Contamination and Equivocation: Managing Female Rebellion in Adeline Mowbray

Abstract

Amelia Alderson Opie's (1769-1853) Adeline Mowbray (1805) is usually considered an anti-Jacobin novel of the post-French Revolution and Reign of Terror era because of its ostensible condemnation of the radical opposition to marriage, despite Opie's close ties with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's circle of radicals. Written in the ＂war of ideas＂ and arduously participating in the assessment of both the status quo and emergent political philosophies, Adeline Mowbray seems to tout a conservative political allegiance but actually undermines contemporary British reactionary, patriarchal society's value systems by revealing them to be devoid of substantial merit. Opie's novel of purpose effectively deploys the trope of contamination, a label frequently imposed upon such social outcasts as reading women, fallen women, radicals, and racial others at the time, to reflect on society instead. Turning the idea of contamination on its head, Opie reveals British society, which is usually portrayed to be endangered by contamination, to be the actual seat of a polluted wasteland. This strategy of equivocation- publicly endorsing dominant ideologies and covertly critiquing them- allows Opie to maintain feminine propriety while articulating her honest if subversive observations about society in the repressive political era depicted in the novel. Equivocation works as an expedient by which Opie manages her rebellion, which was not tolerated by her society since female rebels were associated with the French Revolution and deemed immoral. Opie's rebellion, reined in by indirection, presents a quasi-conservative outlook, which helped to secure not only her reputation but the publication of her work. Opie exposes the fragility of and injustice in social conventions and public opinion. Godwin’s concept of rational and affectionate companionship without the sanction of marriage, while excoriated as immoral, when practiced by Adeline and Glenmurray in the novel, is the only benevolent, sensible, and meaningful relationship within the fictional economy, though society spares no effort to persecute them. The British society and its measures to quell any radical impulses in the wake of the French Revolution, Opie implies, stunt Britain's social, political, and cultural progress and creates an infested environment, which not only contaminates its subjects but also endangers possibly its purest elements. In the novel, British society's multi-faceted measures to exclude perceived pollutants, such as reading women, radicals, fallen women, and racial others, are revealed to be misdirected attempts to rid presumed, superficial ills, while failing comprehensively to tackle the genuine elements of contamination such as patriarchal tyranny, libertinism, greed, and hypocrisy.