Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy
Jane Barker's amatory novel, Love Intrigues (1713), presents a snapshot of English Jacobite Catholic culture at James II's exiled Court in St. Germain-en-Laye. As evidenced in her Galesia Trilogy and poetry, Barker's narratives promote Catholic monasticism and its advantages for English women such as retreat, education, and the preservation of a feminist history. That the 1719 edition of Love Intrigues minimizes these overt Catholic emphases suggests that Barker's representation of Royalist Catholic solidarity in the first edition was too controversial later, due to recent and imminent Jacobite activity in England.
Montagu's Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood
From 1716 to 1718 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled across Europe and into the Levant, keeping a detailed correspondence with her friends and family in England, letters that were finally published in 1763.1 As the wife of an ambassador, Montagu was afforded privileged access to Turkish women and their domestic circles. As many critics have pointed out, her gender and class position, moreover, gave Montagu a certain authority to interrogate Western assumptions about the Levant in her travelogue. Scholars have paid less attention to the fact that Montagu's travels eastward coincided with a pivotal period of the Habsburg expansion into lands controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Prince Eugene of Savoy led Austria's war effort into Turkey after he successfully curtailed France's power on the continent during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). These two campaigns are interrelated because this expansion of Europe's "external" borders occurred when European nation-states attempted to establish firm "internal" borders amongst themselves to maintain a balance of power. Part of what makes Montagu's letters from the Levant so valuable is the way they demonstrate how personal interactions among Europe's aristocratic classes are conditioned by different nation-states' foreign policies and territorial ambitions in the Middle East during the late 1600s and early 1700s.While this territorial expansion and delineation occurred in tandem with changes that allowed the West to enjoy greater advantages in economic output, military standing, and diplomatic relations, Montagu provides insight into the ways in which global might registered itself in seemingly unrelated areas, including the spheres dominated by women, especially among the wives of diplomats and heads of state. This is particularly pronounced in Montagu's comments on the fashion-clothes, mannerisms, and tastes-of the court. In dispatches from Ratisbon (or Regensberg, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire) and Vienna, Montagu expresses her distaste for the "monstrous" fashions of the elite women (and even Prince Eugene himself). She finds women wearing headdresses four stories tall featuring embankments, which, to her, evoke a bastion or citadel. The dress and disposition of these fashionable women provokes Montagu, because she implies that they violate aristocratic conventions of interaction, what Norbert Elias terms the civilizing process: a polite courtly behavior that indicates social status and is marked by "vigilant self control" (400) and "a constraint on the affects" (190).2 As Elias explains, this regulation of the affects-a gradual "courtization"-occurred in absolutist societies in which chains of dependence were extensive and courtiers distinguished themselves not through physical violence but by carefully controlling their "bodily carriage, gestures, dress, facial expressions" (49). However, as Montagu nears the Ottoman Empire, she increasingly documents how aristocratic women openly display their hostility through their clothes and mannerisms. At the same time, when Montagu and her husband were forced to return briefly to Hanover-a temporary return westward-to greet George I, she ridicules "the Saxon Ladys" for their affected "civility" and "good nature" (281-82). For Montagu, these women are the very epitome of Elias's "courtization" of behaviors, but their affected mannerisms and mask of civility-what Montagu discusses as "a little softLisp, and a pritty pitty pat step" (281)- leave her cold. Although she commends these Saxon aristocrats' hospitality,3 she is neither comfortable among women who openly display their hostility through their clothes and mannerisms nor with women who carefully regulate their "elementary urges" (Elias 191).Montagu locates the relationship between the political machinations that led to a redrawing of European boundaries and the social practices that mark alignment with these territorial ambitions among the women at court. As Montagu edges closer to disputed border areas, she notices how these women eschew "polite" mannerisms; instead their bodily comportment, dress, mannerisms, and style reflect their husbands' efforts to carve out new territory and to implement definitive political borders that serve as the bedrock of the nation-state. …
Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820
Nobody's Story is a ground-breaking exploration of the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The 'nobodies' of her title are not ignored, silenced, erased, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputation, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers during the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. Far from creating only minor variations on an essentially masculine figure, they delineated crucial features of 'the author' for the period in general by emphasizing their trials and triumphs in the market place. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) and Delarivier Manley (1663-1724) became popular and notorious by likening their authorship to the perceived 'nothingness' of female sexuality and deceptions of scandalous rumour-mongering. This preoccupation with absence and misrepresentation, Gallagher argues, was imported into the novel, the new genre that encouraged identification with 'nobodies' - with fictional characters understood to have no individual embodied referents in the world. In studies of the economic relations, authorial personae, and fictional techniques of Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804), Frances Burney (1752-1840), and Maria Edgeworth (1768?-1849), the book details the evolving connection between the development of the novel and the growing prestige of the female author.