The Fallen Woman, from the Perspective of Five Early Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists

Abstract

The Fallen Woman, from the Perspective of Five Early Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists JEAN B. KERN That women novelists of the early eighteenth century moved away from the French romance and toward a more realistic novel of man­ ners is demonstrable in a number of ways: by examining statements of purpose in prefaces and dedications where they emphasize their intent to "speak the truth"; by examining the plot and style of the novels themselves; by showing sociologically how society is reflected in their novels; or by focusing on a stereotypical character such as the old maid, the stepmother, or the female rake, and examining how women novelists gave a new realism to such characters as they groped to record the manners of their age. I have chosen in this paper to focus on the stereotype "fallen woman" as presented by five women novelists writing before 1726. Because my sample is small, I do not wish to overgeneralize my conclusions, but I do hope to cor­ rect some previous generalizations about the early women novelists. First, I would call attention to an article by Maximillian E. Novak1 who has warned against (1) carrying "notionalism" into a study of fiction, and (2) reading into novels fictional values that the author would not admire; on the other hand, he has urged that critics should be constantly aware of the past. What Novak seems to be suggesting is that studies of the novel should avoid reading into early fiction 457 458 / KERN ideas (his word is "notionalism") which are current in the twentieth century; at the same time they should reflect awareness of the age in which the novels were written. This wise caution is particularly use­ ful to a limited study of these five women novelists in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. While they are not just women novelists to be looked at from the perspective of recent purely feminine criticism, they are conversely not writing in a vacuum about the position of a "fallen" woman in their own day. I have chosen a combination of literary history, including biographical detail where it is known, and a close look at the novels themselves to determine how their "fallen" women contribute realism to their novels of manners as these novel­ ists relate their own experience in the society in which they lived. I have noted where they were conscious, in prefaces and dedications, of creating a new theory that fictions should be truthful. I have slighted structure and style except where the latter is realistic, be­ cause I am less interested in how good their novels are on an absolute scale than in what they say about a type character. While I found Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Lon­ don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) extremely useful about the so­ ciety of this first quarter of the eighteenth century—especially on the double moral standard which permitted sexual liaisons to men but not to women, my choice of working from five examples of women novelists who write of the "fallen" woman is a small addition to a sociological approach. Finally, this is not a short chapter in the his­ tory of women novelists, but an attempt to integrate literary history and close reading in order to examine how these women write of manners in fictional form. As early as 1929, E. A. Baker was aware of their importance to the novel of manners: "The service they rendered was to have kept up a supply of novels and stories, which habituated a larger and larger public to find their amusement in the reading of fiction, and which, poor in quality as they were, provided the original form for the eigh­ teenth century novel of manners."2 Yet in spite of Baker's statement, these early women novelists have either been ignored or lumped to­ gether as imitators of French romance. Few appear in the DNB; of the five who are the subject of this paper, only Mary Manley and Eliza Haywood rate a notice, while Penelope Aubin, Mary Hearne, and the anonymous "Ma A" do not. Few, also, are the studies of their entire canon,3 but many...