The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England by Park Julie

Author:Park, Julie [Park, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009-10-20T18:30:00+00:00

I go on but indifferently,-I didn’t write as I did, the certainty of being known, the high success of Evelina, which, as Mr. [Samuel] Crisp says, to fail in a 2d would tarnish,-these thoughts worry and depress me, -& a desire to do more than I have been able, by writing at unseasonable Hours, & never letting my Brains rest even when my corporeal machine was succumbent.7

If working with the novel form appears fraught with technical and psychological difficulties for Burney, the social and ideological background for her novels surrounding ideas about mechanical subjectivity—embedded as much in the sights and artifacts of material culture as in conduct book dictates and contemporary philosophy—challenges further the notion that women can mediate subjectivity through acts of invention as opposed to copying. Few other models of subjectivity appear to compel and thwart the heroines more, and Burney herself, than the ever-capacious figure of eighteenth-century machine life and its well-modulated displays of openness and inwardness, whether captured in marvelous toys, the strict patterns of conduct book femininity, or the carefully crafted characters of a novel.

The Machine Life of Women in Eighteenth-Century England

While consumer society propelled female subjects into a perpetual and nongenerative state of wishing for trinkets and apparel—with the fashion doll working as its agent—it also presented an artifactual corollary in the unreflecting yet intriguingly repetitive figure of the automaton. Well before Hoffmann’s haunting creation of Olympia in “The Sandman” (1818), Ned Ward in Adam and Eve Stript of their Furbelows (1714) made a ready equation between the “Machine” and cultural models of femininity when describing the “Devout Lady” who, in her piety, “is so precise in her Deportment, and so mathematically regular in all her Actions, that you would think every Motion in her Limbs, were the Effects of Art, and not of Nature, and that her whole Composition was but a Machine of Clock-work.” 8 Elsewhere throughout the century, the machine proliferated in conduct literature as a mixed figure for women’s consistency and restraint, or her vanity and vacuity.

Working as a moral standard, for example, clockwork imagery fuels Hester Chapone’s lecture on procrastination in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: “There is in many people, and particularly in youth, a strange aversion to regularity—a desire to delay what ought to be done immediately, in order to do something else . . . It is of more consequence to you than you can conceive . . . to acquire habits of constancy and steadiness.”9 Viewing the mechanics of conduct more broadly, Abbé D’Ancourt’s Lady’s Preceptor, or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction upon Politeness, conceives the whole of life as a machine: “Life is a continual Series of operations, both of Body and Mind, which ought to be regulated and performed with the utmost care.”10 For Richard Allestree, in A Lady’s Calling, modesty itself, “the Science of decent motion,” operates as a canny system for regulating thought and behavior, as it “checks and controles all rude exorbitancies, and is the great civilizer of conversations.

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