Narratives of Women: English Feminists of the 1790s

Abstract

Did ‘feminist’ writers of the 1790s produce narratives in which women could find self‐respect and authenticity? Before this ‘positive’ endeavour came the ‘negative’ task of constructing narratives revealing women’s oppression. More positive images may be found in narratives which relate women to political discourses and events. But the main type of narrative pointing the way towards authentic selfhood for women, free from the prisonhouse of gender, is the narrative of Bildung or development, so common in novels, conduct books, treatises on education and polemics. This narrative, criticized by some twentieth‐century feminists but treated sympathetically here, may be a middle‐class assertion of Kultur against decadent aristocratic Zivilisation; it is also formed by Stoic, republican and Protestant discourses, and is turned into a woman’s narrative not only by republicans such as Macaulay, Wollstonecraft and Hays but also by conservatives such as Chapone and More. It is concerned with a rich and rational inner life rather than surface appearance and superficial accomplishments, and encourages women to be self‐controlled rather than other‐determined, to some extent selves for themselves rather than for men.