Women Writers, Performance & Conduct Literature

Question 1

Introduction (Texts x 4, Critical x 2, Argument x 2)

Answer 1

Texts:

• Frances Burney, Evelina (1778)
• Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Education of Women (1787), Vindication on the Rights of Women (1792)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)

Critical:

• Catherine Craft Fairchild notes the ‘spectacle’ that denigrates women
• Terry Castle, conversely, argues that the masquerade provided individuals with freedom from traditional roles
• Horace Walpole: Ball and Masquerade supply the place of politics

Argument:

• Masquerade exemplifies the expectations impressed upon women. Forced women to mask themselves whilst masking the intentions of the educator also.
• Whilst women were required to perform an image of perfection (that was ultimately a pompous construct), they also acted as objects of desire, to be made desirable for courtship

Question 2

P1 - Conduct literature as exemplary (Critical x 1, Contextual x 2, Quotes x 6)

Answer 2

Critical:
- Armstrong and Tennenhouse: Conduct literature ‘strives to reproduce, if not to always revise the culturally accepted forms of desire’

Contextual:

• Wollstonecraft’s ‘On the Education of Women’ (1787) a conduct novel that draws from John Gregory’s (1774) ‘A letter from a Father to his Daughters’
• -> Writes explaining ‘how best to act to achieve those chief beauties in female character’
• Thomas Broadhurst’s Advice to Young Ladies (1810)

Quotes:
- Frances Burney’s ‘Evelina’ seeks to take the novel form away from the ‘fantastic regions of romance’. It views the potentially dangerous effects of ‘marvellous’ literature that may cause ‘injury’ and seeks for readers instead to ‘seek aid from sober probability’ and learn the ‘manners of the time’

• Northanger Abbey: Catherine Morland famously discusses society’s negative conceptions of the ‘novel’ and the ‘momentary shame’ a woman feels when discovered with one, compared, for example to the Spectator.

Question 3

P2 - Ballrooms as a site of sociability (Critical x 2, Quotes x 3, Argument x 2)

Answer 3

• Gillian Russell notes that ‘sociability is a performative event’ –> The transferral of information taught in conduct literature to that of reality exemplified by the set-pieces of balls and dances throughout N.A and Evelina
• Josefina Klang writes that the dance is a ‘site of social convention and education in relation to these social conventions’
• Evelina declared to be ‘guilty of ill manners’ for rejecting Sir Clement before dancing with Lord Orville
• Upon fretting that Lord Orville should be ‘so much my superior in every way’, Evelina overhears someone comment that this was ‘the most difficult dance I ever saw’
• -> Dance judged not on its physical quality but on its social compatibility
• Catherine, similarly, in N.A. claims that ‘she longed to dance … but had not an acquaintance in the room’
• -> Unlike Evelina, she is aware of social convention priorly. Her story is that of re-education rather than education, and about a satire of more traditional expectations of females.

Question 4

P3 - Highlighting the spectacle (Quotes x 4, Critical x 4)

Answer 4

• In N.A. Isabella illustrates a degree of self-reflexivity in her claim that her ‘favourite position’ was on a ‘bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of everyone entering’
• -> Note liminality of between the doors, voyeurism and self-reflection
• -> Adopting what Sue Ellen Case terms the ‘split subject position’
• -> Exemplifying the masque as ‘spectacle’ (Catherine Craft Fairchild)
• N.A. notes how the ‘social assembly’ at the ‘Pump-Room’ was dominated by ‘dancers’, ‘ribbons’, and ‘high feathers’ - highly visual and flamboyant (spectacle)
• The focus on the visual and spectacle is dehumanizing, detracting from the individual. The original ‘pleasure’ of the dance (Paulina Ossona) is eradicated in favour of sociability, and as Foucault writes in ‘The History of Sexuality’ the covering up of female sexuality and desire (with spectacle) results in shame
• -> A ‘shame’ experienced by Evelina after she is scalded for dancing with Orville
• -> Catherine and Isabella are made to feel ‘very uncomfortable indeed’

Question 5

P4 - Northanger Abbey’s satire (Critical x 1, Plot x 1,

Answer 5

• Aurelie Chavaleyre: Describes the novel as gothic satire
• Austen satirises Catherine’s fearful desires around General Tilney and the death of Mrs. Tilney as she blurs her reading of the gothic ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ with real life
• However, at the end of the novel, Catherine is surprisingly wedded with Henry Tilney. Austen’s language to describe the event is very blank and sudden: ‘Catherine [was] married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled’
• -> Spends a large portion of the novel defying the Gothic then concluding with an idealised ending
• The wedding, particularly mirrors the first ballroom scene, in which Tilney discusses the ‘contractual agreement’ of the dance as a broader allegory for marriage. Just like Evelina who is married to her partner, Orville, Catherine is wedded
• -> Collapses the boundaries between the masque and real society: society as a performance

Question 6

P5 - Wollstonecraft’s perspective (Argument x 1, Historical x 1, Quotes x 4)

Answer 6

• Recognises the ‘spectacle’ and how conduct narratives merely seek to transform women into the perfected constructions of male desire
• Wrote in a letter in 1597 that ‘all the world’s a stage’
• ‘By far too much of a girl’s time is taken up in dress … the body hides the mind, which in its turn is obscured by the drapery’ (TED, 1787)
• Desires that a woman is valued for her mind, her ‘abilities and virtue’
• educated to be ‘affectionate’ and ‘rational’ rather than ‘alluring’
• Ultimately, she exclaims: ‘I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves’
• -> Just as she seeks to overcome the performance of perfection, so too does she seek to overcome the performance of education conduct narratives, both of which are evidently intertwined.

Question 7

P6 - Wollstonecraft’s desires on education (Critical x 1, Quotes x 1, Argument x 1)

Answer 7

• Vivien Jones writes that WSC utilises the form of the conduct narrative to make greater claims for education
• She lambasts the ‘false system of education, gathered from books written on the subject by men’
• Whilst ‘On the Education of Women’ appropriates a number of features from traditional conduct narratives, Wollstonecraft’s continuous rejection of performance is exemplified by her re-appropriation of the term of education as performatively asserted by conduct literature, and stripping it of its artificiality.

Question 8

Conclusion (2)

Answer 8

• Northanger Abbey satirises the performativity of female education, by illustrating that it is no different from the sorts of gothic literature that are derided as false and untrue
• Wollstonecraft does not seek to satirise but to reclaim education, stripping it of its own performative masking of masculine ideology, and focusing on inner truths, raising the minds, ‘abilities and virtues’ of women