The Tested Woman Plot: Women's Choices, Men's Judgments and the Shaping of Stories by Lois E. Bueler (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 151 poetry was a form of knowledge. Nevertheless, Peter Robinson has done wonderful things with Searle's narrow categories. University of Plymouth Alan Munton The Tested Woman Plot: Women's Choices, Men's Judgmentsand theShapingof Stories. By Lois E. Bueler. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2001. viii + 312 pp. $50. ISBN 0-8142-0872-x. In this study Lois Bueler argues for the existence and importance of a plot type: the tested-woman story. This concerns not just any woman or any test; it is an archetype that begins in the ancient world and lasts until the twentieth century,when, Bueler argues, the weakening of patriarchy reduces it to a cultural echo, albeit still a resonant one. Tracking this archetype through differenteras and genres, she uses narratology, loosely inflected by structuralism, to identify the functions of this plot and the characters who are its vehicle. Historicism explains differences between eras: so Bueler argues that sensibility in the late eighteenth century requires characters to develop their own moral agency in response to a declining patriarchal authority; hence women's choices are less dependent on men's judgements, which is why Fanny Price's struggles to maintain her integrity are lonely, silent, and interior ones, and manifested in free indirect style. Bueler's premiss poses methodological problems for everyone?what is the relationship between culture and literary form? Can you write a book about what you see as a transhistorical literary phenomenon without oversimplifying the twin history of ideas and forms which that literary phenomenon expresses? There are few models for this, as the author observes: we do not know in much depth how literary plots work across periods and genres, and perhaps one has to start with breadth, which this book certainly supplies. Bueler offersa balancing act in which she combines attention to context with read? ings of texts meant to exemplify cultural tendencies and changes. Whether you think this works depends on your predilection for lucid summaries of orthodox ideas and your approval ofthe texts selected. Some less obvious choices, like Charles Johnson's play Caelia (1732), contrast imaginatively with the largely canonical field. Bueler is more specific about patriarchy as ideology than practice?Filmer's Patriarcha does its usual star turn as a repository of ideas about male authority in overlapping domestic and political institutions?yet in her readings of texts she shows a sensitivity to genre that helps explain the functions and nuances of tested-women plots as they differ between classical, biblical, medieval, Renaissance, neo-classical, Enlightenment, and nineteenth-century stories. Against that generic diversity, she puts an insistence that tested-women plots are actually as much about men as women. Women's choices, especially their sexual choices, appear to be the substance ofthe tested-woman plot, but Bueler sees the point as being much more to dramatize competition between men. She is alert to the functions of fathers and brothers, tempters and seducers, and how they are consonant with patriarchal ideas of hierarchy and authority available to the authors discussed. Her range of texts offerssomething to everyone: from Euripides' Iphigenia inAulis to William Trevor's Felicia }sJourney,with special attention given to works by John Ford and Samuel Richardson. How farwomen writers adopted rather than adapted the tested-woman plot is discussed with reference to novels by Austen, Eliot, and Gaskell, though were iiterary' to be defined more widely, there would be plenty of other and earlier comparisons to make. One misses a sense of ideological contestation through literature, and given how important these stories make trial set? tings, evidence, judgement, and punishment, a nod to juridical thought would have been helpful. Yet the continuities are thought-provoking?echoes of Milton's take on 152 Reviews the tested woman, Eve, turn up in Adam Bede?and Bueler's readings refresh one's sense of how archetypes operate in historical moments. More importantly, she wants to explain why. The challenges of such a project make this book as interesting as its success in meeting them. King's College London Clare Brant The Heege Manuscript: A Facsimile of National Library of Scotland MS Advocates ig.j.i. Intro. by Phillipa Hardman. (Leeds Texts and...