Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction: Speaking of Dread (review)

Reviewed by: Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in EighteenthCentury Women's Fiction: Speaking of Dread Susan Staves Sue Chaplin . Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth Century Women's Fiction: Speaking of Dread. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. vi+165pp. £45;US$89.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-3306-8. Chaplin presents a complex, but unusually coherent and well-developed argument about women novelists' responses to eighteenth-century constructions of femininity. She uses French theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault, to explore bourgeois constructions of femininity from philosophical, psychoanalytical, and political perspectives. Having articulated a set of contradictions inherent in these constructions, she offers readings of six novels: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, or the Ruin on the Rock, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor. She argues that as new possibilities emerged—for example, from political and legal discourses and from the discourse of sensibility—for imagining the female as subject , paradoxically, the culture required the woman to use her new subjectivity to establish herself as object. Several of Chaplin's key terms, notably "sublime" and "sensibility," are notoriously slippery, but she offers definitions that have some of the clarity and ability to acknowledge competing meanings that one finds in Raymond Williams's valuable Keywords. Chaplin describes the coexistence of a "transcendental sublime" that is redemptive and associated with immateriality and masculinity, and a less familiar [End Page 120] "material sublime," associated with materiality and the female. Masculine contemplation of the unrepresentable sublime provokes dread ; responses include efforts to dominate, debase, annihilate, or construct "alternate sources of transcendent power." One of these alternates is the transcendental sublime, which in the eighteenth century "is taken to be the sublime" (13). Following Irigaray, Chaplin argues that what passes for the sublime in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is, by a kind of reaction formation, a construct designed to mask dread of , and to transcend , what is to men a more fundamentally terrifying power: the material body of the mother. The discipline of aesthetics arises seeking to repudiate and transcend the corporal, material/maternal sublime and to replace it with a scientific "appreciation of greatness, rule and order" (17). Burke's distinction between a masculine sublime and a feminine beautiful becomes "an attempt to maintain a space between the transcendental ideal that confirms masculine subjectivity as singular and self-sufficient, and the 'nothingness' of the maternal feminine," now figured as weak and dependent (18). Chaplin reads the novels as gender-conscious experiments in reversing the symbolic economy of the sublime. Thus, in Clarissa, Richardson represents a spiritually transcendental form of selfhood in his female heroine and associates the male Lovelace and other male characters with a corrupted materiality, repudiating Lovelace's claim that it is women who have no souls. Despite Lovelace's fantasies of mastery and transcendence, the rape reveals his abject nature. Arabella in The Female Quixote deploys romance as "a transcendental body of law" (75) that she can use to control male sexuality and reduce the threat that men will make her into an object. Modes of a legal sublime are also crucial to Chaplin's argument. She understands Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France as elevating the English constitution "to the status of a transcendentally sublime object" (29), powerful enough to control the revolutionary threat. Using the work of Douglas Hay and J. A. Sharpe, Chaplin maintains that the execution of the law, especially in the ritual of public hangings and the draconian punishments of the bloody code, appropriates terror to promote the state as sublime. Then, in an argumentative move that seems to me to sacrifice accuracy to the convenience of analogy, she claims that in the civil and domestic realm, the Marriage Act of 1753 was to civil law what the bloody code was to criminal law. Both were, as she says, designed to protect property. In any case, she draws an important conclusion from her account of the Marriage Act : because the Act repudiated consent as sufficient evidence of a valid marriage, it stood in contradiction to movement , elsewhere...

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