Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 393 Eleanor Ty. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. xvii + 189pp. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8020-2949-3. Eleanor Ty's book does a double service. First, it offers sophisticated discussion of nine novels by late-eighteenth-century authors, most of them largely neglected: Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, The Victim of Prejudice); Elizabeth Inchbald (A Simple Story, Nature and Art); Charlotte Smith (Emmeline, Desmond, The Young Philosopher); Helen Maria Williams (Julia); and Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria). Second, it incorporates into its analysis a lucid application of Lacanian-inspired psycho-linguistic feminist theory, according to which each of these authors, even the most conservative or cautious, "refused" in her own unique way "to comply with the Law of the Father" (p. 155). Each had to do so, Ty maintains, in order to construct a reasonably complete feminine subject or identity; for in the dominant male-centred discourse of the day, woman figured primarily as silent, idealized object. Each accomplished this task by employing her own combination of a cluster of writing strategies—chief among them, double discourse, multivocality, repetition, and literalization—that constitute, for Ty, an alternative eighteenth-century "female aesthetics" (p. xi). Ty's use of Lacanian theory as revised by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva is cautious in one sense, bold in another. It is cautious in that she explains her theories and their terms carefully and uses them sparingly, mainly to shed new light on any feature of a novel that she believes has previously been inadequately understood. Psycho-linguistic theory serves her well, for example, when she undertakes the defence of a tendency in these novelists to construct "idyllic, romantic" endings (p. 112). Ty sees this literary move not as a sign of authorial defeat or retreat from reality but as an artist's strategic decision to "dissociate" herself from the world of aristocratic or parental tyranny, at once corrupt and corrupting, that usually composes the protagonists' larger social environment. Ty's use of theorists is bold, on the other hand, since she refuses to be intimidated by their quarrels with one another. She draws freely on a number of critics interested, as she sees it, in the question of women's relationship to their "mother tongue," combining the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Nancy Chodorow, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Carol Gilligan with those of Irigaray and Kristeva. This allows Ty maximum flexibility in working through individual novels, although it occasionally causes some confusion about terminology (I counted, for example, at least three discrete meanings for the highly charged term "hysteria" in one chapter and was never quite sure, at any given moment, which one was being used). More often than not, however, Ty offers her readers fresh, clear, and valuable insights. The union between theory and text seems especially happy in the discussion of Inchbald's Nature and Art. riere Ty revises her reader's understandings of characters and plot by discussing them in terms of their proximity to the "patriarchal world or what Lacan calls the symbolic order" (p. 101). Henry and his son, as exiles, are masters of the literal (associated here with maternal and pre-symbolic or "semiotic" discourse); and their literal readings ("massacre" for "war," for example) subvert the euphemistic symbolic rhetoric of the governing authorities. William and his son, on the other hand, are masters of the symbolic code, the Law of the Father; they unwittingly demonstrate the pure, if unintentional, malice ofsuch symbolic abstractions as "poverty" or "woman." The heroine Hannah's victimization within the system—for she is a poor, illiterate young woman— literalizes their abstractions, revealing "how women are 'literally' excluded from the symbolic order and have no access to language" and also how some men "can conceive of woman only as product or commodity" (p. 108). Ty's discussion in this chapter— as in all others—ranges among other relevant points of reference as well. She speculates on genre; she punctuates her discussion with illuminating comparisons, usually to fellow 394 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 novelists of the 1890s such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and...