Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel, 1790-1805 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel, 1790-1805 Amy Garnai (bio) Miriam L. Wallace . Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel, 1790-1805. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009. 314pp. US$65. ISBN 978-0-8387-57050-5. In recent years, an increasing number of critical studies have dealt with the intersection of politics and literature in Britain during the 1790s and the first years of the nineteenth century. Examining in particular the literary engagement with the upheavals brought about by the French Revolution, these studies often focus on texts that had in their own time contributed to the "Revolution debate" from both sides of the political spectrum but were later marginalized or neglected. Miriam L. Wallace's book is an important contribution to this work of cultural recovery, including insightful and probing analyses both of understudied literary texts and more familiar ones, as well as a sophisticated theoretical framework in which to view them together. Building on the foundational work of Gary Kelly, Marilyn Butler, and those who followed in their footsteps, Wallace's book provides a unique and compelling perspective on the cultural landscape of the period. As acknowledged in the title, Wallace situates the idea of subjectivity as an organizing theme for her discussion. She argues that the "dual status [of political subjects] as entities made through subjection to ideology and state power and as linguistic subjects, self-constituted through representational activity [is] particularly pertinent for this founding literary moment" (17) of the emergence of the British reformist novel. She lucidly unpacks the various ways in which subjectivity is articulated; [End Page 438] by the concluding chapter we can see not only how the 1790s was a historical moment conducive to its emergence as a politically freighted category but also how this recognition of a dual subjectivity is highly relevant to our own time. Among the many strengths of this book is Wallace's repeated emphasis on the relevance of eighteenth-century reformist discourse to the issues of human rights, agency, and political action that continue to preoccupy us today. For example, her discussion of Mary Hays's 1799 novel The Victim of Prejudice examines rape and trauma narratives from both historical and contemporary theoretical perspectives in order to show not only the limited possibilities for the articulation of female trauma—and female subjectivity—within the novel's own purview, but also the ways in which trauma can be rewritten and given expression through an "active witnessing by a future, unnamed sympathetic reader" (146). Central to Wallace's argument is the rejection of the divisions that underpin many current studies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, divisions that enforce binary oppositions and an exclusivity of focus in regard to gender as well as politics, and which "leave out the complex relations among radical and more conservative writers and between female- and male-authored texts" (19). The works under consideration in Revolutionary Subjects reflect the diversity and complexity of the writing of this period. While substantial attention is given to texts that fit seamlessly into a study of the progressive, reformist novel—William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Robert Bage's Hermsprong, Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives and The Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, and Mary Hays's Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice—Wallace also examines more ideologically nuanced works, including Charles Lloyd's Edmund Oliver, Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray, and, in a particularly bold move, Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. The chapter discussing Lloyd and Opie, to my mind the strongest chapter in the book, convincingly locates these writers' works as "conservative reformist novels" (187) whose political positioning includes criticism of some of the more overt reformist principles and the support of others. Wallace's application throughout her study of the Godwinian distinction between "moral" and "tendency"—that is, a work's overt aim as opposed to the availability of possible alternative readings—is especially useful for identifying this ideological ambivalence. Thus, Edmund Oliver and Adeline Mowbray can be viewed as novels whose "moral" lies in the critique of excessive sensibility and the "new philosophy" that...