Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Joseph F. Bartolomeo (review)

Abstract

1032 Reviews how, although references later on referto 'fading' and to 'vanishing'. Mason speaks for many of the contributors: 'Editors like consistency. The danger is that we risk sacrificing something of the interpretative potential of what might seem to be messy, incomplete, or untidy stage directions as we regularize, emend, and supplement these fragments of text' (p. 92). In later sections, Edna Zwick Boris notes that the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy changes meaning if Hamlet knows that Claudius and Polonius are spying on him. John C. Meagher points to directions that establish a lClowne and am other' (Qi) rather than one or two gravediggers, and another in which one 'throwes up a shovel' rather than a skull. As for subsequent productions, Alan R. Young traces the use of full portraits of Claudius and King Hamlet in the closet scene rather than miniatures and Iska Alter measures the effects in Kenneth Branagh's film of intervening (and interrupting) flashbacks. Current writing on Shakespeare often concentrates on theatre history and produc? tion, but this is the firststudy to single out the importance of stage directions in understanding, as well as producing, a play like Hamlet. It is a signal contribution to Shakespeare studies. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Arthur F. Kinney Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. By Joseph F. Bartolomeo. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 242 pp. ?36. ISBN 0-87413-799-3. The purpose of this book is to examine relations between pairs of eighteenth-century novels, in order to illuminate intertextuality between them, and to show the role of gender in shaping that intertextuality. The choices are interesting: Idalia and Ro? xana; Joseph Andrews and David Simple; Clarissa and The Female Quixote; Roderick Random and Evelina; The Monk and The ltalian?a line-up that runs from amatory fiction in the early eighteenth century, through mid-century moral fiction, to later picaresque and sensibility, ending with Gothic. The author engages a little with that plot of novelists in the market place which has recently reshaped the story of the eighteenth-century novel, though he is initially critical of feminist critics fortreating women novelists separately from their male contemporaries, even as he depends on them for setting an agenda about gender. His sampling technique is welcome in so faras it contributes to a history of the novel in which influences are shown to operate across gender lines. He is alert to how women novelists, particularly Lennox, Burney, and Radcliffe, were cautious about identifying with other women writers, and the analysis of Roxana is a valuable reminder that some women writers were sufnciently successful for men to want to copy them. Where the book disappoints is in its limited interest in those aspects of eighteenthcentury culture that both male and female writers were caught up in, aspects which help make more sense of their fictions. In part this comes from restricting analysis to the novels, with patchy reference to biography, and next to no interest in say drama, or phenomena such as masquerading, which other critics have used to good effect in reading novels of the period. In consequence some generalizations are wholly unsupported?on mercenary marriages, for instance, as discussed in Roxana, we are told too simply that 'Defoe and most of his contemporaries would have rejected them' (p. 48). Both Idalia and Roxana are said to articulate a strong, insistent desire for agency, with no curiosity as to why or how that might be related to anything else in the 1720s. In places this indifference to cultural discourses in fictionleads to major problems with the argument, which turns consistently on a questionable unhistorical MLR, 99.4, 2004 1033 humanism. So Roderick Random's description of Narcissa, though usefully com? pared to the blank Orville in Evelina, is said to abandon realism and to be stylized and unconvincing, regardless of how the hero's description of her uses conventions of a blazon in which stylization is what makes sufficientappeal to an eighteenth-century reader. Terms like 'plausible' or 'obscure' are not justified in relation to eighteenthcentury readers but twenty-first-centuryones. None the less, many of the close...