History of Reading News. Vol.XXI No.2 (1998:Spring)
by Kate Levin

From its preface and introduction, Caroline Gonda's book Reading Daughters' Fictions appears ideally suited for an audience interested in the history of reading. Gonda thus describes her purpose:

I argue that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fictional representations of father-daughter relationships participate in the construction of . . . female heterosexuality, that novels, as much as tracts or conduct-books, served an ideological function . . . Contemporary diatribes about novels and their evil influence on young women maintained that women learned from fiction and followed its example in ways which made them unsatisfactory daughters or wives (or worse). I suggest that much of what the reading daughters learned from 'daughters' fictions'--heroine-centred novels of family life, courtship and marriage--might bolster rather than undermine familial and social order. (p. xvi)

This description seems to promise a book that will focus on the cultural work of fiction, the role that eighteenth-century British novels played in turning their female readers into "virtuous women" (p. 35). The first part of Gonda's book does elaborate on this "ideological function" of eighteenth-century novels, the process by which novels disciplined their female readers rather than causing them to rebel specifically through these novels' representations of father-daughter relationships.¹ Such representations changed during the eighteenth century from tyrannical fathers who controlled their daughters through fear to affectionate fathers who governed through love to--at the end of the century--a collapse in paternal authority altogether. Throughout the century, novelistic depictions of father-daughter relationships mostly helped to teach "reading daughters" their proper function in society, which was to marry a man of their fathers' choosing and bear that man's children.

This book thus seems worthwhile for historians of reading as well as feminist literary critics. But the actual chapters disappoint somewhat. These chapters, which focus on a particular author (such as Frances Burney), theme (such as father-daughter incest), or novelistic subgenre (such as the Gothic) are clearly written and interesting, and their arguments often stand on their own terms. In particular, I admired Gonda's fascinating critique of another feminist critic, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, who in Gonda's view misreads Maria Edgeworth's novels in her own book on eighteenth-century fathers and daughters.² Gonda's subtle and detailed explication of Edgeworth's novels made me eager to read them, while her attack on Kowaleski-Wallace exposes the dangers of being blinded by one's own ideological framework: "[i]f any woman who puts pen to paper in a novel becomes equally a figure for the woman writer, and if all women's writing is metaphorically endowed with the same 'explosive power' because inherently subversive and a threat to the patriarchy, the effect is, ironically, to minimize any sense of actual women writers' artistic and political achievements" (p. 233). In other words, by equating the journals or letters of Edgeworth's fictional characters with her actual publications, Kowaleski-Wallace undervalues those publications. All this may be true, but to what end? Gonda sometimes examines "writing daughters" like Edge-worth, but her "reading daughter," the figure at whom she claims eighteenth-century novels are directed, mostly disappears in her actual chapters, usurped by discussions of father-daughter plots.

As the book loses sight of the process by which novels turned eighteenth-century "reading daughters" into wives and mothers, it loses some of its coherence as well. With one major exception--Gonda's chapter on Samuel Richardson (a novelist who worked throughout his career to create his own context)--her chapters concentrate largely on plot details or on an individual novelist's biography to the virtual exclusion of reception history. As a result, the book reads too often as a series of arguments about different portrayals of father-daughter relationships rather than as a comprehensive portrait of the connection between eighteenth-century literature and life.

While Gonda does a good job of mapping out the changes in the novelistic representations of fathers and daughters, we lose sight of these novels' larger cultural function, their role in creating proper female readers. A symptom of this problem occurs in Gonda's chapter on the Gothic. In this chapter, she describes The Heroine, Eaton Stannard Barrett's 1813 parody of Gothic fiction, as "a tale of female quixotism" (p. 161), in this case the story of a young woman negatively affected by Gothic novels. But rather than elaborating on the implications of this theme for her claim that eighteenth-century novels had mostly positive consequences for their female readers, she focuses exclusively on the novel's representations of family, the way in which "Cherubina's sins against the father move her into a genuinely Gothic plot" (p. 161). Gonda's book becomes too much about her own (albeit interesting) readings of daughters' fictions and not enough about those reading daughters that the novel allegedly sought to control.

NOTES

¹ Gonda never uses the word "discipline" in her book; I take this term from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, 1979]). One of my problems with Gonda's book is that she uses a Foucauldian framework without mentioning Foucault. For a description of such a framework in the context of eighteenth-century reading habits, see Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I reviewed Richardson's book in the Spring 1997 History of Reading News.

² See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Kate Levin's essay about the relationship of Charlotte Lennox's career to her female readers appeared in Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period; she has forthcoming articles about John Cleland and the 18th-century literary market and about Falstaff's subversive function in Henry IV Part 1.