Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

Author:Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Glanvill’s Ghost, Cold Sociability, and “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind”

It is one of the most pregnant facts of mental life that, if we weld certain elements taken from the whole of being into a realm of their own, which is governed by its own laws and not by those of the whole, this realm, if completely cut off from the life of the whole, can display in its inner realization an empty nature suspended in the air; but then, often altered only by imponderables, precisely in this state of removal from all immediate reality, its deeper nature can appear more completely.

GEORG SIMMEL, “Sociability” (1910)

Tho’ I banished Mr. Glanville, I did not desire his Death; and, questionless, if he knew how I resent it, his Ghost would be satisfied with the Sacrifice I make him.

CHARLOTTE LENNOX, The Female Quixote (1752)

What, then, to make of Arabella, Charlotte Lennox’s famed female Quixote? She appeared on the London literary scene just three years after Tom Jones, and Fielding himself made haste to praise the “Coldness of the Narration” that delivered her there.1 If “Coldness” implies remoteness, Fielding isolated something besides a quality of Lennox’s narrative voice: Arabella lives, to echo Georg Simmel’s evocative phrase, in a realm of her own, one governed by its own laws and not those of the whole society.2 The latter she notoriously rejects in favor of her private library and the unshared phantoms of her mind, and when at last she comes to her senses and forsakes those, the English novel is supposed to have reached a climacteric of its own. In Catherine Gallagher’s justly influential reading, Arabella’s conversion to the credo of common sense at the hands of a mysterious “Divine” marks her submission not, as would appear, to reality but rather to a distinctively modern conception of fiction—a regime, governed by “probability and illusionistic realism,” where “‘credit’ is solicited only conditionally, on the revived Aristotelian terms not of ‘belief’ but of ‘suspended disbelief.’” For Gallagher, Arabella’s conversion comes at the price not just of other forms of fiction but of material embodiment too. Gallagher’s Lennox herself paid that price as, for all the popularity of this novel, she was ultimately left to vanish, impoverished, from the increasingly abstracted marketplace of mid-eighteenth-century English letters.3

Gallagher’s persuasive reading redresses decades of criticism in which “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind” was understood as an allegory of the English novel’s break with its own nebulous past, and especially with the archaic figures of romance that could ever after only haunt it. Just as it once supported confident accounts of British literature’s arrival at the age of reason, this allegory also underwrote counterarguments for romance’s subliminal persistence in the kinds of literary “History” that pretend to certify its death.4 Yet I want to suggest that “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind” might have little to do with transition and that the solids that seem to melt into air over the course of Lennox’s novel (or vice versa) are nothing more or less than social facts—facts that Lennox tests via a supernaturalized account of what happens in the air.

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