The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction Julie Murray (bio) Scarlet Bowen. The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xiv+224pp. US$80. ISBN 978-0-230-10354-2. In a rich and rewarding study of the dynamic relationship between the novel and what she refers to as “customary culture” in the eighteenth century, Scarlet Bowen argues that writers in eighteenth-century Britain mitigated the potentially threatening novelty of the novel by “appealing to custom,” a term she defines as “a constellation of traditional social ideals structured by the delicate balance of reciprocal obligations between patrician paternalism and plebeian deference, the insistence on moral and not market economies, and a tradition of plebeian rebellion in defense of such customs” (1–2). What distinguishes Bowen’s book from other recent accounts of the novel is its focus on the crucial contributions to the fledgling genre made by the plebeian orders’ staunch defence of tradition in the name of custom. Although she does not wish to “deny the genre’s imbrications in modern developments,” her intention is to “restore a sense of the novel’s cultural, social, and temporal hybridity as eighteenth-century writers call upon values and cultural forms of the past to mitigate the future” (2). Bowen’s study takes its place alongside those that have also offered an alternative history of the novel form by resisting the premise of the genre’s wholesale absorption into other narratives of rise—of the middle class, of feeling, or of the possessive individual. Bowen’s study thus reminds us, in a new key, that eighteenth-century novelists were not nearly so wedded to novelty and innovation at all costs, and had, rather, a much more complex connection to tradition. In contrast to the still pervasive association of the novel with expansion in multiple senses—capitalist, imperialist, historical, psychological—Bowen calls attention to its equally powerful claim to movements backward rather than forward, to tradition rather than progress. With chapters on Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Bowen’s study hews closely to well-known novels by well-known novelists. The one exception is a brief but illuminating chapter on fictionalized memoirs of female soldiers, which examines Christian Davies’s 1740 Life and Adventures (1740) and The Female Solider; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750). Arguing that plebeian identity, female masculinity, and British nationalism intersect in complex ways at mid-century, Bowen suggests that the “plebeian female soldier,” a “figure at once masculine and feminine” invokes and “refashions notions of Britishness during a period of history when its identity was most in dispute” (82). The chapter on Pamela is the strongest because it departs from accounts of Pamela’s virtue that understand it entirely in terms of a [End Page 726] sexual economy. Making wonderful use of Pamela’s conscious invocation of a robust tradition of ballad literature and arguing that “Richardson’s heroine shares a richly detailed ancestry with the heroines of popular balladry” (60), Bowen usefully marshals E.P. Thompson’s assertion that “plebeian culture is rebellious, but rebellious in defense of custom” (Customs in Common, 9; cited in Politics of Custom, 63) in order to argue that “virtue in Pamela connotes a very particularized idea of merit derived from customary social relations” (63). Pamela’s “resistance” to Mr B. is less a matter of her moral or sexual purity than it is a question of the “reestablishment of proper paternalistic treatment of the lower orders” (63). The sheer fact of Pamela’s rebellion “in defense of custom” tends to be obscured in feminist critics’ accounts of how Pamela’s steadfast resistance to her master is a sign of her bodily self-possession and thus her modernity. Bowen’s view is a salutary corrective to the historical record, without sacrificing what is modern about Pamela. Throughout the book, Bowen is admittedly more interested in the workings of plebeian culture than anything else. Her understandable desire to correct a scholarly overemphasis on polite and commercial modernity, and by extension on the...