Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British "Bildungsroman" 1750-1850 , and: Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

598 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 Lorna Ellis. Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British "Bildungsroman" 1750-1850. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999. 205pp. US$36.00. ISBN 0-8387-5411-2 Ellen Gardiner. Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000. 198pp. US$36.50. ISBN 0-87413-695-4. If these two books represent general trends, they indicate a resistance to the Balkanization of male and female novel writing that has long plagued eighteenthcentury studies. In part, each book regards women's writing as engaged in an extended dialogue with men's writing, and vice versa. Indeed, Lorna Ellis and Ellen Gardiner examine female agency to show that it is understandable only in terms of complex interactions with patriarchal models of power. Appearing to Diminish traces the history ofthe female Bildungsroman as distinct from but related to the "traditional" or "male" Bildungsroman. It focuses on three kinds of texts: romance and amatory fiction, which constitute the origins of the form; near-Bildungsromane that help define the female Bildungsroman, such as The Female Quixote or Evelina; and the Bildungsroman proper, including The History ofMiss Betsy Thoughtless, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, the "last major step" in the form (p. 138). Ellis shows that the female Bildungsroman modifies romance's treatment of female power when female characters exploit their own "looking and telling" (p. 49), and appropriates amatory fiction's more direct evocation of political and domestic power through the "overt manipulation ofthe male gaze" (p. 59). At the same time, it distances itselffrom these precursors by featuring female protagonists who covertly exercise power over courtship and marriage. The heroine's gaze manifests this play between conservative and feminist positions. Unlike heroines in romances or amatory fiction who enforce their own gazes or manipulate the gaze of others, the Bildungsroman heroine "must learn to see herself as the object of her own gaze so that she can self-consciously construct herself the way she would like to be seen" (p. 52). Detaching the female Bildungsroman from its traditional tie to romanticism and rooting it in earlier female experience and authorship, Ellis highlights the contradictions underlying eighteenth-century women's writing. The heroines oscillate between active construction and passive compromise, which suggests a resolution to the difference between those critics who regard the Bildungsroman as essentially conservative, even repressive, and those who believe it is subversive . Ellis seeks to dismantle this "false dichotomy" (p. 18) in order to generate a more complex understanding of both the genre and its historical context. The critical split thatEllis addresses is reflected in the compromises the heroines adopt. Female Bildungsroman protagonists are constrained less by artistic considerations than by the material circumstances and alienation ofwomen. Ultimately, to explain the genre's intermittent appearance and varying popularity, Ellis suggests REVIEWS 599 that Bildungsromane intensify during periods when reactionary politics follow an inconclusive social conflict such as the English social scene of the 1720s and 1730s or the French Revolution. Succinctly written, Appearing to Diminish marshals the particular features of the female Bildungsroman and effectively analyses them to show the dialectical tendencies of the form. Ellis is less successful in demonstrating how political context shapes literary production; she somewhat uncritically affirms a simple correlation between politics and literature. Apart from a few attempts to characterize various periods as revolutionary, unstable, or reactionary, she offers few details. Moreover, the tracing of recurrent Bildungsroman features in various precursors can occasionally seem schematic and repetitions. Because Ellis uses single texts as historical markers (indeed, only three authors Ellis discusses wrote Bildungsromane that satisfactorily meet her criteria), one wonders whether other less-read authors continuously produced them. Nonetheless, while Ellis offers no dramatically new analysis (Austen critics, for example, have long noted the play of subversion and conservatism in the endings to her novels), she illuminates an important critical disagreement about the female Bildungsroman, its relation to Bildunsromane generally, and its viability at different historical moments. Regulating Readers also seeks to reconstruct the writer's historical instrumentality , but situates eighteenth-century novels differently within their contemporary critical climate. Ellen Gardiner examines...

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