Romantic narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft

Abstract

The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), the heroine gives up writing lyrical effusions to begin a narrative of her life, which is circulated, also in unfi nished form, among various readers inside the text.Her choice raises several issues about the relative value of literary modes.In Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel Ian Duncan, using Sir Walter Scott as his centerpiece, argues that by the early nineteenth century the (masculine) novel had absorbed a (feminine) romance, thus gendering narrative for generations thereafter. 1 Yet Wollstonecraft sees narrative as a means to authority and contestation, even as she struggles with the plots into which Maria is written by both romance and realism.Wrongs does not, however, support the argument that the Romantic novel was a marginalized female form-on and increasingly by women-while men claimed the higher status of "poetry." 2 For it is poetry that is conventionalized as feminine, while narrative initiates Maria's growth as a political and individual subject.Indeed, as Mary Favret notes, writing on the fetishized use of poetic inserts in novels by Charlotte Smith and Anne Radcliffe, these inserts, which are "separable, artifi cial, and disposable," "correct, contain, and hypostatize the feminine in the novel," 3 instituting poetry itself as feminine.At the same time, Maria does not actually dismiss poetry, but only a specifi c form of poetry: what she calls "rhapsodies descriptive of the state of [her] mind." 4 Nor is it clear that she writes a novel in Duncan's sense, unless we take "novel" nongenerically, as the literary vehicle of the "new(s)" or in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of the novel as marking a new sense of time oriented to the future rather than the past and resulting in the "novelization" of adjacent genres. 5 Starting from the unwritten theory in Wollstonecraft's text, this book xi enlightened being, "a citizen of the world." 16Within this reorganization of knowledge, which has also entailed a shift from "theory" to "cultural studies" (in the loosely thematic sense in which that term is used to protect most work done in English departments under the more rigorous umbrella of thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler), the turn to prose metonymizes a turn to culture and responsibility.The result has been a redistribution of power among the historical

Cite this

Tilottama Rajan (2011). Romantic narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Choice Reviews Online. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-5560

@article{tilottama2011romantic,
  title  = {Romantic narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft},
  author = {Rajan, Tilottama},
  year   = {2011},
  journal = {Choice Reviews Online},
  doi    = {10.5860/choice.48-5560}
}

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

References