Mary Spongberg. Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories.

Abstract

In Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he describes the queen of France awoken from sleep and fleeing, almost naked, from her bedchamber to escape the band of ruffians who had broken in and were cutting down the sentinel outside her door before they pierced the bed she had just vacated with bayonets and poniards. In Women Writers and the Nation’s Past, 1790–1860, this scene is presented as a startlingly Gothic vignette in which the trauma of the revolution is embodied in the figure of Marie Antoinette, evoking from the reader what Mary Spongberg calls an “empathetic identification” (11) with the unfortunate queen. This event is central to Spongberg’s deftly argued reorientation of a formative period of English historiography because it emblematizes the dual influence of Burke’s text. On the one hand, Burke’s Reflections emerges as the founding text of Whig history as a conservative and masculinist national discipline that normalized the erasure of women. On the other hand, Burke’s romanticized account of the queen’s plight allowed women to identify with her. This empathetic identification, Spongberg argues, functioned as “a form of embodied historical cognition” (11) that transformed the historical representation of women in the Romantic period and crucially enabled the development of women’s historical writing.