Frontispiece for Phillis Wheatley’s poems
Dear friends and readers,
In this second of a two-part report on the EC/ASECS conference I attended a couple of weeks ago now, the themes of the papers and talks seem as much about what gains respect as what incurs infamy.
Papers and talks were on ways writers were pressured into presenting themselves in order to be heard at all, surprising underlying punitive and/or emotional patterns which are still with us; the difficulty (impossibility it seems) of breaking out of stereotypical expectations, frustrating publishers. Since two of the panels I went to were chaired by Eleanor Shevlin and were about book history, I also summarized a paper she read aloud to the Washington Area Print group last week on the publisher William Harrison.
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From a 2007 film adaptation of Justine
The session I chaired on Saturday (9:00-10:15 am) was originally intended (by me) to be about actresses, but as my call for papers turned up but one possible paper and I found I was not able to write a paper myself after all, I contented myself with the publication of my review of Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens, and widened the scope of “R-e-s-p-e-c-t (yes I had Aretha Franklin’s famous song in mind) to include women in all working occupations and all ranks: “For actresses, women playwrights, working women, fictional heroines, and even aristocrats respect and favorable reputation matter.”
I’m delighted to say truthfully all three papers were excellent (I took more notes than usual) and the talk afterwards stimulating.
Kate Novotny spoke on “The Ethical Quicksand of Sade’s Justine: or, How to Win Readers and Offend People.” Mr Novotny went over the text, conventions and rhetoric of Sade’s Justine to show how Sade mediated his book’s shocking content in order to persuade his reader to listen to his philosophical point of view which (among other things) justified violence. His rhetoric relies on the similarity of his story to Richardson’s Pamela and other tales of virtuous lowly girl makes good. Justine is a satire on Richardon’s piety. Kate went over the text of Justine slowly, showing its use of familiar motifs. Lulled as it were, once we are reach the orgy, the fundamental nature of the text is an egoistic misogynist ethos. The strongest person is the best person and can or will not be controlled; one implication is that it’s a mistake to give women a voice at all.
In contrast, Sarah Hastings’s paper, “Vows, Whores, & Signs: Women and Words in Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans and The Rover shows Behn’s comedies hinge on a critique of mores that prevent women from exercising their power. Behn intermingles women who enact normative roles of virtue and who are prostitutes, gypsies are aligned and actresses identified with prostitutes. Failed servants survive through prostitution — indeed only through sexual flexibility can women survive at all, marriage being an exploitative commercial contract whose crux is a sexual-familial bargain. We see the mask of the courtesan allows her to enact agency and be pro-active on her own behalf; she is better off than the relatively helpless women who obeys norms of virtue. Women want to flee the world of men, be free from male control. Her stories foreground anxieties about marriage. Behn’s women want marriage to be partly based on compatibility (love). Tellingly Angelica Bianca is the only real courtesan in The Feigned Courtesans and wants to de-commodify herself; Helena wants a constant husband (while Willoughby wants an open marriage for himself). Behn’s plays reflect the world outside them too. Ms Hastings gave a brief history of the laws concerning prostitutes (made illegal under Henry VIII) and suggested an infinite series of steps exist between respectability and being called a whore; the class the woman belongs to affects how she is seen too. Women were treated as interchangeable objects. Market savvy women exploit these gradations and contradictions. During the civil war too there seemed to be a surfeit of women in civilian society, yet changes in customs which favored women.
From a 1986 production of Behn’s The Rover
Katherine Kittredge’s paper, “No Shame in Patchwork: Didactive Depictions of Laboring Class Girls” came out of her work on child poets and children’s literature in the long 18th century. Mr Kittredge asked how are laboring girls depicted in the 18th century? The improbability of Pamela not only gave rise to parody, it was felt not to be the strongly corrective narrative needed to train working class girls to accept their place and condition. The most famous of the didactic stories for girls was Goody Two-Shoes, the story of an itinerant orphan teacher who becomes respected and later marries up. Much harsher is the History of Susan Grey where an orphan becomes a washerwoman; when a captain goes after her, she is unjustly fired, flees, and dies a horrible death. We see the vulnerability of such a girl; ambition is dangerous; education and gentle behavior cannot change your status. In another story, the mother so busy with so many children that she can teach them only the catechism and her older daughter cannot be spared to attend school. Interestingly, in such stories we do not find upper class women teaching; the roles modeled insist on plain clothing, mending one’s clothes, and if the girl has fewer that suggests she will be safer: one good calico say and two other outfits. (She is not trying to get above herself.) Sewing or making clothes becomes a skill that creates community among women. These are proto-adult narratives that teach the girl that a laboring girl will never pass, they have an underlying paranoia that everyone is watching and punishments meted out. Later on in the century other standards than home-made few clothes replace these; now the girl has to be careful lest she make herself ridiculous because she has access to consumer culture.
Samantha Morton as Jane Eyre (1997 film)
The discussion afterwards was very interesting. One French scholar debated whether Sade had a discernible or consistent philosophy in Justine. Late on I thought of the Comus-like debate in Sade’s Marquis de Ganges but do not know if there are such passages in Justine. After all the papers all stayed within the 20 minute limit. I remembered Germaine Greer’s two part chapter in her Slipshod Muses where she argued that we have very few documents on Behn and suggested that much that has been said about her in biographies has no foundation. Greer thinks what evidence we have suggests Behn lived partly as a kept mistress and her playwriting was a way to help her make ends meet, not something she could really survive on. Thus her plays mirror her life’s experience. Ms Kittredge’s children’s stories anticipate Bronte’s Jane Eyre who has (we recall) only 3 dresses, two grey plain ones and one grey silk; she resists Rochester’s attempt to make her play a role above her status; she becomes a teacher, and she is rewarded for her selflessness. Even 20th century novels for women reflect these didactic “good girl” patterns: in Winifred Holtby’s socialistic radical South Riding, one of the heroines is very intelligent and her parents cannot afford to send her to school because her mother having too many children needs her at home. She is rewarded for her self-sacrifice when someone comes across with a scholarship for her; her great wish is to become a teacher like the primary heroine of the book.
Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin), the working class girl as teacher with her pupils behind her (2011 South Riding, an Andrew Davies’ product)
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Edward Young (1681-1765)
Eleanor Shevlin chaired two book history sessions. The mid-morning (10:30-11:45) had three papers whose particular topics — a woman poet, a bluestocking and saloniere who wrote letters and Richardson — were areas I’d worked on.
Jim May spoke first about the frustrations he’d experienced working on a half-volume for the Cambridge edition of Richardson’s complete correspondence. Prof May has been working for many years on Edward Young and his part was to edit the 28 Young-Richardson letters (6 from Richardson). He gave a brief history of the publication of this correspondence. Richard Phillips had bought Richardson’s letter ms’s, and commissioned Anna Barbauld to edit the papers inside 3 months (!) Peter Sabor has counted around 600 letters from Richardson and Barbauld included about 1/4 of these; she conflated, abridged, eliminated substantives. The texts are hard to read. Foundational work was done in the 20th century by Henry Petit and Harry Forester; it would be very hard to improve upon them. PRof May handed out a xerox of letter by Mary Hallow, Young’s housekeeper who had a close relationship with Young. The problem is Cambridge’s policies which do not include information on punctuation, variants and have other restrictions so hat Prof May will intends to publish an essay which includes the notes not permitted in order to get the material he has added.
Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800)
Eliza Child’s paper on Elizabeth Montagu’s “Letters from the North: Marriage, Power and Coal” was fascinating to me. I had known Montagu was involved in her husband’s mines (a central source of their great wealth), but not how active, how interested in industry, genuinely knowledgeable and (for her time) benevolent or at least just to the workers. It was another outlet for her imagination, altruism, sensibility. She chaffed at the limitations her husband imposed on her. Ms Child told us about Montagu’s entrepreneurial activity at Denton, a mining community; she had the confidence to persuade her husband to risk capital expenditure. Sections from Montagu’s candid letters were read aloud (she does not want to “lose” money “merely to avoid a little trouble”); her husband was more cautious (we heard her urging him “to act”, that he got “angry” but when “money came into his pocket” is gratified). She had hoped to be seen with Voltaire and Johnson in her “Essay on Shakespeare”; here she could be socially useful. She enacted fair hiring practices (contracts were short-term), opposed fixing prices (cabals), broke ranks with their peers over these issues. Her sister, Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison, is a model of benevolent capitalism. She also had effective charities: set up schools, gave material assistance to children to learn to read, for girls to knit and spin. These letters can provide a conterpoint to how women are often depicted in the 18th century novel where we often find them victimized by wealth.
Felicia Hemans, recent edition of her poems and letters
Alex Grammatikos spoke on “The Nothingness of Fame, At least to Women: Felicia Hemans and the Price of Celebrity.” Mr Grammatikos’s paper showed how Hemans was gradually pressured into presenting herself in the most conventional poetess sort of ways because she saw that not to do so left her vulnerable to criticism for her private life: she separated from her husband after having 5 children by him in 5 years; she turned to her mother who took care of the children while she spent her days writing and reading. She was also ignored or seen as inferior to the male poets. When she presented her work as that of a women of sensibility (and wrote poems to suit) she was successful. In her letters we see her say that she has no friends to help her promote her work as an author. She tells one correspondent how her previous poems were not successful because their subject was “not to be seen from a female pen.” She read reviews which focused on her femaleness and she redirected her career. There was a considerable gap before she could get a book of poems published again and when she did, she writes in the sentimental vein (“Records of Women”) for which she became famous. Mr Grammatikos felt Hemans resented this identification and Byron’s mockery of her as a “he-mans” was grating. But there was no breaking out of these stereotypes. So the phrase “nothingness of fame” was hers and refers to her sense of her true selfhood as lonely and suppressed.
Once again the talk afterwards was very interesting. I regret I was not able to get most of it down because so much was give-and-take. I can remember best what I contributed which was that I reviewed a Cambridge edition of Austen’s later manuscripts (which is supposed to be published this spring) and found the edition to be a missed opportunity; the choice of documents showed the series had not been thought through (so one had “everything else” including early manuscripts and not all the late ones); it was said to be for students and yet the price was outrageous and notes veered between minute erudition and high school-type explanations; it was basically a reprint of Chapman without Chapman’s apparatus.
There were two more lively talks (Phillis Wheatley, Kathy Temple on William Blackstone’s Commentaries); another session from which I briefly summarize 2 papers, and on November 9th (a few days later) Eleanor Shevlin’s paper on “The Making of the English Novel,” the role of periodical subscription magazines and newspapers; for summaries of all this see the comments.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
After luncheon, we had two talks. Kathy Temple is writing a book on William Blackstone and her presentation included why Blackstone wrote his famous commentaries and the misleading way they are described. In order to be a successful lawyer in the 18th century you had to present yourself with considerable theatricality, perform entertainingly. Blackstone could not: he stuttered, was embarrassed, very uncomfortable, would fall silent. He lacked the plausible superfluity of words necessary to carry on in public. Innately shy, he was probably an emotional man. At the same time his book (which made his career for him) is often presented as an example of superb abstract reasoning and logic. Readers tend to dismiss the affective emotions of a legal text even when on the surface. We want to hold to reason. In fact Blackstone’s superiority is rooted in his understanding that emotions are central to arriving at a truly just verdict. Blackstone’s core concept is that of harmonic justice. As we all know the book was enormously influential; it consists of thousands of cases. Bentham in the 19th century said it was a fiction and no one should believe it. What interests Prof Temple is the way Blackstone is not committed to reason but to different types of affects. He was a man anxious about authenticity and authority, and when he moved away from his body and could present himself through print became eloquent.
E.M.
Vincent Carretta has just published a biography of Phillis Wheatley; his previous work includes an edition of Equiano. His talk was informative and to me (who am interested in literary biography as such) insightful. Phillis Wheatley was early on a canonical figure in African-American literature. She published the first book of (57) poems in English by a person of African descent. She went from high respect to a nadir of rejection for her absorption in white culture and acceptance of her state as a slave. Today we are willing to understand. IN 2005 one of her letters sold for $250,000. The first account of her life was in 1834; in 1864 a ten page biography based on primary research appeared. In 1984 Wm Robinson did the fundamental primary research for an edition of her poems; Prof Carretta relied on all this when he did an edition of her poems for Penguin in 2000. Her most anthologized poem is “Upon Being Brought to the US as a slave.” She is grateful to have escaped the hard life she had known, to be able to read and to be a Christian. She married in 1780 and then seems to disappear for 4 years. John Peters, her husband was a litigous businessman; it’s possible she fled with him during a period of bad debt. Her husband died in 1801.
In this case as a biographer you remember that your subject is a woman who can become submerged once she married, she is a slave is someone who must obey other people’s wills. As a biographer for anyone you ask yourself how much context and of what kind do you include? You are trying to complete a puzzle which has missing pieces. What do you need to fill out the gaps?
He was asked if he is asked to speak to African-American or other black groups. He said he has on Equiano in Britain. Often then his audience has a high percentage of people of African descent. There are today many Phillis Wheatley societies and read in women’s reading groups. Institutions are named after her.
E.M.
The last sessions of the conference were late Saturday afternoon. I went to Linda Troost’s because I saw a paper on Richardson’s Clarissa and one of a 19th century woman’s memoir whose title reminded me of Mary Hays’s FFemale Biography: Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. Since I was tired by that time I took only brief notes on these. Julie Beaulieu spoke on Clarissa’s “Famous Distempers.” Ms Beaulieu saw Clarissa as having refused to marry Lovelace because she was seeking happiness above all, a perverse insistence on looking to fulfill her own individual life. (Yet she is rewarded by Richardson at the end.) Ms Beaulieu was eloquent about Clarissa and Anna’s love for one another; there we have a model of love, intimacy. Madness in the book is a response to an unhealthy life,a repressed deeply unhappy one.
Katherine Richards told us about the life of Louisa Stuart Costello who wrote Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen. Costello lived from 1799 to 1870, was a prolific travel writer, poet, historian. She compiled an enormous book of women’s lives. Ms Richards’ thesis was that Costello used miniatures to represent these women in visual ways, and that was part of a changed perspective on women’s biographies. Costello herself made miniatures to support herself, her mother and younger brother. Costello also took a more personal approach than women had dared to before.
Afterward I asked if Costello concentrated mainly on later 17th century women since it seemed to me her examples were all drawn from such women, and I knew that biographies and papers of later 17th century women began to be published in the middle to later 19th century. She said no, and that the choice of women seemed to be serendipitous. Other people commented on other women who wrote compendious books on women before Costello beyond Hays and after Costello (e.g., Christine de Pisan, Anna Jameson, Julia Kavanagh). It was thought that perhaps the same woman who would write a biography was someone who would write a travel book.
I did say just to Ms Beaulieu that I thought Clarissa also says she did not marry because she feared he would corrupt and subjugate her sexually. She was afraid of what he might arouse in her in bed and how he might take advantage of her dependence on him and emotional investment. It’s couched in the language of corruption, but we can use terms like emotional and mental abuse, loss of integrity, an increase in abjection. I did understand why she wanted to see the true love and happiness of the book as possible between Anna and Clarissa, yet even at the close Anna urges Clary to marry or to litigate. She cannot understand Clarissa does not care about the world’s respect any more. There is a gap in understanding between them.
On November 9th, Eleanor Shevlin gave a wonderful hour-long talk on William Harrison who published good novels at inexpensive rates as numbers in a Novelist’s Magazine. She went over the marketing strategies these volumes show him to have used. He transformed what had been regarded as ephemeral productions (novels) into texts worthy of being saved. The examples she brought were well but not expensively bound books, they had 2 columns a page, the type was small but still readable, tiny illustrations (copper engravings), sewn, good paper. She said his was a pioneering reprint series that would enable an unprecedented number of printings. He produced 23 volumes. (After him came Barbauld and then Scott.) His choices included Joseph Andrews, Amelia, Vicar of Wakefield. It was an unerring early anticipation of what would be the British school canon. He had other magazines, the Lady’s Poetical Magazine is one of these. It was big gamble nonetheless; really he was an early improver and trying to reach more people with serious literature. He printed a very large number of copies. He commissioned books too, one of Nelson, for example. Thomas Holcroft was one of those who worked for him. Unhappily he did die impoverished in 1818. (She did not say this but in this era there are booms and busts, the 1790s was not a time good for business; after the Napoleonic wars were over there was a depression.) His shop was at 1 Paternoster Row, between shops of other rivals. He married twice and clearly loved his first wife, Ann Silverbridge. They were wed at St Dunstan’s. After she died, he married a second time and when he died, he left his wife with 3 daughters and 1 son and no income. She applied for assistance (a pathetic letter to a Royal Literary society).
Eleanor’s enthusiasm was infectious and when she ended I felt great affection for Mr Harrison.
[…] For the 2nd part click here. […]