Main tendencies of the 18th century novel

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL: MAIN TENDENCIES

By M.R.SETHI

Shape and form

During the eighteenth century a number of innovations in both subject matter and narrative technique took shape. The novelists had to reconcile the demands of narrative order and the realistic portrayal. The art of fiction often involves the close imitation of true narratives. The novelists adopted various techniques in order to present the form and content of their works. Some of them, like Defoe, Defoe adopted the episodic technique, which more often than not produced a loose baggy form of a novel, without much sense of narrative order or progression or organic unity. Later Fielding self-consciously uses Chapters and Books as in his novel Joseph Andrews . This conflict between the demands of realistic presentation and aesthetic narrative order is evident in Sterne's anti-novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne blasts the conventions of the Novel even before this genre has had a chance to become a settled form.

The genre's new understanding of itself resulted in the first metafictional experiment, pressing against its limitations. Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) rejected continuous narration. It expanded the author-reader communication from the preface into the plot itself – Tristram Shandy develops as a conversation between the narrative voice and his audience.

Realism.

A key concern in the eighteenth century novel is its preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. Broadly speaking, ‘realism’ is a term that can be applied to the accurate depiction of the everyday life of a place or period in a literarily work. When the term is applied to the works of the eighteenth century, however, it usually refers to a writer’s accuracy in portraying a character or characters form a low socio-economic class. This is visible in Defoe's and Fielding's attempts to make their works as realistic as possible. For that purpose they use the word ‘history’ while introducing their works. And it is for this purpose that they employ the first person narrative technique as in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. Another tactic used by the novelists to make their works look realistic was the use of epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, as in his novel Pamela (which was burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela). They also consciously used anti-romance forms as a means of asserting the realism of their writing. These writers largely used the model established by Cervantes in his anti-romance. One way of asserting the value of the new novel technique was to show how its fidelity to the "real" was more accurate than earlier forms, such as romance, chronicle, fable, etc. Richardson and Defoe are the first major writers in English literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legends or previous literature, and thus, differ considerably from Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton. In the eighteenth century, the novel’s use of the non-traditional plots was a manifestation of realism. For example, when Defoe began to write novels, he did not take much notice of the prevalent critical theory which tended to incline towards the use of traditional plots. In doing so Defoe started a new trend of realism in fiction.

John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ is considered by many the precursor of the novel. But his piece is an allegory and hence far from realism. On the other hand, Defoe’s works employ the realistic mode. In the words of Wyatt, “Bunyan undoubtedly showed that a narrative could be conceived and carried through with consistency and vigour, and interspersed with animated dialogue …. [but] Defoe selected secular subjects, banished allegory and limited the historical so closely that his fictions were easily …. Called ‘narrative biography’” (1) Wyatt quotes the editor of Read’s Journal who said in 1718 that Defoe exhibited the ‘agreeableness of the style … the little art he is only a master of, of forging a story and imposing it on the world for truth,” and then adds, “an impression comes in our minds that ‘this simple honest fellow is telling us the true story.’” (2)

Novel of the Middle Class

The Classical Age was of a relatively less pure quality than was that of the preceding ages. It was because the society was in a kind of flux. The ruling class was, no doubt, still built upon an aristocratic frame and the prestige of high birth or position was not abolished. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century, the upper middle class was more and more mingling with the nobility, or rising in position in the state. The influences of the middle order of the society were everyday become more active.

As the middle class was slowly emerging, the novelists based their plots on and took their characters from this big segment of society. Legouis and Cazamian describe this new trend in these words: “Henceforth, England will gradually and dimly tend to reconstruct the unity of its conscious self round the sentimental, sensitive, and moral suggestions which come to it from these men, middle class or mediocre by birth, with whom deep spiritual inclinations have suffered less change than with their predecessors through and artificial and acquired culture.” (3)

Return of the Picaresque Novel

The picturesque style of novel began in the 16th century as a counterbalance to the chivalric romance. The Picaresque novels generally feature protagonists from the lower classes, but also draw on characters from various social classes. The primary character is usually duplicitous, both a dupe and a charlatan. The story involves panoramic scenes, and usually had different types of discourse, from philosophical reflection to parodying other traditional forms like the romance or poetry

In America, Henry Hugh Brackenridge (1748-1816), wrote the picaresque novel Modern Chivalry, the first novel portraying frontier life in the United States after the Revolutionary War. In England, perhaps the 18th century novel that most directly parallels Don Quixote is Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. The protagonist, Arabella reads like Don Quixote does, and tries to fashion her life after him. Yet, she is not as fulfilled as Don Quixote is with his role models because her characters are more inert than Quixote’s. He can fashion himself after glorious knights. She struggles to define herself by female characters whose primary goal in life is to preserve their virtue.

Gothic Novel

Another form of the novel that developed in the 18th century was the Gothic fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery, superstition, hidden corruption, conspiracies and terror. This form which appealed to man’s fascination for the dark or the mysterious became at once popular. It was called gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from the rough and primitive grandeur of medieval buildings and ruins. Such novels were expected to be dark and tempestuous and full of ghosts, madness, outrage, superstition, and revenge. The gothic form of writing fiction adhered to several conventions like castles for dilapidated abbeys, having dark battlements, mysterious subterranean vaults and secret passages, trap doors and hidden panels. The novels peopled by dark crazy monks, valiant knights, insane people, valets with murderous errands, haunted minds masked by apparently normal outward lives, and beautiful damsels in distress. The gothic novel also had an underlying theme of homosexuality.

In England, the vogue was started by Horace Walpole’s novel Castle of Otranto (1765). Its supernatural happenings and mysterious ambience made it immensely popular. It is the tale of the love affair of Theodore, a handsome, young peasant and Isabella, the princess who, after many upheavals and mysterious and supernatural events later, marry each other and live happily thereafter as the king and queen of Otranto. Sophia Lee (1750-1824) wrote The Recess, a gothic novel with historical background, which sold well. It is a tale of two daughters Mary Queen of Scots had in a ssecret marriage. These girls eventually end up in horrible marriages, with one going mad and the other ending up in a Caribbean jail. However W.Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786) and Ann Radcliffe’s novels The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre. But Radcliffe was somewhat different in her approach to the supernatural in her novels. She was careful to distance herself from vulgar believe in ghosts and supernatural marvels by providing rational explanation for the apparitions and noctural groans that frightened her heroines. In America, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly was a perfect example of the gothic novel.

Femino-centric Novels

The popularity of the novel in the 18th century coincided with and very largely depended upon the growth of a miscellaneous reading public, in which women were becoming more and more numerous and influential. The education of women among the middle classes was a much debated topic, supported, among others, by Daniel Defoe. As a sizeable portion of the reading public was female, a number of novelists of the eighteenth century (in addition to the women writers of the time) wrote femino-centric novels. According to Mary Anne Schofield, the novel with its attendant romantic love and disguise becomes the earliest form of literature written, and perhaps read, mostly by and about women. The novel became an appropriate medium “to study the pervasive ideology of female powerlessness by allowing the ‘other side’ of women, their aggressive natures to be displayed in disguise.” As a result a majority of the novels of that time tended to embody women’s interest and perception, often transforming women’s actual experiences into the stuff of fiction, as the miserable condition of women prisoners in Defoe’s Moll Flanders or the plight of the maid-servants in Richardson’s Pamela. Defoe’s ‘Roxana’ also transforms women’s experience into fiction. In this case, he is rewriting the story of Mary Carleton, a woman resembling Roxane who was hanged in 1673.

The heroine in the women-oriented novels of the 18th century followed a less similar pattern. The heroine’s family is very poor or the heroine is orphaned and penniless. Moll is a orphan as her mother gave her birth in the New Gate Prison. The pre-1700 heroines were “more foolish than evil and were punished by disgrace and death.” (Theresa Thompson). But in the 18th century novel they are determined to fight for survival and fight against the social injustice and male dominance. Roxana refuses to accept the role available to her in the society. She is rather termed by some critics as a ‘male rapist’. These heroines earn something unpleasant about men in their encounters with the opposite sex. Roxana’s husband is a fool who abandons her and their five children. Some of Moll’s husbands too abandon her, one of them on the very next day after marriage. Pamela finds that the life of a poor maid servant is hellish, to say the least. However, these women have strong will and power and learn not only to survive but often on their own terms.

Richardson told his stories primarily from a woman’s point of view and made his heroines independent entities, not the ones who exist merely in relation to men. He expressed the heroine’s way of seeing. He presented manners, morals, human relations as they affect woman. Richardson presented women in convincing details so that the reader had to understand and respect them.

Regarding the femino-centric bent of mind of the novelists of that time, Joan DeJean writes, “At no other time in its history was the novel so overwhelmingly feminocentric. Novelists male and female alike celebrated, pitied, and sometimes condemned the female characters whose psychology they explored, all the while doing something that had very rarely ever been done in literature before—centering their works on women and their lives. Finally, and perhaps predictably, the novel's detractors warned ominously that it had the potential to feminize its readers, and even that it would prove a menace to society because it would weaken its (male) moral fiber.” (4)

Women Novelists

Apart from the male writers’ preoccupation with women-oriented novels, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a number of woman writers. In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf claimed that a revolution in literature began with the simple fact that in the 18th century, the middle-class woman began to write. The tradition was established towards the end of the 17th century by Aphra Behn. Although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is generally considered the first English novel, some critics prefer to give that distinction to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). What is more important is the fact that Aphra Behn was the first woman to make writing her profession. But in the seventeenth century women’s writings were virtually ignored, in the eighteenth, they were recognized in all their glory. Now women were immensely influential as educated ladies, as readers, as patrons, and most importantly as novelists whose works were highly regarded. Though much admired in their time, their novels were subsequently erased from the pages of literary history and recovered in the twentieth century. In the words of Abby Woolf, “…in the past several years many literary critics have been on a kind of archaeological dig, unearthing a rich heritage of writing by English women. “ (5)

According to Katherine Rogers, “By the later eighteenth century, women dominated the field of novel writing in quantity and held their own with men in quality. Among the conditions which made this development possible, such as improved education for women and more mixed social gatherings, perhaps the most important was the emergence of a pattern for a “feminine” novel – a sort of novel that women were both qualified and encouraged to write. . . . Though the limitations on women’s lives kept them from rivaling men’s presentation of the external world – a brawl in a tavern, a ship’s sick bay during a battle, a learned dispute at a Visitation Dinner – they were quite as able to deal with feelings and private thoughts.”

Although poetry and drama remained primarily male preserves, there were a number of woman novelists in the eighteenth century. The 'conduct' novel, with its emphasis on behavior and marriage ability, targeted women readers, and Frances Burney (1752-1840), whose first novel , Evelina, appeared in 1778, was one of the most successful authors of her time. Other women, more obscure now than Burney, also enjoyed wide public recognition. Sarah Fielding (1710-1768) was the sister of the novelist Henry Fielding, and her best known work is The Adventures of David Simple, a ‘moral romance. Amelia Opie (1769-1853), was wife of John Opie the painter and friend of Sydney Smith, Sheridan and many other members of the literary society. She was a copious poet and novelist. Her works include, Adeline Mowbray and Simple Tales. Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821), a novelist, dramatist and actress, and a close friend of Godwin, is chiefly remembered for her two prose romances, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796). Hannah More (1745-1833) was an eminent member of the Blue Stocking Circle and was the author of the immensely successful novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife.

Sarah Scott (1723-1795), sister of writer Elizabeth Montagu, most of whose novels were published anonymously and sold quite well, is best known for her work A Description of Millenium Hall, which idealizes her utopian ideals. Ann Radcliffe (1724-1823), author of The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) and The Italian (1797), was one of the best selling novelists of her time and is now considered the best of the Gothic writers.

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