The Sentimental Novel and Its Feminist Critique

Author(s): Klaus P. Hansen

Source: Early American Literature , 1991, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1991), pp. 39-54
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25056841

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 THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL
AND ITS FEMINIST CRITIQUE
KLAUS P. HANSEN
University ofPassau, Germany

Cathy research
N. Davidson andnovelNina
on the sentimental in the Baym have
United States made decisive advances in
but apparendy
without taking much note of each other's work. As usual, this progress was
the result of a new approach. Earlier standard works by Brown and Petter
had viewed the sentimental novel as formula literature, as an epigonic
montage of already established components. This preconception in turn
determined the scholarly procedures used to deal with the subject: these
components were described and their origin determined which for the
American sentimental novel inevitably meant resorting to Richardson and
his English imitators. Baym and Davidson have broken with this time
honored method by ceasing to view the sentimental novel as the degenerate
continuation of an English genre and to explain it through exploring its
past. Instead, they shifted their perspective to the future. For them, it is a
genuinely American phenomenon because it generated a genuinely Ameri
can tradition. Unlike earlier research, the scholars of today look forward to
The Awakening and Daisy Miller rather than back to Richardson.
The new approach also meant a change in the way we look at popular
literature in general. Even though they agreed that it was formula
literature, Brown and Petter had different opinions as to the social function
of such literary products. Especially in the second part of his book, Brown
used his texts as the basis for a history of the culture and tastes of the
period. In other words, he considered them socially relevant documents
which could tell us something about society. It is all the more astounding,
then, when in his conclusion, he adopts Van Wyck Brooks's opinion that
such works are escapist. This U-turn comes a bit too suddenly, and he
does not bother to give his readers an explanation. Petter, on the other
hand, is a New Critic who concentrates on the texts without even glancing
at the social reality which surrounds them. He indirectly justifies this by

39

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 40 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

claiming that they were entertaining precisely because they were remote
from the everyday reality of their readers. The heroine wanders sorrow
fully through the world while the reader sits cosily by the fire.
With regard to the sentimental novel, Baym and Davidson have put an
end to this unreflected way of dealing with popular literature. They claim
a kind of feminist competence for their genre. Baym writes: "the novels are
written by women, are addressed to women, and tell one particular story
about women" (22). In a study which is relevant for more than just the
sentimental novel, Davidson provides us with a comprehensive demon
stration of the existence of a female culture. Providing ample evidence she
shows that these melodramatic stories were in fact very close to reality.
The various "props" taken from Richardson such as seduction, being
forced into marriage by one's parents, the absolute power of the husband,
financial dependence, and etc., were not fictions but rather the existential
presuppositions upon which the lives of women at that time were based.
That these novels melodramatically overemphasized their points may
reduce their literary quality but not their social relevance.
The new perception of the social relevance of the sentimental novel as a
way for women to deal with their own reality is a decisive methodological
step. By attributing to the genre a task which goes beyond mere enter
tainment, it becomes worthy of presenting a message and therefore worthy
of an interpretation. Looking more closely at individual novels one
perceives that they are not just following a formula; instead, they modify
the given material thus achieving a differentiated outlook. This is inevitable
because, since the novel deals with pressing contemporary problems, it
needs scope for the free play of artistic expression and cannot simply be
forced into conformity with the structural givens of a genre. These
deviations from the conventions of both medium and message are at the
heart of Baym's and Davidson's work. Baym shows how after 1822 changes
in the usual plots produced a revised view of women. Davidson prefers to
think that this happened earlier and maintains that at least some of the
early novels (1789-1820) have literary quality as well as critical intentions.1
Her examples and her methods of textual analysis, however, are not very
convincing. Davidson tends to read her texts from a far too modern
perspective which makes them look more advanced than they are. As we
shall see, she does not interpret historically, does not read the novels as the
contemporary reader would have done but, rather, reacts with the con
sciousness of an emancipated woman of today.
The new approach, its avoidance of looking backward in particular, has

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 The Sentimental Novel 41

somehow, as important as it is, thrown the baby out with the bathwater. It
is a mistake to ignore the origin of the sentimental novel, especially its
ideological foundation which must be seen alongside its literary structure.
One has to reconstruct the conventions and their underlying ideology, the
view of women it includes, because it is within this framework that the
writing and reading of the sentimental novels took place. Davidson is not
concerned about this. She is neither interested in the possibilities of literary
expression available to the writer nor does she take the ideological
limitation of the reader into account. For her the ideal contemporary
woman, be she author or reader, has long since achieved an emancipated
worldview and has a positively Barthian sensitivity to ironic nuance.
How does one understand the contemporary reader ofthat time through
whose eyes the sentimental novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century
have to be read? Most of the genre certainly was shaped by a bourgeois
outlook, and this outlook found its first expression in the English "moral
weeklies," particularly in Addison and Steele's daily "broadsheet" The
Spectator (1711-12; 1714). In opposition to the predominant aristocratic
code, these journals set up new manners and new morals which were the
first successful attempts at establishing middle-class culture and ideology.
Two cornerstones of the new ideology were individualism and privacy.
Whereas the aristocracy conducted their lives in the public eye and enjoyed
making a show of their status, the bourgeois, at least theoretically,
embraced privacy. A kind of cosy domesticity surrounded by the nuclear
family was proposed as the center of life. Other ideas concerned themselves
with morality and respectability, concerns which appeared to be an
additional attack on feudalism. Human beings were not to be judged on the
basis of their origins, status, wealth or any other accident of birth like
beauty or wit; instead, the only standard was merit, namely a morality
achieved through effort and will. For women morality meant chastity and
virtue in particular. Compared to the nobleman's preference for high birth,
beauty, and wit above anything else, this rigid insistence on female virtue
was new. This bourgeois convention of the role of women was celebrated
in Richardson's Pamela and the sentimental novels in its wake, and this
bourgeois convention became the target of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique.
Reading the American sentimental novels through the eyes of Addison,
Steele, and the younger Richardson who had not yet written Clarissa, we
are methodically on the safe side. Against the backcloth of the norms as
propagated in The Spectator and in Pamela, we will perceive that a century
later many of them are still valid, but we will also see that a few other

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 42 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

authors rejected some of them as being too restrictive. These authors,

however, are not as far advanced as Davidson maintains, but cover at best
a middle ground between Pamela and Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
The beginnings of the sentimental novel in America are not marked, as
Davidson has it, by a drive against its own conventions. On the contrary,
the first specimen is completely dependent on English models and the
early bourgeois ideology as articulated in the English moral weeklies. The
dreadful literary farrago, The Power of Sympathy (1789), concocted by
William Hill Brown, is by no means the first American novel as its author
claims, but it is probably America's first sentimental novel. Its form is very
revealing of the reception of European sentimentalism in the United
States. Even though he did not understand them very well, Brown
obviously had read all the sentimental classics and reproduced their main
motifs in individual episodes or digressions. There is the debate about the
novel, the tale of seduction, the conflict between sensibilit? and jugement out
of Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle H?loise, the French author's theory of
language (which Brown preaches but does not practice), and the attempt to
come to terms with the various conceptions of sympathy (one of the
unfortunately neglected but central concepts of sentimentalism; cf. David
Marshall). As if this were not enough, we also get a hymn to Sterne which
merely reveals that Brown had completely misunderstood Sterne's idea of
the sentimental, and the whole thing is topped off with a suicide ? la
Werther. Even though from a formal point of view this derivative montage
is a failure, the message itself is quite straightforward and continues the
English counterreaction to sentimentalism after 1780. Brown divides up
Julie's sensibilit?/jugement conflict between two characters and gives it a
one-sided solution. Harrington is the man of feeling, while his friend
Worthy (whose name suggests a certain competence) is the fanatic of
rationality. Harrington's overindulgence in sensibility leads to a barely
eluded incest and suicide. Worthy, being in the end surrounded by a
number of corpses, is the only one to achieve happiness. Speaking for the
author, he speaks a petit-bourgeois funeral oration at Harrington's grave:
"Violent passions, too nice a sensibility took reason from the helm of life."
Leslie A. Fiedler and Davidson have tried to rehabilitate Brown.
Fiedler's view (he was lucky that Brown was a man) is that this novel is
part of his tradition of the "anti-bourgeois sentimental novel" which he
sees as a contrast to the emotionally and intellectually anemic writings of
women: In contrast to the happy world where feeling and reason were in

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 The Sentimental Novel 43

harmony, which was called for by the woman's novel, Brown posited an
ambiguous and threatening concept of nature which also contained the
destructive magnetism of incest. In Brown's novel as Fiedler sees it, the
spiritual desire for order is destroyed by physical drives, and the anarchist
Fiedler is thrilled. Chaos is certainly a threat in most episodes of the novel
but Fiedler draws the wrong conclusions. Because chaos threatens, and it
does so mostly through passion in any sentimental novel, middle-class
values like reason, prudence, and self-protective modesty are all the more
important. Disappointing as it is, the first American novel is not anti
bourgeois but petit bourgeois.
Concerning artistic merit, Davidson also tries to promote Brown to at
least two-star status by claiming the novel is "surprisingly sophisticated in
technique, structure and theme."2 For her the compliance with conven
tions was only superficial while in fact they were being undermined with
irony. The proof which is offered to support this thesis is more than thin.
Worthy is supposedly being disparaged by the contrast between his
youthfulness and his sententiousness. Unless the text offers some indica
tion to the contrary, one can only argue that the sentimental tradition loved
sententiousness and even from the mouth of a very young man; precisely
because he is so sententious, especially in a novel which uses this style
throughout, one has to assume that Worthy is the mouthpiece of the
author. Furthermore, the message of his preaching, namely that too much
feeling is dangerous, is confirmed by the plot. Davidson's view of his
advice as exaggerated and ineffective does not derive from the novel but
from the value system of a twentieth-century interpreter who simply
cannot imagine people being that square.
Beside The Power of Sympathy, Foster's The Coquette has also been a
victim of the feminists' urge to present unconventional women writers.
Three aspects of this novel clearly demonstrate that it has not fully
outgrown the bourgeois convention of the role of woman. First, themati
cally, Foster's work has an English novel as precursor, Elizabeth S.
Tomlins's A Victim of Fancy (1787), whose title would aptly characterize
Foster's heroine Eliza. Second, The Coquette is also part of the reaction
against sentimentalism but the warning is expanded to include ambition
and, as the center of the faults, self-indulgence. Giving in to one's feelings,
moods, or fancy was criticized by contemporaries as a symptom of
permissiveness. Third, as Schultz has shown, the coquette is a stock
character of the English comedy. In an aristocratic context it had its

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 44 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

allurements; for the middle class, however, it was utterly disgusting. A

woman who encourages several lovers out of social ambition and thereby
risks virtue and reputation is an object of severe criticism.
Without knowledge of each other both Wenska and Davidson have been
trying to find an iconoclastic element in The Coquette. Both of them base
their interpretation on the sympathetic portrayal of the main figure and an
allegedly unsympathetic one of all other figures whom Davidson condemns
as "pompous moralists." Davidson blames Eliza's downfall on "hypocriti
cally priggish"3 Boyer. These verdicts stem, however, from a far too
modern taste. If one reads The Coquette from the point of view of the
sentimental tradition the meaning is clear. Eliza, the heroine, sins both in
word and deed against the holy cows of the middle class, namely against
matrimony, domesticity, the "cult of true womanhood" (Barbara Welter),
and above all against the principle of prudence. Boyer has everything that
would have delighted Richardson, Steele, Defoe, Goldsmith, Susanna
Rowson, and Enos Hitchcock: reason, sensibility, respectability, and the
regular income of a country parson. Instead of agreeing that "the middle
station of life is best" (Defoe), Eliza worships precisely the social ambition
that The Spectator had criticized as aristocratic vice. She is "gay," "vola
tile," and has too much "fancy." The latter term was meant to show her
over-sensitivity, the illusory nature of her goals, and her unwillingness of
not recognizing Sanford as the coxcomb he is. The message, which could
have been found in Goldsmith's The Vicar ofWakefield, extolls the prudent
modesty of the middle class: the higher one tries to climb, the deeper one
will fall.
The novel's intention is twofold: on the one hand, Eliza is introduced as
a modern woman who claims education and self-assurance as natural rights
for women (The Spectator allowed education only if it qualified for the role
of the submissive housewife); but on the other hand, no matter how much
a modern reader may identify with her, her story is a series of reprehen
sible acts. She abandons her faithful parents with a sense of liberation; she
forgets her dead fianc? rather too quickly and, what certainly would have
horrified her contemporaries, feels compromised by the well-meaning
condolences offered her. She fulfills the contemporary definition of a
coquette by simultaneously encouraging two suitors. After losing Boyer,
instead of being reasonable and waiting hopefully, she falls into a fit of
melancholy which, since Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and
Shakespeare's Hamlet, we know can easily happen to people with an excess

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 The Sentimental Novel 45

of "fancy." This melancholy which dims her sense of reality makes her the
more susceptible to her seducer, and after the worst happened, she repeats
her earlier mistake and once again leaves her parents' house thereby
causing them even more sorrow. All of this behavior is criticized by her
more perfect advisers who are all living happily in model marriages which
by their own lights are even modern. Mrs. Richman is just as intelligent,
cosmopolitan, and well-educated as Eliza, but being unmolested by fancy
she lives in a perfect partnership based upon mutual respect and what one
might almost call equality. It is not as though Eliza were the only one with
any sophistication, and this sophistication which has to be regarded as a
progressive step, is in no sense degraded by Eliza's behavior.
To be sure, Wenska and Davidson are right when they say that Eliza is
characterized positively. And if the novel deviates from the convention
then it is in the sense that Eliza is both a positively portrayed heroine as
well as a warning example. Her characterization mentions two groups of
traits: on the one hand she is educated and intelligent, and on the other
graceful and with perfect manners. Mrs. Richman has the first traits as well
but she lacks the second. Because of her grace and charm Eliza seems
predestined for the upper classes and that is exactly the danger. The
Spectator warns us about wit, beauty, and other such qualities because they
encourage ambition. The author of The Coquette is of the same opinion.
She offers us a view of women which for its time is quite modern,
propagating both education and political competence. At the same time,
however, she warns that this development might lead women into the
danger of aiming too high and to abandon the cardinal bourgeois virtues.
Completely consistent with the more advanced opinions of her time,
Foster's message is that the broadening of women's horizons is a good
thing but that it must be accompanied by prudence and is probably best
supervised by a country parson.
Although The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy have been most
written about, they are by no means decisive for the subsequent develop
ment of the sentimental novel in America. More important than Brown
and Foster is the versatile Susanna Rowson. After the not so perfect
Charlotte Temple (1791), with Trails of the Human Heart (1795) she suc
ceeded in presenting the prototype of the American version of the novel of
victimization. The sufferings of its heroine, Meriel, are divided into three
phases. First of all she has troubles with her family. Her father not only
makes sexual advances but is a spendthrift as well. At the cost of great

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 46 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

disadvantages for herself she keeps his behavior a secret and even helps
him out with her small fortune until the whole family is penniless. In the
second phase, after their household has been broken up, Meriel tries to
make her way alone. In part she accepts the help of patrons who then try
to exact sexual favors or she tries to earn her money whereby she is
thwarted by her enemies and despised by her family. Her third period of
suffering begins when, more out of duty than conviction, she gets married.
Her husband turns out to be a copy of her father and he soon betrays her
by spending all the money on a mistress. Even so, everything ends happily.
Her husband dies and she marries the great love of her youth, a man
morally as perfect as herself, who turns up at the right moment.
Just as in Pamela and Clarissa the plot revolves around two central
points: sex and money. As Nancy K. Miller has shown in an excellent
book, both belong together because women are financially dependent and
thus their chastity remains their only capital. Using the Trails of the Human
Heart we can now discuss the question whether, as Davidson would have
us believe, the novel of victimization implies a criticism of the socially
defined role of women by means of a realistic portrayal of their problems in
the novels' plots. Apart from its lack of probability, the plot proper may
certainly claim social relevance but it is embedded in a worldview which is
thoroughly fatalistic. In keeping with the baroque Wheel of Fortune
(which is mentioned), the heroine is spoken of as a "sport of fortune" or a
"child of adversity." Completely in accordance with convention, these
fatalistic notions are softened by the idea of a divine providence. Misfor
tunes have a deeper meaning as trials, i.e., as opportunities to prove one's
morality. Doing well in such trials leads to a reward in this world or the
next. Therefore: "We ought not to complain: every trial, however painful
to be borne, is inflicted for some wise purpose" (2:98). This attitude is
confirmed by the happy ending. Meriel, who is physically weak but
morally strong, receives her reward out of the hands of a deus ex machina
and she receives it just as passively as she had borne the "blasts of
adversity." Such a worldview fully accords with the early bourgeois
ideology.
Is it possible for a novel to be critical of the conventional role of women
which explains suffering fatalistically and which introduces a heroine who
suffers passively? We should not forget how Davidson substantiates her
assertions. She compares the sentimental novel with an educational tract
and says: "The very form of the medium, too, worked against the message
it was assigned to convey. Whereas a tract might extoll the virtues of

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 The Sentimental Novel 47

submission in the face of all trials, a novel must create trials to which a
dedicated heroine then virtuously submits. But those trials fully visualized
give us not an inspiring icon of feminine virtue but a perturbing portrait of
the young wife as perpetual victim" (128). Davidson is only half right in
the final sentence above because the sentimental novel does both: on the
one hand it demonstrates suffering, while on the other it defines feminine
virtue as unswerving submission. The genre certainly illustrates the
difficult position of women but at the same time the heroine bears this
position without complaint. The novel weakens its critical intention
because it embraces a fatalistic view of the world which understands the
heroine's sufferings as part of the general human condition rather than
being specifically feminine. The reason for feminine victimization is not
looked for in society or in social roles. Instead, it is found in the nonhuman
sphere of divine providence or the unknowable ways of God. With a
consciousness of this sort Rowson can of course portray the concrete
problems of women (which she does with a vengeance), but since she treats
these problems as finally grounded in metaphysics, a critique of the right
culprit, namely the bourgeois convention, becomes impossible.
Davidson would not agree with this and would answer back with her
idea of the "disjunctions in the sentimental structure":

What is promised in the preface is not always proven in the plot.

As earlier noted, much early sentimental fiction was forced into a
difficult balancing act?not always successfully executed?between
readerly demands (especially from the professional readers) for
moralistic restraint and writerly demands for artistic license. But
that wavering and uncertain balance can be read not just in the
sociology of the production of these texts but in the texts them
selves and even in the first readers of these texts. Indeed, I would
suggest that these texts find one of their chief loci in the difference
between the reader's private reservations about her own limited
legal and social standing as opposed to her public acceptance of
ostensibly unquestioned social values and established good order.
(135)
From the point of view of the sociology of knowledge this is rather naive.
The problem cannot be tackled by drawing a distinction between "private
reservation" and "public acceptance." The convention of the female role
was not enacted from above by male dictatorship against the will of most
women but was part of their consciousness and their identity. For most

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 48 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

women the traditional role assigned to them had been deeply internalized
and it determined their way of interpreting reality. I think it would be
more sensible to look at it this way: the women authors of most of these
novels deliberately formulate on the thematic level an agreement with the
social role assigned to women. On the dramatic level, however, i.e., when
this agreement gets turned into a concrete plot, they unconsciously betray
the unconscious misgivings that deep inside they felt about this role.
Consciously, however, feminine victimization is never attributed to the
social position of women but is always viewed as the consequence of an evil
world which treats both sexes badly. The only major achievement of the
novel of victimization is that, unlike other genres, it did not try to
romanticize or idealize conditions as they were. The novel may be realistic,
which marks a decisive step forward, but it does not demonstrate that male
dominance is not a metaphysical fact but a social agreement which can be
renounced. It does voice misgivings about the lives of contemporary
women, but it does not go as far as a consciously intended critique?i.e., a
critique which has gained the insight that it is not a matter of God or
nature but of society. Between these two forms, the mere misgivings and
the open critique, lies a decisive, epoch-making step, namely a change in
consciousness which gets lost in the twilight zone of Davidson's disjunc
tions. Rowson's Trials belongs to the first form, but the second, the real
critique of the oppression of women which recognizes its social origin, is
found in one of her later works, the serialized novel Sarah; or, The Exem
plary Wife (1805, reworked 1813).
The plot of the novel remains entirely within the traditional framework
of victimization. The mother of the heroine is dead, her father is the usual
spendthrift and she is raised by an unpleasant aunt. After having been
nagged into marriage, she embarks upon the "tempestuous sea of wedlock"
(6) with a man named Darnley who immediately proceeds to betray her
with another woman and squander all the money. While in debtor's prison,
his own wife begins to seem too expensive so he sends her away. Needless
to say, other men try to exploit her situation and she has difficulties
earning money. In the final chapters she is reunited with her husband but
again things are not very harmonious. Sarah then rather abruptly dies and
Darnley is punished for his wickedness by a second marriage to a shrew.
The opening of the novel is remarkable for its literary quality, though,
unfortunately, this level is not maintained. Jumping directly into the story,
Sarah's first letter tells us how she recendy married and what had made

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 The Sentimental Novel 49

her take this step. With critical distance and not a trace of melodrama she
describes how her decision was made, "hemmed round with persuasive
meddlers, who . . . urged me to this measure, fearful I should be
burthensome to them" (3). She makes a decision against the promptings of
her heart in order to escape an oppressive dependence on her relatives.
Standing in front of the altar at the high point of the wedding ceremony,
she gets a nosebleed and stains her dress. This is the most powerfully
expressive scene I have ever found in a sentimental novel. No melodra
matic fainting, just an everyday occurrence which is effective precisely
because of the understatement. It is made clear that the step she took was
wrong and that the man to whom she will devote her life is unworthy of
her.
What had happened previously is explained in the letters of her friend
Anne who is the recipient of Sarah's letters and is now writing to a third
person who is interested in Sarah. In this way Rowson manages to give the
reader two independent perspectives. We experience events from the point
of view of the person effected but we also have the relativizing commentary
of an outsider. A similar technique was used in The Coquette when Eliza's
advisers correspond with each other, but the balance shifts in the course of
that novel in such a way that at the end the advisers' predictions are
confirmed. In Rowson's novel the situation is almost reversed. The preface
rejecting the usual faultless heroines as being unrealistic ("Sarah is not a
faultless monster") has prepared the reader for Sarah's being relativized.
This corresponds to what we learn from Anne who also introduces Sarah
with certain reservations. Sarah is well read, a trifle unrealistic as a
consequence, and has a "romantic sensibility, enthusiastic superstition, and
sceptical boldness" (12, 13). The latter characteristic, especially, lets us
know that Sarah is not going to be an ordinary heroine. The misgivings
articulated by Anne are important as a means of reassuring the reader who
expects the conventional in order to introduce an iconoclastic heroine
without danger. In the course of the novel this relativization becomes less
prominent and the doubts expressed about the heroine are diminished. In
the beginning, her education is spoken of disparagingly but toward the end
one hears only about her "brilliant mind." Her pride is treated in the same
way. In the first letters Anne calls it "hauteur" which does imply a certain
mild criticism, but Sarah will vindicate this characteristic and the course of
the plot will show she was right. Sarah's is a pride which is continually
being redefined and reintroduced into the novel while always contrasted

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 50 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

with the conventional pride of her aunt. It is here that Rowson introduces
a counterideology which is a necessary precondition for critique since only
with such help can a conventional ideology be rejected. The aunt advises
Sarah to marry out of class pride because otherwise she would have no
alternative but to take "servile employment." Sarah, however, would rather
"eat the bread of servitude" than "bear a state of dependence on anyone"
(25, 16, 113). Her willingness to work for her living is quite modern and
she finds work less humiliating than to be supported by unwilling relatives.
But when she tries to earn her living, with a variety of odd jobs, she fails
miserably. The context suggests, however, that this is a clue to Sarah's
being more advanced than her surroundings. The more women's pride and
self-assurance increase, the more sentimentalism decreases, which seems to
support the idea that this creed is connected to feelings of inferiority. Sarah
is quite good-hearted but she despises the exaggerated cult of sensibility
with its swooning and exaltations. She despises it as typical of conventional
feminine behavior. She who is intelligent and convinced of her own worth
does not need kindness and she also does not need to show weakness as a
way of getting attention. "Sensibility" is attributed to her on a number of
occasions but the definition has been changed to mean an awareness of
integrity and personal worth. This sensibility is related to pride.
By marrying beneath her moral and intellectual standard, Sarah in effect
sinned against sensibility and pride, the validity of which is demonstrated
by the subsequent catastrophes. When the bad character of Darnley
becomes clear, Sarah does not submit fatalistically like Meriel in Trials of
the Human Heart. On the contrary, she uses her mind to defend herself.
She calls him to account and they have arguments which are refreshingly
realistic. In these arguments Sarah always cuts a much better figure, first of
all because she is right but also because she is more intelligent. Even so, she
fulfills her duties as a wife but not slavishly to the point of self-abnegation.
She suffers, but less because of Darnley's atrocities than from being
dependent on a man inferior to her. Here we have a theme which had been
intimated in earlier novels but which had never been spoken of this
explicidy. Sarah sees her marriage to Darnley as an injury to her integrity:
"This man's insolence has given a wound to my sensibility, to my pride
and self-love ... that kind of proper pride, which is the safeguard of female
virtue" (34, 35). Sensibility and pride go together and both are particularly
justified for a woman betrayed. Both protect virtue, but the virtue that is
meant here is more than just chastity: it means feminine dignity in a

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 The Sentimental Novel 51

broader sense and one which can also be injured in marriage. Unlike
Meriel, Sarah does not abase herself by trying to regain the approval of her
partner. On the contrary, she tries to "shun . . . every action which might
lower me in my own estimation" (103). The lack of love in their marriage
helps her in this. At the high point of the story when Darnley is caught in
flagrante delicio with another woman, Sarah tells him contemptuously to
his face: "If I loved you, Darnley, what a miserable being I should be" (74).
Since she never loved him, his betrayal cannot really hurt her and because
of this she is able to continue living with him. Outwardly, she does her
duties as a wife; inwardly, however, she maintains her independence. This
constitutes a moral revaluation of marriage and creates a counterideology of
feminine worth. Marriage as a legal construction is separated from the idea
of emotional intimacy or partnership. To become legally married all one
needs is a justice of the peace or a parson but genuine intimacy or
partnership requires love and intellectual equality. Meriel would have been
satisfied with good behavior on the part of her husband; Sarah wants more.
Rowson's later novel discusses not only the individual fate of its heroine
but also comprehends it as part of the basic problem of the relationship
between the sexes. Unlike Meriel, Sarah does not see the source of her
problems in a general human condition, she sees it clearly as a result of her
being a woman. By doing so, her thinking made the decisive step forward
and attained the change in consciousness which is the prerequisite for the
formulation of a real critique. When Darnley strikes her, she thinks to
herself: "Dishonoured?insulted?struck. ... I am a woman; the law will
not redress my grievances, and if it would, could I appeal publicly?" (94).
Such statements might be ascribed to her "sceptical boldness" except that
they are neither corrected nor relativized. Instead, the plot confirms how
right she is. Moreover, it is noticeable how skillfully Rowson chooses the
occasions and the stylistic form of such utterances. What contemporary
reader, even a conservative one, would not agree when Sarah with
refreshing realism lets off a little steam. The men who come back from
their club half-drunk "preach about the prerogative and dignity of men,
the great lords of creation, and expect their simply rational companions to
bow with submission, and acknowledge their supremacy." Or when she
writes her brother: "Your sex, in general, accustom themselves to consider
women in so inferior a light, that they oftener treat us like children and
playthings, than intelligent beings" (40, 258).
Furthermore, the novel reflects on how Sarah's problems are much

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 52 Early American Literature, Volume 26, iggi

more severe than those of more conventional women precisely because she
is men's equal if not superior and because she knows it. Her intellectual
brilliance is of little use to her since she is hemmed in by the rules of an
uriemancipated society where only women's domestic achievements are
honored. When a guest in her own house makes advances and she rejects
him with contempt, he laughs in her face, "and asked me what I meant to
do with my pretty person, high breeding and splendid accomplishments?
. . . Oh, that I were a man" (33). As a woman she cannot live out her own
personal qualities because her social status remains subordinate. And this is
the limit which the novel also reaches. There seems to be no goal which a
gifted heroine could attain.
After Darnley gets rid of her in order to save money, she tries to earn
her own living but her situation is worse than before because she is
constantly being confronted with frauds and would-be seducers. She learns
that a single woman is considered fair game, and so when Darnley calls for
her, she returns to him against the advice of Anne. A sort of reconciliation
takes place in which both confess to having made mistakes. Sarah admits to
having lacked patience as well as having shown a certain "extravagance."
Here, Rowson is making a last precautionary gesture in the direction of
conventionality. Despite their good intentions, the marriage once again fails
due to Darnley's worthlessness. But this is consistent with the intentions of
the novel because otherwise Sarah would have to betray her ideals and
become just another housewife. As before, she fulfills her duties outwardly
while maintaining her inner independence. This period of resignation is
suddenly ended when another man, "Hayley, our good curate," enters her
life. He is an equal and she cautiously admits that she could love him. The
two see quite a bit of each other, especially when doing charity work, but
it never comes to a declaration of their feelings. This encounter changes
Sarah and her thoughts advance a step further. She muses that a woman
who really loves "can never be guilty of aught that would call a blush to her
own cheek, or brand the object of her esteem with infamy." What she is
referring to exactly (perhaps even sleeping with Hayley) remains deliber
ately open. Just as in her earlier thoughts, love is in the foreground but
here it is not only the precondition for marriage. Whereas previously she
thought that love and marriage had to go together to justify sexuality, she
now cautiously hints that love alone would be enough. In this respect
Rowson's concept of love is daring; on the other hand it is through this
concept that convention might return. If Darnley were her true love, Sarah
would be willing to accept the conventional role of women and bear

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 The Sentimental Novel 53

anything, "but the reproaches of my own heart" (255). This is no complete

relapse into conventionality, however. Because the marital duties were
accepted voluntarily, they would be an expression of devotion rather than
dependence.
But all these ideas are only the thoughts of a lonely heroine in a quiet
moment, and Rowson abandons her in her hesitation and doubts. The
author had not been trying to come up with a completed, mature plan for
a revolution. She does not want women to be completely independent and
find self-fulfillment without men; she wants them recognized as equal
partners who out of love submit voluntarily. By making Darnley die so that
Sarah could marry Hayley, Rowson could have concluded her novel with
the realization of this concept. But that would have infringed on the
concepts of duty and the inviolability of marriage. It probably went too far
for Rowson, and perhaps it seemed too optimistic because she surely must
have sensed that overcoming traditional sexual roles would never be easy.
So, making an accusation the message of her book, she ends it with Sarah's
death, a disillusioned and disillusioning death without poetic justice?just
as had been promised in the foreword. Rowson did not possess Mary
Wollstonecraft's piercing intellect and courageous spirit; nevertheless,
within the framework of the sentimental novel and its modified, but still
bourgeois, ideology, her achievement is great. After having begun with the
articulation of misgivings in her early works she finally attempted that kind
of breakthrough which Davidson had hoped to find at the very beginning
of the American novel.

NOTES

i. Before her book mentioned above, Davidson had presented her thesis
articles.
2. "The Power of Sympathy Reconsidered" 28.
3. Revolution 32.

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