315 ner that, when all belief is in question, carries ethical import. Kant trumps Plato. Mr. Donoghue has organized his project around a series of couplings— Richardson and Pope, Sterne and Laclos, Diderot-as-philosopher and Diderot-asnoveliest , Radcliffe, Godwin, and Goethe , and Charles Brockden Brown and Sade—that are as productive as they are odd. While Pope implicitly and Richardson explicitly ‘‘bestow a surprising degree of legitimacy’’on human artifice for its moral and transformative potential, Sterne cannot, for all his efforts, discover in sensibility ‘‘anything apart from the purely earthbound’’ because it is inseparable from its foundation in ‘‘a materialist philosophy’’; Yorick is famously left at the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey with a handful of the Fille de Chambre’s —the uncertainty tellingly tied, Mr. Donoghue suggests, to a decidedly physical moment of ‘‘feeling.’’ Diderot, we are told, replaces Richardson as his model with Sterne largely because his devotion to philosophical skepticism salted the ground necessary to cultivate realistic fiction; the ‘‘disorderly quality of Diderot ’s novelistic discourse,’’ praised by postmodern critics for ‘‘mirroring the dissonance of the world,’’ is better seen as a ‘‘dissonance between form-giving and his materialist philosophy.’’ The examples and the argument grow with each chapter. In the ‘‘curiously stereophonic effect’’of Radcliffe’s treatment of the real and the unreal in her novels (where, however titularly supernatural the events they witness, readers always end in Northanger Abbey); in the violently sensible ‘‘little monster’’ Werther; in the theatrical factitiousness of Sade’s ‘‘sexual tableaux’’—in each case, and despite enormous and important variations , literary realism stands opposite, not alongside, skeptical materialism. And thus the title fits exactly, for it is Mr. Donoghue’s constant, provocative thesis: ‘‘the discourse of the novel’’—realistic fiction—enlightens. E. Derek Taylor Longwood University RUTH PERRY. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 466. $80. Ms. Perry argues that the concept of ‘‘family’’ and kinship obligations underwent drastic transformations as the primacy of blood relationships gave way to an axis of conjugality. Through casestudy based chapters of particular sets of relationships, she fleshes out the practical and psychological impacts. For instance , as sons were freed (or burdened) to accumulate capital and maximize economic opportunities, daughters sometimes became beggars, actually homeless people shuttled to relatives or friends as dependents vulnerable to being treated worse than servants. At every point she factors in such major forces as changes in economic systems, print culture, population growth, and urbanization, and most valuably brings together the best and most pertinent research in social history , cultural anthropology, psychology, and law. Brief comparisons to kinship practices in India, Nepal, and other places sometimes reveal the crass practices of English families. Ms. Perry knows this literature well and rightly pauses to inform the reader of controversies within , for example, interpretations of the Hardwicke Marriage Act. She is not shy about taking stands. She concludes that the Act was a key moment in the history of the family and unflinchingly records 316 her own judgment: ‘‘Concerned with legal contracts for the transfer of property rather than social relations between humans , the . . . Act constructed men’s and women’s rights as equal. . . . Ignoring the very real difference between men and women in social consequences for sexual experience . . . the Hardwicke Act created the need for the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes.’’ To some specialists, Ms. Perry tells a familiar story. In a variety of ways, women were better off in 1700 than in 1760. One of the epigraphs for her Introduction describes ‘‘the wreckage of families’’ in Austen’s novels as ‘‘unnerving’’ and in novels by other women as ‘‘appalling.’’ The first chapter is titled ‘‘The Great Disinheritance,’’ by which Ms. Perry means the psychological as well as legal and economic disinheritance of daughters , and the two chapters on marriage chronicle the Foucauldian pressures that confined not only what women could do but what they could assert their natures to be. From the valued and even indulged daughters in Jane Barker’s and Mary Davys ’ fiction, English novels came to Clarissa, epitome of what Ms. Perry describes as the new position of daughters in the family: ‘‘temporary...
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Feb 13, 2012
Usha Rajdev 
