Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt Renee Bryzik Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2017). Pp. 274. $140.00 cloth. Katrin Berndt’s Narrating Friendship takes on the difficult task of asking how friendship works in connection with formal and thematic developments in the novel during the second half of the long eighteenth century. The text uses moral sense theory to examine the structural underpinnings of friendship in the novel and to make legible the seemingly omnipresent themes of friendship by following values like other-regard and sympathy as they shape-shift through the complex plot twists of novels lauded for decades by feminist critics but left largely unexamined in studies like this one not specific to women’s writing. Berndt integrates years of work on male and female-only friendship, as well as historical research on changing family structures by Naomi Tadmor and Ruth Perry, to show how an enlightenment community spirit of friendship was replicated and reinvented in literature through the 1830s. The text is synchronic, including two chapters on novels from different decades in each of four thematically organized parts, which reinforces Berndt’s goal of demonstrating friendship’s flexibility, how it holds the “potential to embody established structures and sentiments as well as revolutionary tenets” within and between selected novels (38). Part 1 introduces narrative friendship as an Enlightenment principle that enables writers to critique conventions of traditional and modern British society. Chapter one uses Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) to show how feudal social expectations of patriarchal benevolence fail a family struggling to transition to modern society, and reads the tragic ending between would-be lovers as the unrealized potential of modern friendship (67). Berndt cites early modern divine Jeremy Taylor, whose reservations over modern friendship’s ability to reconcile the selfish desires of the new economy with longstanding Christian values of benevolence and civic concerns became a popular argument during the eighteenth century. Taylor’s appearance here contextualizes later references to Hutcheson, Smith and others who laud friendship for its ability to turn selfishness into morality. Chapter two, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), also reads tragedy in connection with friendship’s virtues, where catastrophes throughout the novel stem from the protagonist’s inability to transform childhood friendship into mature morality, and cites Francis Hutcheson on sympathy as an essential friendship value for Shelley. Victor’s “imagined sympathies” and “solipsistic contemplation” inhibit the active sensibility that would save his friends (84). Each of the novels in this first part uses a specter of friendship to critique the individual that imagines themself more powerful than their community. The second section argues that the friendship motif fostered the development of utopian and sentimental sub-genres by working at the interface between civic concerns and private desire. Through very different techniques and political positions, Sarah Scott’s utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762) and Helen Maria Williams’s Jacobin novel Julia (1790) employ narrative friendship as a structuring tool to reshape society and as a means of addressing the responsibilities of the individual within that society. Berndt depends on feminist readings by Alessa Johns and Janet Todd, who have articulated the centrality of women’s issues in these genres, but it is in this section where Berndt’s pioneering decision to include a range of friendships (all-female, all-male, and heterosocial) seeks justification. [End Page 483] While friendship in Millienium Hall supports a female utopia based on Christian charity, Berndt convincingly posits that this text is a challenge to “paternal law . . . not tantamount to the discrimination of men” and that heterosocial relationships are essential to transformations in public sphere life (117). Berndt’s reading of Williams’s Julia in chapter four also foregrounds heterosocial friendships despite its primary relationship between Julia and Charlotte. This later sentimental novel uses Romantic aesthetics and rational contemplation of feelings to create morally complex friend characters that demonstrate how private sphere decisions of the heart impact society at large. In part three, Berndt argues that while epistolary narration adheres to techniques established in the mid-eighteenth-century, it serves a unique historical purpose...