Abstract
The study of Romantic fiction has been dominated by the Bildungsroman. In this chapter, I consider two Romantic novels, Maria Edgeworth’s Vivian (1812) and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805), that frustrate the conventions of the Bildungsroman and present a different view of realist fiction in the Romantic period. The Bildungsroman has dominated the study of Romantic fiction because it expresses the necessary self. The hero of the Bildungsroman perfects their will in society, uniting their individual freedom with their social role and necessitating their actions. Vivian and Adeline Mowbray are ‘network novels’, which present a darker picture of social life and are sceptical of free will. Until recently, it was believed that the ‘network novel’ was rare outside of the United States, but I show that it was a central form of fiction in Romantic Britain and Ireland. I use digital methods to study networks of words in Vivian and Adeline Mowbray, to build a picture of the moral vocabulary Edgeworth and Opie use to describe their network-protagonists. In Sect. 3.1, I consider the characterisation of Edgeworth and Opie’s novels, showing how they problematise the central theme of ‘self-love’ and ‘self-command’ in Romantic fiction. In Sect. 3.2, I consider the plots of Edgeworth and Opie’s novels, using association analysis to show how they combine elements of the marriage-plot and the seduction-plot to create open-ended ‘real life’ narratives. In Sect. 3.3, I consider the language of the two novels, showing how the novels undermine the transparency of language and prevent the reader from extracting a single or authoritative perspective. In sum, Vivian portrays its protagonist as a multiplicity enmeshed in a web of words, while Adeline Mowbray portrays its protagonist as a monster whose will shatters social conventions and distinctions. Throughout the analysis, I rely on a corpus of 40 Romantic novels to provide context for Edgeworth and Opie’s artistic choices.
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Notes
- 1.
‘… Gleichgewicht, Harmonie mit Freyheit’. Karl Morgenstern, ‘Ueber Das Wesen Des Bildungsromans (1820)’, in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsromans, ed. by Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), pp. 55–72 (p. 66).
- 2.
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 133.
- 3.
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. by Albert Sbragia, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 21.
- 4.
Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750-1850 (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999), pp. 10, 18.
- 5.
See above, p. 16.
- 6.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 23. Or as Katie Trumpener puts it, in the ‘nineteenth century novel, a society and a place pass through time together’: Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 131.
- 7.
The term ‘romance of real life’ is from the period; the concept of the ‘network novel’ was introduced by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, and I explain it further below. See Michael Gamer, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 34.2 (2001), 232–66; Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example, Haney Foundation Series, 1st edition (Philadelphia: PENN/University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
- 8.
The concepts of necessitation and reconciliation profoundly shape discussion of Romantic fiction. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt argues that Jane Austen synthesized the social realism of Henry Fielding and the psychological realism of Samuel Richardson, by communicating in her novels ‘a sense of the social order which is not achieved at the expense of the individuality of her characters’: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 297. Marilyn Butler argues that in the seminal novels of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, ‘[a]n individual grows from irresponsibility to a sense of himself as Civil Man, just as a community has advanced from barbarous disunity to its modern ordered complexity’: Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 486. Butler’s fiercest critic arrives at a similar conclusion in her counter-analysis of Jane Austen. The ‘antinomies of autonomy and authority’ run through all Austen’s novels, argues Claudia Johnson, and it is a mark of Austen’s mastery that she could reconcile ‘autonomy’ and ‘authority’ more easily than other writers of her time: Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 154, 166. For all these critics, the Bildungsroman and its central theme of necessitation are the keys to Romantic fiction.
- 9.
Gary Kelly, ‘Romantic Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 187–208 (p. 192).
- 10.
Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 333.
- 11.
The singular exception is Kate Etheridge, ‘Beyond the Didactic Theme: Public and Private Space in Maria Edgeworth’s Vivian’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 46.185 (1997), 97–111.
- 12.
M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 106.
- 13.
Isabelle Bour, ‘Caleb Williams et Son Double: Adeline Mowbray d’Amelia Opie (1804)’, Bulletin de La Societe d’Etudes Anglo-Americaines Des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles, 43 (1996), 93–101.
- 14.
Gary Kelly, ‘Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology’, Ariel. A Review of International English Literature Calgary, 12.4 (1981), 3–24. Weiss usefully summarises the range of scholarly opinions on the book: Deborah Weiss, ‘More of a Philosopher: Adeline Mowbray and “Every-Day Nature”’, in The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives, by Deborah Weiss (Cham: Springer, 2017), pp. 127–68 (pp. 129–30) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55363-4_4>.
- 15.
They actually first introduced the concept in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction’, in A Companion to the English Novel, ed. by Stephen Arata and others (Chichester: Blackwell, 2015), pp. 306–20. But in their original formulation, it was difficult to see what made the ‘network novel’ different from certain definitions of the Bildungsroman: see Michael Falk, ‘Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman, and the World of The Absentee’, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 63.2–3 (2016), 107–22 <https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1244909>.
- 16.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 88.
- 17.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 104.
- 18.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 137.
- 19.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, pp. 146–47.
- 20.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, ‘The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction’, p. 162.
- 21.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 34.
- 22.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 129.
- 23.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, pp. 66–71.
- 24.
‘Wenn Sie glauben, daß es nicht pedantisch aussieht, versetzte der Hauptmann, so kann ich wohl in der Zeichensprache mich kürzlich zusammenfassen. Denken sie sich ein A, das mit einem B innig verbunden ist, durch viele Mittel und durch manche Gewalt nicht von ihm zu trennen; denken Sie sich ein C, das sich eben so zu einem D verhält; bringen Sie nun die beyden Paare in Berührung: A wird sich zu D, C zu B werfen, ohne daß man sagen kann, wer das andere zuerst verlassen, wer sich mit dem andern zuerst wieder verbunden habe’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 2 vols (Tübingen: Cotta, 1809), i, p. 90.
- 25.
John Frow, Genre, New Critical Idiom (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 118.
- 26.
Volker Neuhaus, ‘Die Archivfiktion in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren’, Euphorion, 62 (1968), 13–27 (p. 25). Quoted and translated in Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the ‘Bildungsroman’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 103 <https://doi.org/10.1353/book.58457>.
- 27.
See Maria Edgeworth, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Marilyn Butler and Mitzi Myers, 12 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), iv, pp. 299–312.
- 28.
See below, p. 28.
- 29.
Maria Edgeworth, Tales of Fashionable Life, 6 vols (London: Joseph Johnson, 1809).
- 30.
Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, ed. by Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 31.
Grenby, p. 163.
- 32.
When calculating Table 1.2, hyphenated terms such as ‘self-denial’ were split into two separate words.
- 33.
At least in the original version. Edgeworth removed the final paragraph of the novel in later editions.
- 34.
Etheridge, pp. 101–2. Etheridge uses the 1892 edition, in which Edgeworth altered Russell’s character, deleting some of his more secular utterances and adding in many references to orthodox religion.
- 35.
Kelly, see above n. 9.
- 36.
Moretti, p. 22.
- 37.
Watt, pp. 148–49; see also Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. xxxii; Armstrong, chap. 1; Perry, chaps 5, passim and esp. 193, n. 8.
- 38.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 27.
- 39.
See Gamer, p. 235. See also Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809): ‘“Le vrai n’est pas toujours vraisemblable,” says an acute observer of human affairs. The romance of real life certainly goes beyond all other romances; and there are facts which few writers would dare to put into a book, as there are skies which few painters would venture to put into a picture’. Edgeworth, Novels and Selected Works, i, p. 268.
- 40.
Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word : The Rise of the Novel in America (New York : Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 106.
- 41.
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, p. 148.
- 42.
All instances of ‘connexion/s’ were converted to ‘connection/s’ before the analysis.
- 43.
It is not surprising that ‘connection’ should be in the top 20 for the word ‘improper’, but not vice versa. ‘Connection’ is about four times more frequent than ‘improper’ in this corpus, so it is possible for the word ‘improper’ to elicit the word ‘connection’ frequently, while the occurrence of the word ‘connection’ does not necessary elicit an occurrence of the word ‘improper’.
- 44.
Weiss, pp. 140–41.
- 45.
Namely: Belinda, Camilla, The Coquette, Emma Courtney, Vivian and The Wild Irish Girl.
- 46.
Carol Howard, ‘“The Story of the Pineapple”: Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray’, Studies in the Novel, 30.3 (1998), 355–76 (p. 368); Joanne Tong, ‘The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Finding the Family in Amelia Opie’s Novels’, Studies in the Novel, 36.4 (2004), 465–83 (pp. 480–81); Roxanne Eberle, ‘Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman’, Studies in the Novel, 26.2 (1994), 121–52 (pp. 144–46).
- 47.
Tong, p. 481.
- 48.
Eberle has already made this observation for Adeline Mowbray: Eberle, p. 123.
- 49.
‘… beschränkt, eben weil see bloß Segmente seines Selbst verkörpern …’ Martin Swales, ‘Unverwirklichte Totalität. Bermerkungen Zum Deutschen Bildungsroman (1977)’, in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsroman, ed. by Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), pp. 406–26 (p. 417).
- 50.
Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 56.
- 51.
John Burrows presents some remarkable statistical evidence for this point. As Austen’s novels progress, the main character’s speech becomes stylistically more and more correlated with the speech of the narrator: J. F. Burrows, Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 136–37.
- 52.
See Bakhtin on ‘intonational quotation marks’: Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 44.
- 53.
‘…die Erfahrung gelehrt hatte, die Ansichten der Menschen viel zu mannigfaltig sind, als daß sie, selbst durch die vernünftigsten Vorstellungen, auf einen Punct versammelt werden könnten’. Goethe, I, p. 57.
- 54.
Johnson, p. 22.
- 55.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 47.
- 56.
Taylor, pp. 105–6.
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Falk, M. (2024). Fiction: Growing Down in Edgeworth and Opie’s Novels. In: Romanticism and the Contingent Self. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49959-3_3
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