The Eighteenth Century

Abstract:

My essay examines how Hannah More's writings draw frequent and often unexpected parallels between mechanical motion and female behavior. While other evangelical writers like John Newton warned that young women might be corrupted by popular mechanical displays like those in James Cox's museum of automata, More embraced certain similarities between manmade mechanisms, the divine clockwork universe, and the regimented and yet "vital" routines of a Christian woman. The piece focuses on how More's only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), formulates theories about self-control. More treats the novel as a "mechanical" genre. While she acknowledges that the wrong kind of novel might elicit dangerously automatic and unthinking behaviors, she suggests that the right kind of novel (e.g. Coelebs) can accomplish what a treatise on conduct cannot: namely, a narrative in which repetitions and routines can demonstrate--rather than merely describe--the workings of providence.