Three decades after the publication of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), Nancy Armstrong rewrote Watt’s history of the novel in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), whose focus on female sexuality and the domestic novel has exerted far more ...
Three decades after the publication of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), Nancy Armstrong rewrote Watt’s history of the novel in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), whose focus on female sexuality and the domestic novel has exerted far more definite influence over the criticism of the novel. Armstrong remaps the rise of the novel by relocating the point of its departure from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the adventure novel Watt acclaimed as the precursor of the genre, to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). While I agree with Armstrong’s thesis that modern subjectivity is constructed through the attempts to control female desire and readings, I take issue with her hypothesis that Pamela, by transferring “erotic desire from Pamela’s body to her words,” constitutes the novel as a respectable genre free from such censure received by former semi-pornographic novels.
Armstrong’s reading of Pamela symptomizes a lack of proper attention to novels that represent desire through the female body, and this dissertation attempts to recover the missing part of Armstrong’s genealogy by finding a place for the gothic and pornographic novel in the literary tradition meandering from Pamela to Jane Austen’s early novels. The gothic novel, which decisively served as the locomotive for the mass production of fiction in the latter half of the eighteenth century, is the key focus of this dissertation, which traces the development of the genre in the context of the Culture of Sensibility and its philosophical background in Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson, Hume and Smith investigated the possibility of a congruence between virtue and pleasure in sympathy; yet the ideal supposed fell apart eventually, and I argue that modern pornography, a form of pleasure pursuit, rose in the moment of virtue’s separation from pleasure.
Beginning with a reassessment of Armstrong, this dissertation moves onto the second chapter, in which I discover both gothic and pornographic elements in Richardson’s Pamela. The third chapter traces the production of violence in the construction of modern subjectivity, reading two French novels that delve into the covert relationship between power and pleasure: Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and D. A. François de Sade’s Justine, ou Les malheurs de la vertu (1791). The novel’s relationship to pornography is one of the most complicated issues that arise in studying literature from the latter part of the eighteenth century, and this chapter finds a way to explain the complexity against the backdrop of the Culture of Sensibility. The fourth chapter analyzes how Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) represents the trauma of the French Revolution and the Terror through a narrative of real and fantasized violence. I argue that violence, although marginalized in Armstrong’s history of the domestic novel, is the main obsession of the 1790s which materialized into an explosion of the gothic novel.
In the fifth chapter, I define Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as a gothic novel that paves the way to domestic fiction. Radcliffe, “the great enchantress” of the gothic novel, struggles to tame the violence that unfolded to its extreme in Lewis’s gothic pornography while simultaneously representing and containing the desacralized body portrayed in Sadean pornography. The final chapter investigates how Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) rewrites Radcliffe’s gothic into a domestic novel. Austen takes over the gothic convention of domesticity and redirects it into her marriage plot, which, I argue, is a form of mutual contract that would have been denied and forsaken in the aftermath of the Revolution. In the conclusion, I address Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen’s metafiction on sentimental novels, as the arguable turning point in the transformation of the sexual contract into the marriage plot, and the textualization of the female body into the subjectification of the female reader.