Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (review)

Abstract

502 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:4 is that we can understand epistolary exchanges in Clarissa in terms of the cardiac metaphor: "a circulatory system ofreceiving, expressing, and receiving again those impressions and ideas closest to the hearts of the individual correspondents " (p. 188). He is informative when he reminds us that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century "the representation of the heart takes on new and more positive meaning as the source of circulatory power, vital equilibrium, and a variety of expressions of love" (p. 198). And he is excellent on Lovelace's phallic heart, a displacement upwards that threatens often enough to choke him so that in some sense he rapes himself as well as Clarissa. But Erickson's master metaphor in this chapter tends to become more and more literal, and Clarissa is depicted as a sort of heart surgeon, operating on herself to render her heart to others. Erickson also becomes more and more densely theological, as the dying Clarissa fortifies and restores her heart (as a new Eve and Mary, "the woman writer who bears a new female version of the Word," p. 216). In the end, Erickson's reading of Clarissa is powerful and suggestive, almost overwhelming in its command of the language of the heart, but his rendering of Richardson's novel strikes me as theologically and historically overdetermined, extracting a density of moralreligious meaning that actual eighteenth-century readers might well have been astonished to read about. In the process, Erickson tends to efface the moral, social , and in particular the historical world the novel represents and to favour, I think excessively, the anatomical and moral-theological. John Richetti University of Pennsylvania Christine Roulston. Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in EighteenthCentury Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1998. xx + 21 1pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-8130-15812 . Long, long ago, in terms of critical half-life, Nancy Miller ended her book The Heroine's Text (1980) with these lines: "Because the novel, more than any other form ofart, is forced by the contract ofthe genre to negotiate with social realities in order to remain legible, its plots are largely overdetermined by the commonplaces of the culture. Until the culture invents new plots for women, we will continue to read the heroine's text. Or we could stop reading novels" (pp. 157-58). Her last words have begun to take on a new meaning in the last twenty years. I think she meant at the time that we could "stop reading novels" if we were tired of witnessing the same euphoric and dysphoric plots repeated over and over again. But, as later critics have continued to explore eighteenth-century novels and the "social realities" that determine their trajectory, we seem to be producing "readings" of those novels that are more and more alike. REVIEWS 503 I say this with some sorrow, since Christine Roulston's book is full ofintelligent close readings of the four novels she has chosen: Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Les Liaisons dangereuses (all novels that Miller included as well). I particularly enjoyed her discussion oftheparallels with the biblical Dinah narrative in Clarissa and ofthe complex garden imagery in La Nouvelle Héloïse. But overall her ideas about the novels and their relationship to each other produce a strong déjà lu effect. Perhaps this is because there seems to have been a long gap between the writing of the book and its publication. There are very few references to critical work from the 1990s in her bibliography and none after 1994. For example, she refers to Habbakuk's 1950 article on eighteenth-century family law but not to Susan Staves's work; to Peter Brooks's The Novel ofWorldliness (1969), but not to Susan Winnett's Terrible Sociability (1993), which significantly extends and modifies Brooks's insights. This also means that she has not been able to take account of more innovative work that has come out recently—Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies (1996) or Sonia Hofkosh's Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (1998), for example—books that approach the problem ofwomen in fiction from new vantagepoints...