Eighteenth-Century Fiction

REVIEWS 145 Beth Fowkes Tobin, ed. History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. vi + 309pp. US$50.00. ISBN 08203 -1577-X. Beth Fowkes Tobin's collection places itself at the intersection of feminisms, gender studies, and historicism, arguing that an understanding of the cultural and historical location and specificity of women's and men's lives is vital to the feminist project of dismantling the social construction of gender and the cultural assumptions behind it. Although her introductory argument seems at first to be predicated on a rather limiting and over-simple dichotomy between psychological (essentialist) and historical (constructionist ) views of gender (her omission of any mention of Lacan here is curious), she goes on to provide a valuable and lucid account of some of the fundamental tensions inherent in feminist historicism. Tobin places her book usefully in this shifting theoretical context, arguing that feminist historicism and gender studies complement one another: "without an emphasis on real women—their lives, work, and art—the political agenda of feminism, its focus on power and oppression, could disappear in the proliferation of trendy studies on gender, and, likewise, without gender studies' insistence that we reflect on the assumptions that inform our work, feminist literary criticism could be in danger of participating in the reinscription of the social, political, and economic relations that feminists work to transform" (p. 10). The twelve essays that make up the collection admirably embody the book's purpose, specifically illustrating different methods by which feminist critics should "use history and culture to complicate and problematize our understanding of gender" (p. 10). Rigorous historicism is combined in most cases with precise and suggestive reading of different cultural texts. The essays examine a wide variety ofliterary and non-literary texts, ranging from autobiography to opera to legal philosophy to conduct-books to agricultural manuals; in the process, they explore and blur generic boundaries, showing how different modes of discourse interact to reinforce, challenge, or subtly alter cultural paradigms. At the same time, the essays illustrate a wide range of historicist approaches, from materialist analyses of gender and class construction and the economic forces that shape them, to revisionist reconstructions that place individual women in moments of dynamic cultural shift, to analyses of the struggle of women to define themselves as writers and as women in a society which strictly prescribes their cultural expression and experience. A related strength, evident in nearly all the essays in the volume, is the comprehensive contextualizing of gender issues. Essays by Shawn Lisa Maurer and by Tobin, for example, place the construction of gender at the centre of a larger shift in social and economic structures, focusing particularly on the changing construction of masculinity undergirding the middle-class ethic, through the medium of both the popular periodical and the technical agricultural manual. Maurer's well-contextualized and acute analysis of the Tatler and the Spectator shows how the development of a new, seemingly more egalitarian and affective model of masculinity depends on the construction and subsequent "effacement" of a submissive female; indeed, it virtually erases the female , by privileging the homosocial bond above the male-female bond, and by ascribing to males the feminine qualities of nurturing and moral purity. Tobin's essay historically locates the construction of the "new economic man" (the counterpart to Nancy Armstrong's "domestic woman") by an examination of die new "scientific" ways of writing about agriculture, which present agriculturists as a class of highly trained professional men with skills of computation and rational analysis, middle-class qualities which challenge aristocratic masculinity, and which are appropriate to a changing socioeconomic model by which land and human labour become commodifiable objects rather than organic parts of a web of traditional relationships. 146 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 Other essays in the volume show how deeply ideas of gender are interwoven with European cultural and economic dominance, and also how the constructions of gender underlying patriarchal models have their analogy in contemporary race relations. In a provocative rehistoricizing of Austen, Joseph Lew shows how Mansfield Park continues contemporary debates over slavery, abolition, and the political rights of women and slaves as pieces of property whose subjugation...