Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 81 John P. Zomchick. Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xviii + 210pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-4151 1-X. What seems at first glance in its nominal emphases a rather cumbersome title soon proves a fit introduction to the critical inclusiveness and synthesizing imagination that distinguish this study. Central to John P. Zomchick's argument is the dialectical relation between the component elements of his title: while we customarily associate familial discourses with the private sphere and legal ones with the public, the eighteenth century, he suggests, witnesses the law's active participation in the constitution of both the individual and the collective. By virtue of its distinctive ability to straddle the shifting boundary between public and private, the law thus enables analysis of a transitional culture shaped by an expanding market economy and increasing secularization. Within that culture, moreover, law, uniquely the agent of both residual and emergent ideologies, provides the individual subject with systems of order that compensate for the erosion of belief in providential structures. These complex interrelations of formal law and internalized juridical discourse represent for Zomchick the matrix within which numbers of eighteenth-century authors plot their protagonists' coming to maturity. For most, the domesticity celebrated in the closing pages of their novels represents the ideal harmonizing of affective and juridical discourses—the public conscience in the private sphere—and as such forms a hedge against the disruptive energies of the unregenerate public sphere. The favoured retirement motif with which many of the period's novels conclude is thus seen as product of a dialectical relation between the family and civil society in which the retreat of a Roderick Random or a Captain Booth involves not a straightforward rejection of the public sphere but a complex reformation of its principles in ways that confirm emergent liberalism. The "internally coherent and self-regulated" (p. 2) personality attained by the novel's end at once marks the victory of contractual over customary affiliations and deflects potential alienation by locating the reformed hero within the sentimental family. Those characters who, in Zomchick's phrase, "fail to make the law their reason" (p. 20) are correspondingly denied the pleasures of domestic happiness and are sentenced to either the pains of death or exile, or, as in the case of Clarissa, the exclusionary realm of transcendence. The analysis of the central texts for which this paradigm holds true—Clarissa, Roderick Random, Amelia, and The Vicar ofWakefield—is framed by discussion of the protagonists of two quite different works, both of whom fail to achieve full juridical status: Defoe's Roxana, who proves unable to reconcile the impulses of possessive and affective individualism , and Godwin's Caleb Williams, who as victim equally of bourgeois liberalism and the power of formal law is denied the domestic Utopia granted earlier eighteenth-century heroes. The use of the exceptional to define the normative is complemented in its tendency to produce richly patterned readings by the cumulative interpretations of the chosen texts. Having established, for instance, the ways in which Roxana is positioned for reasons of gender as both a juridical and patriarchal subject, Zomchick can build on the implications of this model in his analysis of Clarissa. In Richardson's novel, such incompatible allegiances define not only the titular heroine but also her family, as they adhere to the conflicting claims of absolutism and liberalism, and Lovelace, as he enacts both aristocratic and individualist codes. Only Belford, Zomchick argues, adequately effects the sorts of compromises that allow him to stand at the novel's end as coherent juridical subject and ideological paradigm of bourgeois individualism. In addition to the theoretical cogency of its organizing model and the subtlety of its individual readings, Family and the Law displays an assured capacity to assimilate constructively a range of interpretive strategies. Attention to genre—Roderick Random's picaresque, Amelia's romance, The Vicar of Wakefield's pastoral—underlines the degree of ideological coherence discoverable in these novels' attempted accommodation 82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 of the public to the private sphere through the agency of the...