Seductive Forms

Abstract

Historicist and feminist accounts of the ‘rise of the novel’ have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. This book explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the ‘masculine’ power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French 17th-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively ‘English’ and female ‘form’ for the amatory novel.

‘The Fiery Imagination’: Charlotte Brontë, theArabian Nightsand Byron’s Turkish Tales

“…in the act of narrating their own histories of becoming storytellers'. 27 The importance of the tales as a source of creative inspiration throughout Charlotte Brontë's work demonstrates well Ballaster's contention that 'the East came to be understood as a (sometimes the) source of story, [. .…”

“…24 If the tales of the Arabian Nights had by this time come to symbolize imagination, they had also, by default, become associated with imagination's immoral excesses; they had become, as Ballaster argues, 'spaces of danger and prohibition'. 25 From the opening chapters of Jane Eyre, the Arabian Nights represents the imaginative but also the disobedient side of Jane's character, as when she turns to the book after her outburst at Mrs Reed and finds there rather increased confusion than relief from her frightening and unfettered passion (JE, p. 38). For the young Coleridge, the Arabian Nights was an object of fascination so great that his father eventually burned the book as punishment.…”

Writing like a girl: Revisiting women's literary history

“…Some lend themselves to close analysis for evidence of mimetic strategies of female subjectivation through female narrative agency. 34 Women's midcentury narratives foreground the mute corporeal vibrations of the (usually suffering) female body itself as the key site of the transference of meaning. These mark a heightened 'hysterical' mode in women's narrative.…”

“…Ballaster finds in her analysis of women's amatory fiction in the early eighteenth century that the amatory romance paradigm which forms a vehicle for women's narrative writing in this period has tended to be either absented from masculinist literary history, or included as 'an abortive early attempt at novelistic ''realism'' ', or 'an unfortunate aberration' and hence 'bad art'. 38 Michael McKeon understands the tension between 'romance' and 'novel' as an 'epistemological' crisis, which is ultimately resolved by the inclusiveness of the novelistic claim to verisimilitude. Paul Hunter is keen to stress the absolute incommensurability of 'romance' and 'novel', and remarks that there is no 'hereditary' relation between the novel and the romance.…”