Review of Tassie Gwilliam’s Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender
Readers hailed Samuel Richardson as a genius in his own day for the morality of his novels, and morality had everything to do with sex. In the nineteenth century, Richardson’s critical reception swung to the opposite extreme. Readers usually dismissed his novels as massive testimonials to moral hypocrisy, and moral hypocrisy again had everything to do with sex. The two poles of critical opinion remained mutually exclusive — until recently.
Tassie Gwilliam’s Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender is likely to become a classic piece of Richardson criticism. Besides its other strengths, it is also a definitive example of the late-twentieth-century’s critical compromise on Richardson. Readers still hail Richardson as a genius, but now it is precisely because of his sexual “hypocrisy.” Modern critics are likely to find Richardson’s strain of peeping-tom prurience underlining rather than undermining his novels. In the Age of Androgyny, Gwilliam shows us, Richardson’s uncertainties about the borderline between the sexes make him one of our great contemporaries.
Gwilliam’s book aims to reveal in Richardson’s novels “the unstable and fictional nature of the construction of masculinity and femininity, and to show the fragility of their structural, definitional dependence on one another. . . “ (14). The eighteenth-century dream of perfect compatibility between the sexes often took the form of artificial oppositions between the genders, putting pressure on Richardson’s fictions. Regardless of any intended moral didacticism, therefore, the impossible task of portraying mutually exclusive yet compatible sexual orientations turns Richardson’s novels into sophisticated studies of the “problems and anxieties of gender construction” (1). Characters explore their sexuality and exorcise insecurities by performing experiments, usually cruelly, on one another’s bodies and souls.
The thesis that characters find elements of themselves in the forbidden sexuality of the Other amounts to an “outing” for Mr. B, Lovelace and Grandison. Gwilliam uses the words of the closet to describe their psychologically suppressed lives. While probing the female body for the secrets it holds about the male body, what emerges for these characters is “a search — less directed, less overt — for the meaning of masculinity, a search that shadows the open investigation of femininity. One of my interests here is to bring that covert search out into the open” (4–5). The author achieves this exposure primarily through the dubious hermeneutic technique of taking all metaphors equally seriously and locating their maximum sexual implications. (Gwilliam writes that the effects of male cross-dressing come from instances “whether actual or imaginary” (11), as if there need never be any distinction between the two.) Whenever Gwilliam finds a man comparing a woman in any way to another man, she seizes it as evidence that he is denying the woman’s sexuality in favor of homoerotic wish-fulfillment. At one point in Clarissa, for example, Lovelace debates his alternative techniques of seduction by using the traditional fable of the competition between the Wind and the Sun. Each tries to make a man take off his coat, and of course the Wind’s violence has the opposite effect of the Sun’s gentle persuasion. Once the man’s coat is removed, there is nothing left for the engendering Sun to do. From this Gwilliam writes that “Lovelace seems impelled initially to supply a male body to stand in for Clarissa,” then associates the emasculating “nothing” left to do with the threatening female genitalia underneath the cloak. Ingenious, perhaps, but one senses at times that the pressure on Richardson’s novels comes from without rather than within.
Gwilliam’s use of Eve Sedgwick’s term “homosocial” aptly summarizes her attitude toward Richardson’s male characters. The jargonistic word, which deliberately suggests “homosexual” (with which it is cross-referenced in the index), conveniently insinuates where argument cannot always convince. Gwilliam gives much less attention to the more obviously intimate relationship between Clarissa and Anna Howe than to the potentially homosexual relationship between Grandison and Jeronymo. For example, the relationship between Grandison and Clementina is “untouched by male homosociality” until we discover the relationship between Grandison and her brother (124), as if “homosociality” is a kind of corrupting disease wholly incompatible with male/female relationships. The term’s imprecise and lurid connotations add an unbalanced and unpleasant tone to the book, and it distracts from what are often very sharp and useful observations.
The author’s strongest points usually come not from the over-determined metaphors, but from charting the ways in which tensions slide from character to character as the plot dictates. The novels only reinscribe the problems that they appear to settle (45). Minor characters are scapegoated to allow for the protagonists’ resolution of gender confusion, persuasively emphasizing the tensions in the novels which Richardson is ultimately unable to contain. The gender confusion resolved by the harmonious marriage of Pamela and Mr. B, for example, is traced from Mrs. Jewkes to Sally Godfrey to the maidservant Polly. In Clarissa, Richardson’s support of his heroine’s exemplarity makes it necessary for him to create Lovelace’s accomplices as scapegoats, but the neatly defined opposition between Angel and Whore continually threatens to unravel along with the opposition of genders that it masks. Gwilliam believes Sir Charles Grandison to be the least interesting of Richardson’s novels because he translates the powerfully tragic techniques of Clarissa and Pamela into a community-based view of sex and gender: “The duplicity that haunts the feminine in Pamela is rendered as the literal doubleness of the hero’s relation to the two heroines of the novel. . . . Feminine power is scapegoated and redirected to underwrite the hero and the community” (113). Other examples appear often throughout the book.
Other transfers of conflict connected with Richardson’s works are more problematic, however. Gwilliam leaves us uncertain about the dynamics of the reading experience once gender confusion and literary transvestitism slip out of the novel entirely. In other words, what exactly is the reader’s role in Richardson’s experimental identifications between the sexes? A paradox remains which Gwilliam does not resolve: she clearly writes so that we may better understand the role of women in Richardson’s novels, but she also labels any male character’s attempt to empathize with or comprehend femininity as “probing,” “exposure,” “violation” and “penetration.” When Clementina suffers the shame of revealing her secret passion to Grandison, Gwilliam argues that she suffers a version of what Clarissa suffers in the rape (152). If so, then the guilty pleasures of the entire romance tradition are more guilty than we imagined. The implication seems to be that a man reading Clarissa is a man raping Clarissa, and a woman reading Clarissa is a woman cross-dressing as a guilty man. Gwilliam writes of Grandson’s dullness that “the loss or the refusal of a mystery, principally located in women, affects both author and reader,” but surely it is the loss and refusal of mystery that is our impetus for reading in the first place. An exploration of the secrets and mysteries of the erotic female heart is a serviceable definition of the early domestic novel, particularly the epistolary domestic novel. Gwilliam does not make us comfortable associating ourselves with confused misogynists who read other people’s letters, lift veils and penetrate shields. But, as the history of Richardson criticism demonstrates, perhaps it is not our moment to feel comfortable.
Originally published in South Atlantic Review 59:1 (Jan. 1994), 138–140.
