Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution by Lisa Wood

Abstract

Book Reviews Lisa Wood. Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Pp. 189. $54.5'8 cloth. Modes ofDiscipline explores the w ay in w h ich anti-Jacobin novels penned by w o m en reflect the com plexity and h etero g en eity o f post-revolu tio n co n servatism . L isa W o od notes that m u ch critical attention h as le g iti­ m ately focused on radical w om en w riters o f the period because their p roto­ fem in ist p rin cip les are d irectly relevan t to fem in ist literary history. A s m aintaining social h ierarch y w as p art o f the loyalist project, con servative w om en w riters are often seen as com plicit in m aintaining the structures o f patriarchal authority. Building on the recen t w o rk o f Eleanor Ty, C h ristin e K ru eger and others, W o od seeks to com plicate and develop the relatio n ­ ship betw een gen d er and revo lu tion ary th o u gh t by dem on stratin g that variou s narrative strategies and experim en ts w ith genre w ere em ployed by con servative w om en n ovelists to prom ote the dignity and edu cation o f w om en. H er exploration includes the w o rk o f H annah M ore, Laetitia M atilda H aw kins, Elizabeth H am ilton, Jane W est, Jane Porter and M a ry B ru n ton . E fforts to m ain tain eq u ilib riu m b etw een fem ale ag en cy and con servative p rin cip les did not n ecessarily gain su pp ort throughout antiJacobin literary circles. The Anti-Jacobin, in particular, W ood poin ts out, used the review in g process to guard gen d er boundaries. O ther elem ents o f the con servative m ovem ent, how ever, w ere not as condem natory. P ar­ ticu lar attention is paid to the role o f E van gelicalism in creating a space 250 IAlker for women to balance a socially conservative position with the textual representation of female agency. In the first two chapters, Wood introduces the socio-political context in which the novels were produced and discusses the employment of “an excess of strategies designed to limit meaning” in a potentially destabi­ lizing genre (16). The next three chapters explore in detail the specific narrative strategies of didacticism as they were used by women novelists to negotiate a position of authorial power. Techniques include the inclu­ sion of embedded statements to signify moments where a character acts in a morally appropriate manner, digressive pauses in which the narrator assesses the significance of certain actions, the inclusion of prominent authoritative male characters and the use of repetition. The gender of the narrator and the position he or she takes in the text is seen as instrumental in controlling meaning and increasing authorial power. In addition to examining the use of a masculine or ungendered narrator to enable female authors to transcend their own gendered posi­ tion, Wood draws our attention to the tension between different narrational strategies in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Although heterodiegetic narratives gradually became the dominant narrative mode, providing a sense of authority and distance, Wood points out that some conservative writers retain homodiegetic narrators, which allows them to assert overt control over textual meaning. Others, like Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, construct a mixed narrational form using such devices as footnotes to foreground “the implied author’s experience, wisdom and understanding” (115). Chapters six and seven argue that in the early nineteenth century some conservative women writers move female characters out of conventional domestic plots and avoid the virtuous and unchanging undeveloped female characters common to the anti-Jacobin novel. Substantial revisions in characters and plots were made possible by hybridizing the form, blend­ ing the anti-Jacobin novel with other genres, specifically...