Romantic Revolutionaries: Women Novelists of the 1790s

Abstract

<p>In selecting to work on the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith, I deliberately chose five women writers who were radicals of the l790s in their own ways. By means of their fictional productions, these thinkers challenged the existing social order as well as subverted literary conventions. All five saw the need for change in society; they became the advocates for reform, stressing, in particular, the requirement for amelioration of the woman's condition.</p> <p>My thesis points out exactly to which aspects of the patriarchal establishment these authors objected. The most important concerns were the inadequacy of the education system for girls, the inequality inherent in the institution of marriage, and the lack of freedom of the adult woman. Though their novels treated these problems in different ways, ranging from implicit questioning to open rebellion, these authors stand apart from other women writers of the period, such as Hannah More and Jane West, who took for granted the justification of the male-dominated social arrangement. They reject the marital and social economy that prescribes sex, procreation and female subservience.</p> <p>My study shows that while their fictional works seem to be couched in the language of love and sensibility, the women nevertheless revise and deconstruct the essentially male-structured traditional novel. They resist the realist novel's desire for closure, unity and tautology by opting for a more open-ended, multivalent and decentered construction. In addition, the focus of the fiction is shifted from traditionally "male" preoccupations such as London adventures, conquest, duels, debaucheries and rakishness, to more "female" oriented concerns such as domestic life, maternal responsibility, familial relations and pedagogy.</p> <p>Most significantly, my dissertation argues that these works articulated the female consciousness, perhaps for the first time in novel form. In these books written, for the most part, from the perspective of a female protagonist, woman is treated as subject, rather than object of the male cognizance. By allowing the female voice to enter into male discourse, these fictions undermine the phallocentric monopoly of power and control of language. Consequently, the transparency of the meaning of words such as virtue, chastity, happiness, love is questioned. These crucial words acquire new signification, embodying specifically female vision and desire.</p>