 3d ed. (Paris: Librairie
Letouzey, 1932), vol. 2, pt. 2; P. J. Holmes, ed. Elizabethan Casuistry (Thet-
ford, England: Catholic Record Society, 1981); Henry Charles Lea, A History
of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadel-
phia: Lea Brothers, 1896), vol. 2; John T. McNeil, “Casuistry in the Puritan
Age,” Religion in Life 12 (1943): 76–89; Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de
casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen age (XII-XVI siècles) (Louvain:
Nauwelaerts, 1962); Elliot Rose, Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975); Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of
the Reformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
3. Walter Pabst, Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung: Zur Geschichte ihrer
Antinomie in den romanischen Literaturen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1967),
pp. 8–14; André Jolles, Formes simples, trans. Antoine Marie Buquet (1930;
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 145, 151; Alexander H. Schutz,
“Provençal Poetry,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enl. ed. Alex
Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 679. Fur-
ther references to Pabst follow in the text.
4. Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Garnier,
1991), p. 233.
5. Joseph Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience
(1650), in The Works, ed. Philip Wynter, rev. ed., 10 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
156 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

University Press, 1863), 7:410. Further references follow in the text. For a de-
tailed genealogy of this novella see John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fic-
tion (1814), rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:219–24.
6. Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the “Heptaméron” of Mar-
guerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p.
155.
7. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century
English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 289.
8. G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1971), p. 134 n. 32. Further references follow in the text.
9. Jolles, Formes simples, 143, 150, my translation.
10. Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fic-
tion,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pan-
theon, 1981), pp. 339–60. Further references follow in the text. In her essay
Miller is amplifying ideas presented by Gérard Genette in “Vraisemblance et
motivation,” Figures II (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1969).
11. Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves, trans. Walter J. Cobb (New
York: Penguin, 1989), p. 117; La Princesse de Clèves, ed. Jean-Claude Laborie
(1678; reprint, Paris: Larousse, 1995), p. 175. Further references follow in
the text.
12. See Moshé Lazar, Amour courtois et “fin’ amors” dans la littérature du XIIe
siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1964), pp. 52, 55, 57, 73–77; R. Howard Bloch,
Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), pp. 172–73.
13. René Nelli and René Lavaud, Les Troubadours, vol. 2, Le Trésor poétique de
l’Occitanie (Bruges: Brouwer, 1966), pp. 134–37, my translation from the
modern French.
Another example may be seen in a tenson by Guillelma de Rosers (mid-
thirteenth century) and Lanfranc Cigala. Here the debate is over whether a
woman is better served by a knight who spends time with her or by one who
honors her by serving others. Guillelma replies decisively in favor of the
first; of the latter she asks, “if he was so moved as you say by chivalry,/ why
didn’t he first serve his lady?” [“pois bels servirs tan de cor li movia/ car non
servi sidons premieiramen?”] (in Meg Bogin, The Women Troubadours
[London: Paddington, 1976], pp. 136–37). Pabst, Novellentheorie, pp. 13–14,
analyzes the razos that accompanies this tenson to support his claim that the
razos as a form evolved into the casuistical frame discussions seen in the De-
cameron and the Heptaméron.
14. Bogin, Women Troubadours, p. 168.
15. William Allan Neilson, The Origins and Sources of the “Court of Love” (1899;
reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), p. 242.
16. Christine de Pisan, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, 2 vols. (1891; New
York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 2:129.
17. It is significant to note that Western jurisprudence in its use of the case
method, is rooted in casuistry (see Jonsen and Toulmin; K. Hunter; and
NOTES Í 157

Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983]). In fact, Justinian’s
Corpus civile, a major source of early modern law occasionally recounts its
cases in anecdotes that resemble novellas. Indeed, the section of the code
that deals primarily with domestic matters (and thus women) is labeled
“The Novels” ([Justinian], The Civil Law, ed. S.P. Scott, 17 vols. [1932;
reprint in 7 vols., New York: AMS Press, 1973], vol. 16 [in reprint vol. 7], sec.
4, 3–364). For example, in a section on guardianship of children, an anec-
dotal “case” is presented that clearly anticipates the novella; it begins
“Martha, a woman of illustrious birth, has presented a petition to us which
sets forth that Sergius, her father of magnificent memory, died while she
was of extremely tender age. Auxentia, her mother . . . having had issue by
her second marriage . . . manifested very little affection for Martha . . .”
(Justinian, vol. 17 [in reprint vol. 7], p. 182).
The current reemphasis on narrative in legal theory may be seen as a re-
turn to the casuistical roots of Western jurisprudence. For an interesting
feminist take on this development, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Law’s
Stories as Reality and Politics,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the
Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996), pp. 232–37.
18. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: Dell,
1966), p. 383; Il Decameron (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1966), p. 388. Further
references follow in the text.
19. The other two are IV.1 and IV.5. While these have a general feminist point,
brutally illustrating male control in the family over women, neither uses ca-
suistry extensively to make the point, although Ghismonda in IV.1 does
argue other points casuistically.
The story of Bernabo’s wife was a much-told tale, a source in fact for
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (see A. C. Lee, The Decameron: Its Sources and Ana-
logues [New York: Haskell House, 1971], pp. 42–57), but none of the other
versions seems to highlight the woman’s “case” in feminist terms as Boccac-
cio and Christine de Pizan do.
20. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards
(New York: Persea, 1982), pp. 182–83; The “Livre de la cité des dames” of
Christine de Pisan, ed. Maureen C. Curnow, 3 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI,
1975), 3:920–21.
21. Other than Boccaccio and Defoe no male authors that I’m aware of used ca-
suistry in even a qualified feminist way. Rabelais broadly satirizes the Sum-
mas of scholastic theology in Book III of Gargantua et Pantagruel, but does
not otherwise engage casuistry, and his work is in any event deeply in-
formed with misogyny.
22. Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême (Paris: Champion, 1930), 22, 26–27.
My translations throughout. Further references follow in the text.
23. She used the format of the casuistical love debate in her comedies and other
short pieces. See Telle, L’Oeuvre de Marguerite, pp. 215–36.
158 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

24. Robert Codrington, Preface to Heptameron or the History of the Fortunate

Lovers (London: Nath. Ekins, 1654), p. A3.
25. Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993),
p. 46, suggests as an influence on Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir Marguerite
Porete’s antinomian Miroir des simples âmes (ca. 1285–95). Porete, a Be-
guine, was burned as a heretic in 1310 after the work was condemned.
Navarre also had within her household for a time an antinomian heretic by
the name of Quintin, who was burned for heresy in 1547.
26. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, ed. and trans. P. A. Chilton (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1984), p. 196; L’Heptaméron, ed. M. François (Paris: Garnier,
1991), p. 123. Further references follow in the text.
27. The question of whether marriage can be dissolved by the partners was
a hot issue in casuistry treatises (see Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, 146, 147
n. 52).
28. See Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, p. 179.
29. Boccaccio treats a variant of Heptameron, novella forty, in the Decameron,
4th day, 5th tale; Christine de Pizan retells it in the Livre de la cité des dames,
and María de Zayas reworks it as novella eight, “El traidor contra su sangre”
in the Parte segunda (see discussion in chapter four).
30. Bertha-Monica Stearnes, “The First English Periodical for Women,” Modern
Philology 28 (1930): 47. Further references follow in the text.
31. Ernest Bernbaum, The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663–1673: A Missing
Chapter in the History of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1914). Further references follow in the text.
32. There is some debate as to what extent Carleton was the sole author. Bern-
baum seems to think much was written by a scribe (12, 22), and C. F. Main,
“The German Princess; or Mary Carleton in Fact and Fiction,” Harvard Li-
brary Bulletin, no. 10 (1956): 173, by a hack. But modern critics, especially
Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988) and Mihoko Suzuki, “The Case of
Madam Mary Carleton: Representing the Female Subject, 1663–73,” Tulsa
Studies in Women’s Literature 12, no. 1 (1993), assume Carleton to be the
principal author of The Case. Also there is considerable divergence among
critics over whether her story was essentially true or whether largely a fab-
rication (Bernbaum, Main, and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English
Novel, 1600–1740 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987], p.242, doubt its verac-
ity, where Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction,
1660–1800 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989], pp. 52–55, for ex-
ample, assumes its validity.)
Recent historical scholarship verifies one aspect of Carleton’s story, her
accurate knowledge of German women’s status, which tends to strengthen
her credibility. Carleton claims to be of German origin and states that Ger-
man women have greater power and legal status than English women. In her
critique of the feme covert law Carleton contrasts it with her own country
“where the wife shares an equal portion with her husband in all things . . .
NOTES Í 159

and can liber intentare, begin and commence, and finish a suit in her own
name” (126).
Merry E. Wiesner in Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986) corroborates this asser-
tion: “a married woman who owns property in her own name—and this
was very common in the sixteenth century—was free to do with it as she
wished . . . without the knowledge or approval of her husband” (26);
“women of all marital statuses brought cases to court, evoking no com-
ment that this was somehow unusual. . . . At no point in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries did a woman completely lose her legal identity when
she married” (31).
My view is that Mary Carleton was either an amazing fiction-writer (and
thus an important transitional figure in the history of fiction) or telling the
truth about a life which used novella paradigms as models—in which case
she was the first of the female quixotes.
33. [Mary Carleton], The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (London: Speed and
March, 1663), p. A3r. Further references follow in the text.
34. Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1964), p. 271. Further references follow in the text.
35. There has been considerable debate over Defoe’s attitude toward his hero-
ines. As Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, comments, “Those who find Moll Flan-
ders and Roxana works of consistent irony will so interpret the casuistical
manoeuvering” in them (186). While I agree with Starr that Defoe has some
sympathy for his protagonists and may have identified with them, he nev-
ertheless casts their story in a pejorative, moralizing, and ironizing frame.
36. Karl Stanglmaier, Mrs. Jane Barker: Ein Beitrag zur englishen Liter-
aturgeschichte (Berlin: E. Eberling, 1906), pp. 48–50.
37. Thomas Philip Haviland, The “Roman de Longue Haleine” on English Soil
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), p. 55.
38. Ibid., p. 137.
39. Jane Barker, Exilius; or, the Banish’d Roman, 2 vols. in l (1715; facsimile
reprint, New York: Garland, 1973), 1:7–9. Further references follow in the text.

Chapter Six

1. See Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), pp. 14–15; also The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2. See Ruth Perry, “Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women,” Eighteenth-
Century Studies 18, no. 4 (1985): 471–93; Margaret Atherton, ed., Women
Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994); Hilda
Smith, Reason’s Disciples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
3. Mary Astell, “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies” and “Some Reflections upon
Marriage” (excerpts), in The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers,
160 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

ed. Katherine M. Rogers and William McCarthy (New York: Penguin, 1987),
p. 120. Further references follow in the text.
4. See Melissa A. Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the
Attack on Patriarchy,” in Feminist Interpretation and Political Theory, ed.
Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 1991), pp. 74–94.
5. See Melvin D. Palmer, “Madame d’Aulnoy in England,” Comparative Litera-
ture 27 (1975): 237–53. Another, though probably less important continen-
tal influence on the English women writers was Paul Scarron’s Roman
comique. I trace the complexities of this influence in chapter eight. It is of
particular interest because Scarron incorporated several Zayas novellas
without attribution. Of course, the structural prototype of the picaresque
framed-novelle is Don Quixote.
6. B. G. MacCarthy, The Female Pen (1946–47; reprint, New York: New York
University Press, 1994), p. 263.
7. Madame [Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness] d’Aulnoy,
Travels into Spain, ed. R. Foulché-Delbosc (London: Routledge, 1930), p. 3;
Madame d’Aulnoy, Relation du voyage d’Espagne, ed. R. Foulché-Delbosc
(Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1926), p. 155. Further references follow in the text.
8. Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 74, 76. See his chapter, “Truth-Lie
Dichotomy” for a further discussion of this issue. D’Aulnoy’s modern
French editor, R. Foulché-Delbosc (see n. 7) holds a similar position.
9. [Delarivier Manley], Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley (London: R. B.,
1696), p. 29. Further references follow in the text. Robert Adams Day, Told
in Letters (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 43, states that
Manley “indubitably imitated” d’Aulnoy.
10. Ibid., p. 158.
11. Another of Manley’s friends, Mary Pix, also published a work of prose fic-
tion in the 1690s. Manley, Trotter, and Pix were lampooned in a 1697 com-
edy The Female Wits: or, The Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal. Pix’s The
Inhumane Cardinal, ed. Constance Clark (1696; Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars Fac-
similes & Reprints, 1984) is not particularly innovative, being a lengthy re-
hearsal of the traditional novella seduction plot. Pix does see it as a
cautionary tale, however, that should “raise Compassion in the tender Bo-
soms of the Young and Fair” (p. 236).
12. Introduction to Olinda’s Adventures by Catherine Trotter (Los Angeles:
Clark Memorial Library, 1969), pp. vi, vii.
13. Included in Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, ed. Margaret
Atherton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 126–46.
14. Trotter, Olinda’s Adventures, p. 137. Further references follow in the text.
15. See Emma Donohue, Passions between Women (New York: Harper, 1993),
pp. 131–32, 238.
16. Fidelia Morgan, A Woman of No Character (London: Faber and Faber,
1986), p. 103.
NOTES Í 161

17. Mary Davys, The Fugitive (London: G. Sawbridge, 1705), p. A6v. Further ref-
erences follow in the text. I have silently corrected the original incorrect
pagination.
18. Mary Davys, The Merry Wanderer, in The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: H. Woodfall, 1725), 1:161. Further references follow in the text.
19. Mary Davys, The Lady’s Tale, in The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2:125. The 1704
version is apparently no longer extant.
20. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957), p. 69.
21. See Naomi Jacobs, “The Seduction of Aphra Behn,” Women’s Studies 18
(1991):395–403; also Judith Kegan Gardiner, “The First English Novel:
Aphra Behn’s Love Letters, the Canon, and Women’s Tastes,” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 8, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 201–22.
22. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, vol. 5 (London: Heine-
mann, 1915), p. 96. Though not entirely reliable, Summers says it may have
appeared as “The Amorous Convent” in 1678.
23. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Stories, ed. Maureen Duffy (London:
Methuen, 1986), p. 125.
24. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), p. 107.
25. Aphra Behn, “The Black Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Summers,
p. 3.
26. Aphra Behn, “The Wandering Beauty,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed.
Summers, p. 448.
27. Altaba-Artal, “Behn’s Progressive Dialogization,” pp. 297–305, considers that
this novella derived from the Violenta novella that we consider in detail in
chapter seven. Altaba-Artal argues for a strong Zayas influence on Behn.
28. Mary Davys, Familiar Letters, Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, in The Works
of Mrs. Davys, 2:272, 227. Further references follow in the text.
29. William McBurney, “Mrs. Mary Davys: Forerunner of Fielding,” PMLA 74
(Sept. 1979): 354.
30. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p.
146.
31. Mary Davys, The Reform’d Coquet (1724; facsimile reprint, New York: Gar-
land, 1973), pp. 80–81. Further references follow in the text.

Chapter Seven

Note: An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “From Avenger to Vic-

tim: The Genealogy of a Renaissance Novella,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Lit-
erature 15, no. 2 (1996): 269–88. ©1996 The University of Tulsa. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher.
1. An example of the “backlash” is the 1697 lampoon The Female Wits (see
chap. six, n. 11). See also Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 5–6.
162 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

2. See especially Alice Clark’s classic study Working Life of Women in the Sev-
enteenth Century (1919; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968), pp. 11–13,
295–308; Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press,
1980), pp. 27–62; Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eigh-
teenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 10–11, 48, 262;
Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, pp. 11–15, 91–92, 118–22; and
Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist
Theory,” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 447–49, esp. 448, n. 14.
3. Another English Renaissance version is Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Triumph
of Death,” a short play, the third in “Four Plays in One” (in The Works of
Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Henry Weber, 14 vols. [Edinburgh: James Bal-
lantyne, 1812], 11:80–109). In this variant a long-lost fiancé of Violante
(here Gabriella) returns from the wars in time to help with the vendetta. He
persuades her against torturing Didaco (here Lavall), but Lavall, who has
been drugged, wakes up and kills the fiancé (Perlot). Gabriella then stabs
and kills Lavall, and then kills herself in order to join Perlot in death. A
somewhat similar plot also obtains in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Span-
ish Curate” (1622).
There also was apparently another Spanish version of the novella. Both
William Painter and Delarivier Manley mention as a source for their ver-
sions a “Paludanus” who wrote in Latin, but Laura Tortonese says, in her
analysis of the novella, “Bandello, Boaistuau e la novella di Didaco e
Violante,” in La Nouvelle française, ed. Sozzi and Saulnier, p. 465, n. 14, that
she was unable to locate this version, having combed the Sermones of Pierre
de la Palud, the likely source. Richard A. Carr, the editor of the modern crit-
ical edition of Pierre Boaistuau’s adaptation of Bandello, Histoires tragiques
(1559; Paris: Champion, 1977) also doubts the existence of a Spanish Palu-
danus, as does René Sturel, another scholar (p. 167, n. 2). There is one piece
of evidence, however, which suggests a common source for Zayas and Boais-
tuau (other than Bandello) and that is the emerald ring that appears in
both, which is not in Bandello.
The novella also appears to have become used as an exemplum in the
misogynist writings of the Counterreformation in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Jean de Marconville cites the Bandello version
in his De la bonté et mauvaistie des femmes (Paris: Jean Dallier Librairie,
1571), pp. 60–61. The work is largely a catalog of “bad women” meant to
warn of their inherent depravity. Since, however, none of the fictional writ-
ers I am concerned with appear to have been familiar with Marconville’s
summary (and only Boaistuau expresses a similarly virulent misogyny to-
ward Violenta), I have not included him in my genealogy of the story. See,
however, Giovanni Dotoli, Letteratura per il populo in Francia (1600–1750)
(Fasano, Italy: Schena, 1991), pp. 143–48, 167, for more on this.
4. Since the extant Heptaméron is not complete, it is possible that the last miss-
ing section may have included the Violenta tale—that is, if such a section
ever existed. A seventeenth-century English translator, Robert Codrington,
NOTES Í 163

speculates in his preface that the last section was destroyed in the Counter-
reformation: “I am informed that the Queen had fully finished the Tenth
days work; but the Friers [sic] and Religious Men, who have deprived us of
the two last Journals, and of the greatest part of the eighth, would have de-
prived us also of all the Rest, if possibly they could have prevented it”
(Robert Codrington, Preface to Heptameron or the History of the Fortunate
Lovers [London: Nath. Ekins, 1654], pp. A3r-A3v). The Heptaméron was to
have included one hundred tales, but only seventy-two (with a few variants)
were completed, or at least remain.
5. Tutte le Opere di Matteo Bandello, ed. Francesco Flora, 2 vols. (1934; reprint,
Verona: Arnoldo Montadori, 1966), 1:495. Further references to this edition
follow in the text. My translations throughout.
6. According to Edwin B. Place, “María de Zayas: An Outstanding Woman
Writer of Seventeenth-Century Spain,” University of Colorado Studies 13
(1923): 11.
7. María de Zayas y Sotomayor, A Shameful Revenge and Other Stories, trans.
John Sturrock (London: Folio Society, 1963), p. 64; María de Zayas, Parte se-
gunda del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto [Desengaños amorosos], ed. Alicia
Yllera (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), p. 189; Further references follow in the text.
8. Zayas has one other novella in which the woman successfully avenges her-
self against her violator by killing him: “Just Desserts” (“Al fin se paga todo,”
Novelas amorosas, novella seven).
9. As noted in chapter eight, the main English vehicles for Zayas were transla-
tions of Paul Scarron’s works; however, the Violenta novella was not among
them. “La burlada Aminta” did appear in a French adaptation in 1656–57 as
“La Vengeance d’Aminte affrontée” in Les Nouvelles amoureuses et exem-
plaires, composées en espagnol par cette merveille de son sexe, Doña Maria de
Zayas y Sotto Maior, trans. Antoine de Méthel Escuier Sieur Douville (Paris:
Guyillaume de Luynes). Source of the above information: Alicia Yllera, bib-
liography in Parte segunda, pp. 83–88.
10. Tortonese, “Bandello, Boaistuau,” in La Nouvelle française, pp. 461–70.
Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques extraictes des oeuvres Italiennes de Ban-
del (Paris: Vincent Sertenas, 1559); for modern critical edition see n. 3.
Boaistuau also put together the first, truncated edition of Marguerite de
Navarre’s Heptaméron in 1558. Interestingly, with both Bandello and Mar-
guerite, Boaistuau was concerned to “correct” (i.e., Latinize) their style. See
further discussion in chapter nine.
11. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (1575; reprint, ed. Joseph Hasle-
wood, London: Robert Triphook, 1813), pp. 209, 217. Further references fol-
low in the text. This edition uses the old “I” for a “J” in Janique, which I am
retaining here.
12 [Delarivier Manley], The Power of Love: In Seven Novels ([London]: John
Berber and John Morphew, 1720), p. 180. Further references follow in the text.
13. Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 1966), p. 253.
164 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

14. Eliza Haywood, Love in Its Variety: Being a Collection of Select Novels; Writ-
ten in Spanish by Signior Michael Bandello (London: W. Feales, 1727), p. 106.
Further references follow in the text.
In Love Intrigues: Or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia
(1713) (in The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker,
ed. Carol Shiner Wilson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], pp.
1–47), Jane Barker’s jilted protagonist Galesia fantasizes doing a job on faith-
less Bosvil (p. 31) that is reminiscent of Violenta’s treatment of Roderigo;
Barker’s novella may therefore be another link in the Violenta genealogy.
15. See Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English
Novel, 1722 - 1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. ix, xi.

Chapter Eight

1. Charles C. Mish, Preface to Restoration Prose Fiction 1666 - 1700 (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. x. These stories may well have been
intended for a masculine audience since they were published in The Gentle-
man’s Journal, but it is Mish’s assumption that the anti-romance would not
appeal to women that I wish to highlight.
2. Ian Watt, “Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel,” in Towards a Poet-
ics of Fiction, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1977), p. 103. Further references follow in the text.
3. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1962), p. 235.
4. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1957), p. 172.
5. Maria de Zayas, The Enchantments of Love, trans H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), p. xvii; María de Zayas, Parte segunda
del Sarao y entretenimiento honesto [Desengaños amorosos], ed. Alicia Yllera
(Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), p. 118.
6. Maurice Z. Shroder, “The Novel as a Genre” (1963), in The Novel: Modern
Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Murray Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren-
tice-Hall, 1969), p. 46.
7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, as cited in ibid., p. 50.
8. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 24. Further references follow in the text.
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 239. Further references follow in
the text.
10. Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of
Feminist Criticism,” in Bakhtin, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 154. Further references follow in the text.
11. Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und
Frankreich, 2d ed (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), p. 26. My translation.
NOTES Í 165

12. Christine de Pisan, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, 2 vols. (1891; New
York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 2:14. My translation.
13. Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558 - 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985), pp. 274–76.
14. [Subligny, Adrien Thomas Perdou de], The Mock Clelia, or, Madam Quixote
(London: Simon Neale and Charles Blount, 1678), p. 268.
15. Jane Barker, The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (London: A. Bettisworth,
1726), p. A5r.
16. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in
France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 37–40.
17. Jean Regnault de Segrais, Les Nouvelles françaises, ed. Roger Guichemarre,
vol. 1 (Paris: STFM, 1991), pp. 93–103, for example. Further references fol-
low in the text. My translations throughout.
18. [Margaret Cavendish], the Duchess of Newcastle, Preface to Natures Picture
[sic] Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, 2d ed. (London: A. Maxwell, 1671),
p. B2v.
19. [Margaret Cavendish], the Marchioness of Newcastle, CCXI Sociable Letters
(1664; facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1969), pp. 39–40.
Further references follow in the text.
20. Mary Davys, The Fugitive (London: G. Sawbridge, 1705), pp. A4v-A5r.
21. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English
Novel, 1722 - 1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 4. Fur-
ther references follow in the text.
22. Margaret Anne Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 3 (1980): 268.
23. This the local-color realism of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose
Terry Cooke, and Sarah Orne Jewett. See Josephine Donovan, New England
Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (New York: Ungar, 1983).
24. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744; reprint, London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1973), p. 101. Further references follow in the text.
25. Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta, 2 vols. in 1 (1758; facsimile reprint, New York:
Garland, 1974), 1:11–12. Further references follow in the text.
26. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752; reprint, London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1970), p. 23. Further references follow in the text.
27. See Sharon M. Harris, “Lost Boundaries: The Use of the Carnivalesque in
Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism,” unpublished article, p. 2. Further ref-
erences follow in the text.
28. Tabitha Tenney, Female Quixotism, 2 vols. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. An-
drews, 1801), 1:6. Further references follow in the text.
29. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, in Tales and Novels, 10 vols. (New York:
Harper, 1835), 1:11. Further references follow in the text.
30. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 149.
31. As cited in O. Elizabeth McWhorter Harden, Maria Edgeworth’s Art of Prose
Fiction (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 114.
166 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

32. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (1818; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 2. Further references follow in the text.

Chapter Nine

1. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 271. Further references follow in the text.
2. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967), pp. 250–51. Further references follow in the text.
3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 11. Further
references follow in the text.
4. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. viii. Further references follow in the text.
5. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and
in the Middle Ages (New York: Bollingen, 1965), p. 60.
6. As cited in Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1987), p. 7. Further references follow in the text.
7. Jane Anger, “Her Protection for Women,” in by a woman writt, ed. Joan
Goulianos (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 24.
8. Richard A. Carr, Introduction to Histoires tragiques by Pierre Boaistuau
(Paris: Champion, 1977), p. xxxviii. My translation. Further references fol-
low in the text.
9. [Margaret Cavendish], Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, The Life of the (1st)
Duke of Newcastle and Other Writings by Margaret Duchess, ed. Ernest Rhys
(London: J. M. Dent, n. d.), p. 12. Further references follow in the text.
10. Josephine Donovan, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange,”
Hypatia 11, no. 2 (1996): 161–84; also see discussion in chapter one.
11. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, Philosophical
and Physical Opinions (London: William Wilson, 1663), pp. b4r-b4v. Further
references follow in the text.
12. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Newcastle, Poems, and Fancies (London; J.
Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), p. 110.
13. John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), pp. 126–27, states that this largely feminine reading
public “required the plain style . . . because ornate style, intricate plot, and psy-
chological complication were beyond its comprehension and appreciation.”
14. Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 247. Further references follow in the
text.
15. Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O.
Evans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 224.
16. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 97.
Further references follow in the text.
NOTES Í 167

17. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957), p. 194.
18. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 95, 161,
189–92, 272, 274, 410–11.
19. Torquato Tasso, “Discourse on the Heroic Poem,” in Literary Criticism from
Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1962), p. 465.
20. Aristotle, Poetics 10.20, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Random, 1941), p. 1465.
21. Virginia Woolf, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of “A Room of
One’s Own,” ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 182. Other
than using an ampersand for “and,” Woolf transcribes the passage accurately.
It is found in Pride and Prejudice, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W.
Chapman, 3d ed., 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 2:169.
22. Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic,
1986), pp. 24–28.
23. In his analysis of the sentimentalist tradition, Hard Facts (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), pp. 116–17, Philip Fisher suggests that for an op-
pressed group, which lacks an analysis of the causes of its oppression, events
do seem to happen as just one thing after another: “Sentimental narrative
avoids the roots of actions in the past, [because to do so provides] . . . un-
derstanding why the act occurred . . . [allowing the reader to] identify with
the actor rather than the victim, for [whom] such acts are unexplained.”
24. Germaine Greer, Introduction to Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seven-
teenth-Century Women’s Verse, ed. Greer et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1988), p. 9.
25. Earl Jeffrey Richards, Introduction to The Book of the City of Ladies by
Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea, 1982), pp. xxi, xli.
26. Michel LeGuern, Preface to Contes amoureux par Madame Jeanne Flore, ed.
Gabriel-A. Perouse et al. (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980), pp.
84–86. Further references to this edition follow in the text. My translation.
27. Katherine S. Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood, 1991), p. 29.
28. Mary Hyatt, The Way Women Write (New York: Teachers College Press,
1977), p. 67.
29. [Margaret Cavendish], the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, Natures Pictures
Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye,
1656), 112.
30. [Delarivier Manley], “To the Reader,” The Secret History of Queen Zarah, and
the Zarazians, in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, ed. Patricia Koster,
2 vols. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), 1:A3r. Fur-
ther references follow in the text.
31. Mary Davys, Preface to The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols. (London: H. Wood-
fall, 1725), 1:iv. Further references follow in the text.
168 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

32. Mary Davys, The Reform’d Coquet (1724; facsimile reprint, New York: Gar-
land, 1973), p. 2.
33. Christine Mason Sutherland, “Mary Astell: Reclaimining Rhetorica in the
Seventeenth Century,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), p. 93. Further references
follow in the text.
34. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” in The New Feminist Criticism,
ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 278.
35. Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1982), pp. 228–29. Further references follow in the text.
36. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), p. 36.
37. Richard Ohmann, “Prolegomena to an Analysis of Prose Style,” in Style in
Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 14.

Conclusion

1. Virginia Woolf, “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” in Collected Essays, vol. 3 (Lon-

don: Hogarth, 1967), p. 60.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957), p. 68.
3. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 66.
4. Virginia Woolf, “Jacob’s Room” and “The Waves” (New York: Harcourt,
1959), p. 371.
Index

Adams, Percy G., 81, 135 The Dialogic Imagination, 3–4, 6,

alazon, 4, 17–18, 21, 23, 26, 79, 114, 19–20, 31, 115, 117, 129
118, 125 heteroglossia, 31, 40, 115, 139
Amadís de Gaula, 124 prosaics, ix-xii, 2–3, 6–8, 10–11, 79,
anti-romance, x, xii, 17, 113–20, 122 81, 120, 130–1, 136, 143, 146
Artistotle, 2–3, 6, 85, 136, 140 Rabelais and His World, 31, 115,
Astell, Mary, 22, 93, 113, 140–1 126–7, 152
“Serious Proposal to the Ladies,” theoretism, x-xi, 6–7, 114–15, 133,
80, 141 146
“Some Reflections upon Marriage,” theory of the dialogic, 12, 17, 20,
80 30–3, 39, 78, 152
Athenian Gazette, see Athenian Bandello, Matteo, 44, 97, 108
Mercury. Novelle, 45, 96
Athenian Mercury, 70–1, 73 Violenta novella, 96–9, 102, 105–8,
attentive love, 7 110
Aubin, Penelope, xii-xiii Banfield, Ann, 142
Auerbach, Erich, 27, 116, 136–7 Barker, Jane, xi, xii, 18–21, 48, 79, 91,
Aulnoy, Madame d’, xii, 120 117–18, 138, 141
Relation du voyage d’Espagne, 55, Exilius, 75–6
80–3, 87 The Lining of the Patch Work
Austen, Jane, xi, 22, 113, 121–2, 126, Screen, xi, 56–7, 93, 117
182 Love Intrigues, 164
Emma, 94 A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies,
Pride and Prejudice, 23, 94, 121, 19–21, 26–7, 54–7, 72, 75, 85,
137, 145 122, 124, 142, 145
Sense and Sensibility, 121 Barre, Poulain de la, 80
autobiographies, see life-histories Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher,
Azpilcueta, Martin 162
Enchiridion, 70 Behn, Aphra, xii, 22, 79, 92
“The Adventures of the Black
Bacon, Francis, 135 Lady,” 91–2
Bakhtin, Mikhail, x, 2, 4, 10, 16, 23, 26, “The Fair Jilt,” 91–2
31, 55, 61–2, 114–5, 139 “The History of the Nun; or the
chronotope, 5 Fair Vow-Breaker,” 56, 91, 93
170 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Love-Letters between a Nobleman life-as-, 30, 72–8, 84–7

and His Sister, 91 literary, xii, 60–1, 66–72, 87
“The Lucky Mistake,” 93 see also casuistry; law
Oroonoko, 91–2 casuistical ethic, 6, 8, 10
“The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” casuistry, x, xii, 23, 57, 59–78, 89, 146
91–2 courtly love, 60, 63–6
“The Unhappy Mistake,” 91 feminist, 11, 61–78, 86–7, 94,
“The Wandering Beauty,” 91–3 104–5
Belenky, Mary, 137–8 and the novel, 5–10, 30, 57, 61,
Bernabo’s wife (novella), 35, 64–6, 157 70–1
Bernbaum, Ernest, 72–3 Cavendish, Margaret, the Duchess of
Berquin, Louis de, 67 Newcastle, xi, 14, 19–26, 48, 54,
bigamy, 52, 68, 71–4 79–80, 119, 134, 136, 138–41
bildungsroman, 49, 55, 71, 94, 114, 48, “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,”
72, 75 23, 49, 76, 83
Boaistuau, Pierre, 132 CCXI Sociable Letters, 3, 21, 23–5,
Histoires tragiques, 96, 102–3, 105, 84, 119–20, 133, 141, 145
107, 110 “The Contract,” 23, 48, 71–2, 84,
Boccacio, Giovanni 94
Il Decameron, 29, 35, 38, 45, 49, The Description of a New World,
63–4 Called the Blazing-World, 49,
booksellers, 135 83
Booth, Wayne, 115–16 “The Discreet Virgin,” 139–40
Boyer, H. Patsy, 100 The Life of the Thrice Noble, High
Brontë, Charlotte, 23, 121 and Puissant Prince William
Villette, 145 Cavendish, 132–3
Brontë, Emily Natures Pictures, 3, 23, 33, 48–50,
Wuthering Heights, 145 70–2, 119, 133, 139–40
burlesque, 23, 89, 94, 117–18, 124, 145 Philosophical and Physical
Burney, Fanny, 22, 126 Opinions, 134
Evelina, 49, 71, 136 Poems, and Fancies, ix-x, 22
“The She-Anchoret,” 70
Calprenède, La, Gauthier de Costes de, “To the Two Universities,” 25
124 Cerrata, Florindo, 38
capitalism, 4, 13–14, 18, 22, 25–6, 33, Cervantes, Miguel de, 21, 47
95 Don Quixote, 11, 17–18, 21, 31,
see also commodification of 114, 116–17, 119, 124–5,
women; production; reification Chaucer, Geoffrey, 29
Caquets de l’accouchée, Les, 38 Cholakian, Patricia Francis, 33–4, 40,
Carleton, Mary, 75, 86 61, 116
The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, Christine de Pizan, x, xii, 10, 13–14, 32,
48, 72–3, 84 34–6, 38–9, 45, 61, 66, 118, 138
case, x-xi, 5, 30, 63–4, 77, 89, 138 Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, 34
of conscience, 59–60, 66, 73 “Le Debat de deux amants,” 63
courtly love, 63 Epistre au dieu d’amours, 116
INDEX Í 171

Epistres sur le Roman de la rose, 116 The Works of Mrs. Davys, 93, 120,
Le Livre de la cité des dames, xi, 30, 140
34–5, 39, 50, 64–5 Day, Robert Adams, 84, 93, 108
“Le Livre des trois jugemens,” 63–4 debate format (Provençal), 13, 63, 67
“Le Livre du dit de Poissy,” 63 Defoe, Daniel, 14, 71, 78
chroniques scandaleuses, 52, 91, 119 Moll Flanders, 14, 52, 61, 71–3, 75
Cigala, Lanfranc, 156 Roxana, 14, 52, 72, 75
Clark, Alice, 95 DeJean, Joan, 118
class, 54, 100, 102–3, 106 Demoulin, François, 66
bourgeois, 13–14, 105–6, 117, 123 demythification, 114, 118, 125–6
genre and, 123, 136 Descartes, René, 1, 80, 141
lower, 14–15, 54, 96, 98, 102–3, dialogic, theory of the, see Mikhail
106, 125 Bakhtin
style and, 136, 142 Donovan, Josephine, xiii, 9, 122, 133–4
upper, 13, 15, 17, 41, 45, 48, 66, 96, Doody, Margaret Anne, 8–9, 121
98, 110, 123, 125–6, 142 Dostoievsky, Feodor, 6, 11
class consciousness, 15, 106 Dronke, Peter, 131
Clements, Robert, and Joseph Gibaldi, Dunton, John, 70–1
29, 39, 116 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 141
Codrington, Robert, 48, 66, 162–3
commodification of women, ix, Eagleton, Terry, 142
18–19, 24–6, 56, 74, 88, 106, ecofeminist literary criticism, 8–9,
120 133–4
see also reification economic issues, see capitalism; class;
commodity exchange, 5, 15, 25, 33, 95 reification
consciousness-raising, 14, 70 Edgeworth, Maria, 121–2
courtly love, 63, 67, 75, 90, 116, 118 The Absentee, 125
“Angelina,” 125
daughters, 13, 24–5, 34, 46, 53, 69, 85, Castle Rackrent, 125
92, 123 eiron, 4, 17–18, 21, 23, 26, 79, 114–15,
Davies, John, 47, 117 118, 125
Davys, Mary, xi-xii, 79, 87, 117–18, Eliot, George, 23, 121
125, 138 Middlemarch, 145
The Accomplished Rake, 93–4, 140 Emerson, Caryl, 6, 29–30
The Amours of Alcippus and empiricist epistemology, 1, 135
Lucippe, 90 epic, 1–4, 16, 31, 39
The Cousins, 93 Évangiles des quenouilles, Les, xi, 5, 31,
Familiar Letters, Betwixt a 35–9
Gentleman and a Lady, 93 exchange objects, see women, as
The Fugitive, 83, 87–90, 120, 145 exchange objects
The Lady’s Tale, 90, 140 existentialism, 9
The Merry Wanderer, 83, 87, 89–90,
140 female quixote, 11, 17, 114, 117–8,
The Reform’d Coquet, 93–4, 122, 123–7
140 Female Wits, The, 160
172 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

feminism, ix, 30, 34–5, 38, 44–9, 52, Resolutions and Decisions, 60, 72
56, 62, 67, 75–80, 96–7, 100–1, Hard Times (Dickens), 8
103, 126 Harris, Sharon K., 126–7
Ferrier, Janet M., 116 Hartsock, Nancy, 15–16
Fielding, Henry, 84, 94, 136 Haywood, Eliza, 96–7, 101
Fielding, Sarah, 121–2 “Female Revenge,” 96, 107–11, 120
The Adventures of David Simple, Love in Its Variety, 95–6
122–3 Hegel, Georg, 15–16, 18, 22
Flore, Jeanne, xi, 39, 138 heresy, 37, 67
Les Comptes amoureux, xi, 35, heroine’s text, 26, 96–7, 108, 111, 120
37–9, 138–9 heteroglossia, see Mikhail Bakhtin
folk culture, 5, 36–7, 115, 148 Highet, Gilbert, 114, 116
Foucault, Michel, 5 Hildegarde of Bingen, 131–2, 136
Fourth Lateran Council, 59 Hobbes, Thomas, 80
Framed-novelle, x, xi, 27, 29–57, 63, Homer, 3
66, 76–7, 80–1, 83–4, 87, 116, honor, 41, 68, 91, 98–101, 103, 105,
130, 139, 141 107
frame in, 30, 32, 39–40, 46, 50, 139 Hrotsvitha, 131
and the novel, 29–32, 39, 43, 50–1, Hume, David, 10
54, 90, 139 Hunter, J. Paul, 29
François, M., 69 Hyatt, Mary, 139
Frye, Northrup, 114 hypotaxis, 32, 39–40, 48, 55, 132–41
Furetière, Antoine see also parataxis
Le Roman bourgeois, 117
incest, 53, 60, 76
Gallagher, Catherine, 10 indirect discourse, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 31,
Gallagher, Lowell, 61 54, 104, 122, 130, 141–3
Genette, Gérard, 62 individualism, 1, 47
Gesta Romanorum, 44 irony, critical, x, 4–6, 11, 17–18, 23, 33,
gift economy, 31–3, 37–8, 40 79, 84, 87–8, 104, 114–15, 120,
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 125 122, 125, 145
Gilligan, Carol, 10 Jeay, Madeleine, 36–7
Gittes, Katherine S., 139 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 9, 141
Glaspell, Susan, 10 joc partit, 63
Gnosticism, 9 Johnson, Samuel, 136
Gogol, Nicolai, 6 Jourda, Pierre, 39–40, 66
Goldmann, Lucien, 4–5, 16, 18 Justinian, 157
Goldsmith, Elizabeth, 33 Juvenal, 116
Gournay, Marie de, 80
Egalité des hommes et des femmes, Kirkman, Francis
34 The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, 73,
Le Proumenoir, 11, 34 75
Greer, Germaine, xiii, 138
Lafayette, Madame de, xi, 62
Hall, Joseph La Princesse de Clèves, 62, 72
INDEX Í 173

Latin, xii, 40, 56, 77, 129–32, 142 The Power of Love, 53–4, 68, 95–6
see also rhetoric, non-Latinate Secret History of Queen Zarah, and
law, 156–7 the Zarazians, 2–3, 85, 121, 140
canon, 71–2 Secret Memoirs . . . from the New
cases, 10, 35, 40, 64–7, 71–3, 157 Atalantis, 25, 50–3, 73, 85
common, 71 A Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter, see
feme covert, 72, 158–9 Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs.
trials, 35, 49, 64–7, 71–3, 99, 102, Manley
107 “The Wife’s Resentment,” 96,
LeGuern, Michel, 138 103–8
Lennox, Charlotte, 121–2 Marconville, Jean de
The Female Quixote, 124, 126 De la bonté et mauvaistie des
Henrietta, 123–4 femmes, 162
lesbian relationships, 50, 76, 85 Marguerite de Navarre, xi, 11, 14, 16,
letters, 17, 55, 81, 83–4, 89, 93, 103, 145 34, 38, 43, 48, 50, 53, 66, 69, 97,
Lettres portugaises, 55, 83 132, 138
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 34 L’Heptaméron, xi, 30–3, 35, 39–45,
Liaisons dangereuses, Les, 52 47–8, 53, 60–1, 66–70, 80, 89,
life-histories, 47–9, 51, 54–5, 57, 138 97, 118, 145
as cases, 30, 48, 72–8, 84–7 Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 67
Lily, John, 132, 135 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain
Lispector, Clarice, 9 de
Locke, John, 1, 80 La Vie de Marianne, 120
Lucian, 52 marriage, women writers critique of,
Lukács, Georg, 1, 6, 14–16, 22, 34 ix, 24–5, 38, 45, 80, 90, 92–3
History and Class Consciousness, 6, marriage-market, x, xii, 13–14, 18,
14–16 22–3, 25–6, 33, 41, 49, 56, 71–2,
Theory of the Novel, 1 74, 76–7, 83–4, 87–9, 110–11,
Luria, A. R., 137 115, 118, 121–3, 126–7
Marxist theories, xii, 4, 14–16, 142
MacCarthy, Bridget, 80 McBurney, William, 94
Machiavellianism, 18, 26, 53, 56, 91 McKeon, Michael, 29
MacKinnon, Catharine A., 15, 157 de Meung, Jean
Main, C. F., 72 Le Roman de la rose, 116
Makin, Bathsua, 80 Miller, Nancy K., 26, 62, 120
Manley, Delarivier, xi-xii, 5, 34, 48, 52, mimesis, 3
79, 85–6, 97, 101, 117–8, 138 Mish, Charles, 113
The Adventures of Rivella, 25–6, 52, misogynist ideologies, ix-x, 5, 11, 15,
72–4, 84–5 30, 32, 34, 39, 61–6, 85–6,
“The Husband’s Resentment. 115–16
Example I,” 45, 53 Moers, Ellen, 136
“The Husband’s Resentment. Montaigne, Michel de, 34, 135
Example II,” 53–4, 68 Montpensier, Duchess de, 55, 118
Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley, Les Nouvelles françaises, 118–19
55, 83–4, 87 Morson, Gary Saul, 6, 23, 29–30
174 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Murdoch, Iris, 7–8, 10, 14, 146 The Inhumane Cardinal, 160
Pollak, Ellen, 14
Newman, Barbara, 131 Pope, Alexander, 141
Newton, Judith Lowder, 22 Porete, Marguerite, 158
novel poststructuralism, 9
and casuistry, 5–10, 30, 57, 61, print culture, 32–3, 56, 130
70–1 probability, 2–3, 81
definitions of, 1–12, 16–17, 54, 57, production, exchange value, 4, 16, 18,
75, 78–9, 114, 130, 139–40 25, 33, 105, 142
as ethical knowledge, 5–12, 145–6 production, use-value, 4, 15–16, 18,
and the framed-novelle, 29–32, 33, 37, 84, 95, 106
39–40, 43, 50–1, 54, 61, 72, 90, and women’s literary practice, 4,
94, 139 16–17, 19–22, 142
of manners, 49, 114, 119, 122 see also women’s labor
realist, 2, 4, 73, 84, 87, 90–2, 97, prosaics, see Mikhail Bakhtin
105–6, 110, 123
subversive character of, 5, 8–9, 11, querelle des femmes, x-xi, 31–2, 38–9,
31, 61, 78, 145 48, 62, 70, 88, 110, 116, 145
novella, 34, 48, 50, 54, 60, 63, 71–2, 81,
83, 92–3, 101 Rabelais, François
Nussbaum, Martha, 8, 10–11 Gargantua et Pantagruel, 115–16,
157
Ohmann, Richard, 142 rape, ix, 14, 40–1, 49, 51
Ong, Walter J., 129–30, 137 rationalism, 37, 79–80, 93, 113, 141
oral culture, 31–3, 36–8, 40, 97, razos, 63
129–30, 137, 142 realism, xii, 2, 5, 11–12, 17, 53–4, 79,
Osborne, Dorothy, 145 81, 92, 95, 116–18, 120–1, 123,
Otto, Whitney, 141 136, 146
Ovid, 53 women’s, ix, xi, 79–94, 113, 121–7
Reeve, Clara, 1–2
Pabst, Walter, 63 reification, 5, 12, 18, 42, 115
Painter, William see also commodification of
The Palace of Pleasure, 45, 53, 96, women
101–3, 105–8, 110 revenge plot, women’s, 92, 96–111, 164
parataxis, 4, 48, 50, 55, 71, 130, rhetoric
136–41, 143 classical, 130, 132, 136
see also hypotaxis non-Latinate, xi-xii, 31, 40, 130–43
parody, 4–5, 36–8, 89–90, 104, 115–16 see also style
Pascal, Blaise, 59 Richardson, Samuel, 78
patriarchal kinship systems, ix, 13–14, Clarissa, 120, 136
24–5 Pamela, 120, 136, 142
Perpetua, 131 Richetti, John, 18–19, 26
Perry, Ruth, 22 roles, stereotypical, women writers’
Petrarch, Francisco, 35 critique of, ix, 22, 26, 32–3, 76,
Pix, Mary, 160 79, 82, 86
INDEX Í 175

roman à clef, 50, 85, 119 Sprat, Thomas, 135

romance, 1–3, 17, 39, 63, 70, 75–6, 80, Staël, Madame de, ix
83, 89–91, 104, 113, 119–20, standpoint, 5–6, 13–16, 18, 31, 54, 127
123–6 feminist, ix-x, 15–16, 31–2, 38, 42,
see also anti-romance 57, 70–1, 125, 138–9, 145
Rosers, Guillelma de, 156 Irish, 87, 125–6
Rowe, Elizabeth, xii lesbian, 85
Rowson, Susanna women’s, 12, 14–15, 27, 30, 40, 62,
Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, 97, 110, 77, 86–7
120–1 standpoint theory, xii, 14–16
Stanton, Domna, 34
Saint-Vincent, Gabriel Starr, G. A., 57, 61, 69–71, 73, 75
Summa Moralis, 69 Stearnes, Bertha-Monica, 70–1
Salzman, Paul, 116 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 11–12
satire, 4, 37–8, 52, 83, 90, 114–16, structure (composition), 61, 89, 94
118–22, 125–7, 140, 145 frame, 29, 31–2, 39, 43, 46–7, 75
Scarron, Paul, 120 patchwork, 20, 43, 55–6, 141–2
Les Nouvelles tragi-comiques, 47, see also hypotaxis; parataxis
117 style, 130–6, 142–3
Le Roman comique, 47, 117–18 asyndeton, 139
Scarron’s Novels, 47, 117 Ciceronian, 135–7
Schurman, Anna Van, 80 conversational, 40, 50, 130, 132,
Scudéry, Madeleine de, 124 135, 139–40
Clélie, 75, 117 dashaway, 130, 136, 139
Segrais, Jean Regnault de, 118 plain, 4, 43, 122, 130, 132, 134–6,
sentimentalist tradition, xiii, 11, 94–7, 143
109–11, 113, 120–3, 125–6 polysyndeton, 139
servants, 17, 21, 54, 106, 124–5 romantic, 119, 122
see also classes; class consciousness Senecan, 135
sexual harassment, ix, 14, 41, 83, 103 Stiltrennung, 136
Shakespeare, William, 97, 105 see also rhetoric; indirect discourse
Shklovsky, Victor, 29–30 Subligny, Adrien Thomas Perdou de
Shroder, Maurice Z., 17, 114, 118 La Fausse Clélie, 117
Sidney, Sir Philip Sutherland, Catherine Mason, 141
The Countesse of Pembrokes Suzuki, Mihoko, 35, 38
Arcadia, 135
Smith, Adam, 10 Tasso, Torquato, 136
Sorel, Charles Telle, Emile V., 10
Le Berger extravagant, 117 Tenney, Tabitha
Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 125 Female Quixotism, 124–6
Sotomayor, María de Zayas y, see tenson, 63, 156
Zayas, Maria de Tertullian, 61
Speght, Rachel, 80 theoretism, see Mikhail Bakhtin
Spencer, Jane, 94–6, 122 Tolstoy, Leo, 6–7
176 Í WOMEN AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, 1405–1726

Tortonese, Laura, 102, 105 of sensibility, ix, 79, 113–14, 121,

Trotter, Catherine, xii, 79, 117–18 123–5
Olinda’s Adventures, 83–7, 89, 93 silence of, 33, 41, 145
“A Defense of Mr. Locke’s Essay of witch, 37, 123
Human Understanding,” 84 women’s labor, 4, 15–17, 33
troubadours, women, xi-xii, 13, 61, 77, herbal medicine, 20–1, 37, 56
118 needlework, 16–17, 19–20, 33, 40,
46, 84, 104
Urfé, Honoré D’ spinning, 16–17, 21–2, 37, 142
L’Astrée, 117 see also use-value production
Ussel, Gui d’, 63 Woolf, Virginia
Varro, 52 “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” 145
Ventadour, Marie de, 63 “Modern Fiction,” 9, 134
vernacular languages, 125, 129–30, A Room of One’s Own, 9, 91, 137
138, 142 The Waves, 146
Violenta novella, 95–111 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 9
Virgil, 3 Wroth, Lady Mary
Vološinov, V. N., 23 The Countesse of Montgomeries
Voznesenskaya, Julia, 141 Urania, 119
vraisemblance, 2, 85
Zayas, María de, xi-xii, 11, 14, 32, 34,
Walker, Alice 38–9, 43, 47–8, 52–3, 96–7, 100,
“Everyday Use,” 16 114, 117–18, 138
Watt, Ian, 1, 29, 57, 73, 84, 97, 113, 135 “La burlada Aminta y venganza del
Week’s Entertainment at a Wedding, A, honor,” 96, 99–101, 108, 110
47 “El juez de su causa,” 35, 47, 49,
Weil, Simone, 7 65–6
Wittig, Monique, 141 Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, 35,
women 43, 46–7, 53, 65, 69–70, 96, 145
abuse of, 33, 40, 47, 70 “El prevenido engañado,” 43
as a class, ix-x “El imposible vencido,” 43
education of, 19–20, 25, 33, 46, 56, “Estragos que causa el vicio,” 47
69–70, 80, 103, 122, 130–3, 138 “La más infame venganza,” 101,
as exchange objects, ix, 5, 13–15, 109
22, 24–5, 33–4, 41, 49, 74 Parte segunda (Desengaños
German, 158–9 amorosos), 35, 43–7, 53, 69–70
readers, 20, 45, 56, 69–71, 80, 117, “Tarde llega el desengaño,” 44–5,
119, 122–4, 135 53
of sense, ix, 79–80, 82, 87, 89–90, “El traidor contra su sangre,” 35,
113–14, 118, 121–5 45–6