BANISHED MEN AND THE “NEW ORDER OF THINGS”: THE FRENCH ÉMIGRÉ AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN CHARLOTTE SMITH AND MARY ROBINSON

Abstract

From its first publication, readers have tended to read Charlotte Smith's 1794 novel The Banished Man as a recantation of her pro-revolutionary politics after the mixed reception of her more controversial Desmond in 1792. Nevertheless, while Smith's hero D'Alonville is a banished French aristocrat with a deep sense of nationalism, his struggles during the Revolution alter his resolve against the revolutionaries' ideals, and his exposure to other brands of political thought gradually convert him from an aristocrat of the Ancien Régime into a citizen of a new, more modern world. The significance of this conversion is illuminated when compared to a similar one in the hero of Mary Robinson's 1796 Hubert de Sevrac, a novel packed with conventional Gothic characteristics, yet one much more ostensibly reformist in its objectives than Smith's novel. Reading these two novels side by side clarifies how both Smith and Robinson use their émigré heroes to model for the reader how the aristocrat can be converted to an appreciation of the “new order of things”. More importantly, in each of these novels, the authors take a woman's perspective in pointing out the moral implications of oppression and bloodshed, whatever the cause.