Home Is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Throughout this article, I will be using Desmond and The Old Manor House as touchstone texts since they are Smith's most well known novels. Most critics, in fact, focus on these two, and it is difficult to find any sustained discussions of The Young Philosopher, primarily because the novel only just appeared in 1999 in a modern-day edition. Past readers of The Young Philosopher had to locate it on microfilm. By asserting this, I do not mean to suggest that Smith's earliest novels were not political, for in them Smith's feminist disposition already showed through. These novels, however, were not as overtly political as her later novels would be. Janet Todd acknowledges this as well, noting that it was only with ‘the publication of Desmond in 1792, [that] she was ready to admit the charge that she held political views, and she was prepared to affront her readers by justifying rather than apologizing for her unfeminine subject matter’ (ix). Most recently, Anne K. Mellor explains this in Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780–1830, remarking, ‘Charlotte Smith conceived of Desmond as a direct response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (106). Desmond's analogy also mimics French nobleman Montfleuri's rebuilding of his ancestral home. Dr. Winslow, his wife, and his ward Miss Goldthorp stay with Delmont, whom they have never before met, when they find themselves lost in the midst of a terrible rainstorm. Spooked by the lightning, the horses run off with Miss Goldthorp still in the carriage, until Delmont comes to her rescue. Because Miss Goldthorp's arm is injured, however, the party must remain at Delmont's until the arm heals. Later in this same conversation we also learn that Delmont ‘had acquired, whether from hereditary prescription or not, a way of looking at whatever proposition was presented to him, not as Dr. Winslow had been used to do, exactly as it was shewn, but in every light it would bear. The Doctor had never thought of any object but exactly as his predecessors, his masters, had told him to think’ (Philosopher 47). The reverend represents most of the Britons that Delmont encounters, who are unable and unwilling to think for themselves. Whereas the reverend believes what he has been told by others, doing what has always been done, Delmont, on the other hand, has been taught to think for himself and to form his opinions through rational reflection. By thoroughly scrutinizing each issue, Delmont shows himself to merit the appellation of ‘young philosopher’ that Smith grants him. Significantly, this scene occurs immediately after Delmont ‘tells off’ his lawyer at the end of the previous chapter. Coming back to back as these two scenes do, they provide a hard-hitting condemnation of the injustices of British society. Pat Elliot makes a similar claim, noting that Smith attempted to affect change by demystifying power relations. Elliot notes that in Emmeline and Desmond, Smith ‘convey[s] strong feminist messages, clarifying and defining women's domestic and social positions, to show how the patriarchal political structure affected women's lives. Charlotte Smith demystified this structure by analyzing it on all levels; on each level, power abusers are represented as hypocritical, greedy, and weak’ (111). Smith's lifelong legal squabbles over her children's inheritance money is well-documented. For an excellent account of how Smith capitalized on her despair over this issue, see Jacqueline M. Labbe's ‘Selling One's Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry.’ Most critics agree that Smith's use of America in The Old Manor House allows her to discuss the French Revolution in guarded terms. Elizabeth Kraft, for instance, writes: ‘By setting the tale some twenty years in the past, Smith avoids the temptation to expound on the revolution in France …. This setting [in America] allows her to make political observations that were indirectly applicable to the French situation’ (xx). Janet Todd makes a similar statement, remarking, The Old Manor House completely supports the liberal view of the [American] Revolution as a civil quarrel disastrously and viciously mishandled from London by greedy and corrupt politicians. But, by the time she wrote, the American War was far in the past and a much more significant conflict had begun in France. Although she presented only the American struggle for rights, Charlotte Smith insisted on making parallels with the French Revolution, while, even more provocatively, she ensured that no reader could finish her novel without concluding that there were many elements in British society that richly deserved a revolution as well. (x) A third function that America serves in the novel is as a backdrop for exposing the horrors of war. Throughout the novel, Smith uses Orlando's experiences to paint for her readers images of violence and ruin. When his garrison leaves New York to set off for their first battle, for instance, Orlando ‘began to perceive all the horrors and devastations of war. The country, lately so flourishing, and rising so rapidly into opulence, presented nothing but the ruins of houses, from whence their miserable inhabitants had either been driven entirely, or murdered!’ (House 345). As their military campaign continues, ‘Orlando was enured to every personal suffering: but those of the unhappy victims of this war—victims that every day seemed to multiply around him, and very few of whom he could save, were a continual torment to him’ (368). The ending of The Old Manor House has been the subject of much critical discussion. Orlando and Monimia's marriage, contrary to what one might expect from a popular novelist like Smith, possesses not that ‘storybook’ quality of romance and happiness. Instead, the couple meets with unceasing financial difficulties, illustrating Smith's increasing dissatisfaction with life in Britain. This is true even in the case of Desmond and Josephine's child since the boy is raised by Geraldine and Desmond along with Geraldine's children from her marriage with Verney. Smith never even mentions the Anglo-French identity of the infant or any problems that might be associated with possessing such an identity since her interests lie elsewhere in this earlier novel. It is also important to remember that in Desmond Smith demonstrated that the loss of British national identity was one reason why the British disliked the French's imitation of them so much. Losing their national identity was a frightening prospect for most Britons since it would make them more like the French than they cared to be. Because Smith's claims about the basis of national identity were so radical for her time (and, as we have seen, because they could even be seen as treasonous and grounds for imprisonment under the Test Acts), Smith had to make her views not completely obvious. I also differ here from critics Eleanor Ty and Elizabeth Kraft, who both argue that Smith's interest in other nations, such as the juxtaposition of Laura's story in Scotland and Medora's story in England, is meant to show that England is just as bad and ‘barbaric’ as these other nations. Ty, for instance, contends that ‘Through the parallels between the stories of the mother and the daughter, which take place some twenty years apart and in different locations, Smith shows how society remains unenlightened and unprogressive, continuing a system based on violence, greed, and brutality. … The repetition of the wrongs the mother had suffered not only emphasizes the self-perpetuating and unprogressive nature of the social order, but also draws parallels between the cultural practices of the more “primitive” and superstitious Scottish clans and those of the more “civilized” and advanced society of London’ (150). While Ty does add a nationalist slant to her interpretation, she overlooks all of the other instances of emerging national identity. Kraft follows Ty, arguing that ‘the novel takes us from Brighton in Sussex to northern Scotland, to London, Wales, York, and Ireland. Everywhere the characters encounter the abuses inherent in the class system, the injustices imposed by national institutions’ (xxvi). While this interpretation is tempting, and I agree that this was a part of Smith's aim, even more significant is how many other instances of questionable national identity emerge in the various stories that are told throughout The Young Philosopher. These other interpretations do not account for all of the other instances of nationalism in the novel. Using a Lacanian approach to the novel, Eleanor Ty asserts that because he was raised by his mother, Delmont is outside of the Law of the Father. The novel, she claims, ‘celebrates female energy’ (143). While I agree with this latter claim, I do not agree that Delmont is feminized just because he is marginalized from society. Instead, Smith repeatedly emphasizes Delmont's ‘masculine’ traits. The political strife that existed between England and Scotland in the eighteenth century has been well documented by historians. See, for instance, Chapter 3 of Colley's Britons for a thorough sketch of the animosity surrounding the 1707 Act of Union and the subsequent Jacobite uprisings. Frances Burney would also focus on this problem in her 1814 novel The Wanderer. In her 1807 poem Beachy Head, Smith develops the connection between the French and the British to an even greater extent, for the poem opens with the monumental splitting of France and Britain into two separate nations. Although she mentions in a note that the resemblences between France and Britain are not all that great, Smith still immortalizes the connections between the two rivals. For an interesting argument that attempts to show how Smith supported this ‘Norman Yoke’ theory, see Matthew Bray's article ‘Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith's Later Works.’ Delmont rebukes his brother for this last epithet, remarking, ‘American girl! what a way of speaking of her, brother!’ (Philosopher 256). This last question would also continue to resonate in Smith's own mind, becoming the title of the 1799 play What Is She?, whose authorship, although slightly uncertain, is usually attributed, as Carrol L. Fry points out (92), to Smith. Another moment when issues of national identity surface is when Delmont travels to Ireland to straighten out his brother Adolphus’ financial affairs. Unhappy with the Irish lifestyle of drinking and gambling (a stereotype even in the eighteenth century) and with the misery of the lower classes, Delmont states that he ‘should [not] like’ to live on this neighboring island (Philosopher 200). At another point in the novel, Delmont must try to get information about Laura and Medora from their Swiss servant Susanne. When he tries to ask Susanne questions about the whereabouts of her two mistresses, Susanne ‘continued to lament herself, and to tell, in her motley language, which had often a ground of French, oddly embroidered with English and German, how dull and sad a life she led’ (226). Smith also has this minor character relay her misunderstanding of a bilingual pun, as Elizabeth Kraft points out in her notes to the novel. When a (British) stranger tells Susanne that she is a ‘Franche Biche,’ she thinks that he is praising her for being ‘frank,’ not castigating her for being a French female (226–227). At another point, Smith herself stubbornly refuses to translate a French quote her narrator includes from Rousseau's Confessions, saucily remarking in a footnote, ‘I give no translation, because those who are interested in such an anecdote will probably understand it as it is, and some others, who are not, may think that it [the quote] already has taken up too great a space’ (376). My thanks to Mary A. Favret for pointing this out to me in her reading of an earlier version of this essay. Although at first reluctant to leave his homeland, even our hero Delmont changes his mind. Medora's pleas to return to America and the injustice and harsh treatment he witnesses in his own nation cause Delmont to desire a life abroad. At one point in the novel, while entangled in the midst of his brother's financial affairs, Delmont only wishes to depart for America: ‘[after] having regulated his few remaining concerns in England, to leave all his troubles behind him, and cross the Atlantic, the happy husband of the woman he adored’ becomes his one desire (201).