Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814

In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers

Elizabeth Kraft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754662808
• eBook ISBN: 9781351871907
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814, Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. To this end, she reads the fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire. Like their paradigmatic foremothers, these early women novelists create female characters who demonstrate subjectivity and responsibility for the other even as they grapple with the exigencies imposed on them by circumstance and convention. Kraft's study, informed by ethical theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, is remarkable in its juxtaposition of narratives from ancient and early modern times. These pairings enable Kraft to demonstrate not only the centrality of female desire in eighteenth-century culture and literature but its ethical importance as well.

Chapter 1
Matriarchal Desire and Ethical Relation

The novelists we will examine in the following pages of this book are the matriarchs of British fiction. As such, they bear comparison to the matriarchs of biblical narrative, mothers of a primarily patriarchal world whose voices have been obscured by time and tradition. Like the biblical matriarchs, the women novelists have left traces of their existences and echoes of their voices. Their sounds, their words, and even their silences document longings and desires which are both temporal and eternal, both sensual and spiritual, both ethical and beyond ethics. To hear and understand, we have to be open to their otherness, responsive to their demands, accepting of our own obligation to listen and to attend. Most importantly, we need to admit the possibility that these women of the past can teach us something we do not already know.

Our tendency to adopt evolutionary models of analysis works against this demand. Luce Irigaray, for example, asserts that “new models of sexual identity” are necessary in order for woman to discover “her humanity and her transcendency.”¹ Is that true? What about the old models? What about the matriarchs? Some would answer that they offer no model for sexual identity because they have none, being, as they are, the creations of men or speaking, like ventriloquists’ dummies, in the voices of men. But is that generalization not a bit too glib? The mothers of the novel actually did write their narratives, and the voices and actions of the mothers of the Bible are set down in the texts side by side with the voices and actions of the fathers. If time and tradition have subjugated these women, it is not necessarily because subjugation was foreordained. The presences are there. Derrida would call them “traces,” perhaps. I would suggest they are stronger than that. We have failed to see and hear these women because we have expected, and to some degree projected, their absence and silence. There are women in the texts, both biblical and early modern, who speak in distinct women's voices. When we hear their words as the words of men, we are misunderstanding them, for they are speaking as women.

To hear them as such, of course, requires that we admit sexual difference, and perhaps it is the hazard attendant on such an admission that has hampered us as critics of literature and culture. After all, the essentializing of difference, whether in terms of race, class, gender, or sexuality itself has been responsible for a wide variety of human wrongs, from mere slights to grave injustices to unspeakable acts of cruelty.² Socially conscious critics and commentators have quite understandably, and quite responsibly, tried to ameliorate the potential for wrong by emphasizing similarity and points of connection. Paradoxically, however, the notion of difference—or otherness—is also crucial to an understanding of ethics. As explained by philosopher and talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas, the essential ethical act is the opening of oneself to the demands of the other to momentarily escape the self, not in possession of the other, but in transcendent participation in the divine or the infinite.³

“Ethics used to be a coercive, customary manner of ensuring the cohesiveness of a particular group through the repetition of a code,” explains Julia Kristeva.⁴ The term, in other words, signaled the assumption of hegemonic values and the assertion of cultural stability. “Now, however,” she continues “the issue of ethics crops up wherever a code (mores, social contract) must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again.”⁵ The mid twentieth century was such a time, and it was in the atmosphere of great social change and worldwide paradigm shifts that Levinas began to raise ethics to the level of “first philosophy.”⁶ The late seventeenth century was also a time of political and societal revolution which prompted the writers with whom I am concerned to examine—with less discipline but with as much creative intensity as Levinas brings to bear—the implications of their own philosophical precepts.

Ethical thought insists on individual responsibility for the construction of the self whatever the conditions imposed by culture or society, so in addition to acknowledging the demands of the other, the ethical person is always, on some level, a subject—never solely an object, never exclusively a victim, never a mere expression of someone else's ideology or power. According to Levinasian ethics, the self, not society, is responsible for its fate and its behavior toward the other. This point troubles some of Levinas's critics. As Lawrence Buell has noted, the primary charge against ethical criticism is its failure to take into account the historical circumstances and political realities that impede the individual subjectivity necessary for ethical action.⁷ Without the ability to realize a self, it is impossible to recognize obligation to an other, be that other nature, man, woman, or God. Still, ethically speaking, whatever one's circumstances, there may be occasion for the self to meet the other on terms of equality, freedom, and openness. The ethical being will remain alert to the possibility of such face-to-face encounters for it is through such meetings that one participates in the essence of the divine or, put another way, is transported, temporarily, into the presence of God.

Levinas is not silent on the social and political inequities that problematize the ethical being. He locates the distinction between the ethical and the unethical in their opposite approaches to desire which emerge from opposite notions of what it means to be a “subject.” In Levinas's formulation, there is a crucial discrimination to be made between a desire that is aroused by the ever-exterior other and a desire that demands to be satisfied by the other through possession and power, in essence an erasure of alterity. We experience “the infinite in the finite” according to Levinas, through a desire “which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies.”⁸ The desirable is the other whose relationship to the I Levinas explains through the notion of “face”—which “signifies… an exteriority that does not call for power or possession, an exteriority that is not reducible… to the interiority of memory, and yet maintains the I who welcomes it.”⁹ The face-to-face encounter between I and other takes place in the present and is not to be expressed by totalizing formulae. It is an incidental meeting that gives rise, in the present moment, to “the idea of infinity.” The transient and transcendent joining of two separate beings is, in Levinas's terminology, a “society” or a union without possession, the opposite indeed of possession which makes a “totality” of one out of two beings.¹⁰ The ethical relationship begins with the face-to-face encounter that leads to the caress—an exploration of the otherness of the other, touch that “transcends the sensible,” touch that “is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible.”¹¹

My own acquaintance with the thought and work of Emmanuel Levinas dates back only a few years. I first read Totality and Infinity around the year 2000 or 2001, having come to the book through one of Levinas's most stringent feminist critics, Luce Irigaray. The final chapter of An Ethics of Sexual Difference offers a “reading” of Totality and Infinity in which Irigaray takes Levinas to task. Levinas's emphasis on generation (the birth of the son) and transcendence (the movement toward God) results in “separating [the woman] off into the subterranean, the submarine,” according to Irigaray. “What of her own call to the divine,” she asks.¹² What of it? I wondered. So, I went to the source, and I discovered that indeed Levinas has “little to say,” in answer to Irigaray's question.¹³ Women function in Levinas's reading of biblical texts as means of transcendence, certainly not objects, but also not the important faces in face-to-face encounters. Abraham's relationship with Sarah is far less significant to Levinas than the patriarch's response to Isaac. Indeed it is the akedah, the binding, and the near-sacrifice of Abraham's son, that, for Levinas, occasions the first ethical act in recorded history. What stopped Abraham's knife in its passage to the body of his son bound on the altar? The scripture says simply “God.” But how are we to understand this intervention? For Levinas, the face of Isaac is the means by which Abraham experiences the presence of God.¹⁴

It is Abraham's radical realization of Isaac's complete otherness that provides the path to the divine. Irigaray, it seems to me, does misunderstand Levinas when she sees the son as merely a reflection or extension of the father. Levinas's point is exactly the opposite. Abraham is privileged in Levinas's ethical landscape precisely because he recognized difference in a relation that most regard as sameness. Putting philosophy aside for a moment, and thinking in terms of common human behavior and emotion, Abraham's discovery of “otherness” in the father/son relation seems nothing short of miraculous. What then becomes mystifying is the tendency of husbands and fathers to regard wives and daughters as extensions of their own identity. Here, unlike the father/son relation, difference is evident because it is physiological. Yet, Irigaray's contention that we lack an ethics of sexual difference seems undeniable. From this reading and these meditations, I began to wonder: what did the matriarchs have to say?

Sarah Laughed

When God established the covenant between himself and Abram, he demanded much and promised much. He was explicit in both his demands and his promises. God begins by appearing to Abram and identifying himself: “‘I am El Shaddai,’” he asserts, and he will go on in the course of the conversation that follows to rename Abram and his wife Sarai to indicate their new status as progenitors of the covenanted people chosen by this God (Genesis 17: 1).¹⁵ The establishing of the covenant, in this face-to-face encounter thereby takes on the flavor of an ethical exchange. God demands that Abram “Walk in My ways and be blameless,” and in exchange, he promises “I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will make you exceedingly numerous” (Genesis 17: 1–2). It turns out that the covenant entails that Abraham “shall be the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17: 4). In fact, Abram's new name signifies “father of a multitude.”¹⁶

From the moment of his bestowing on Abram the name Abraham until the point in the chapter at which he departs, a span covered by 16 verses, El Shaddai harps on the theme of generation. He tells Abraham “I will make you exceedingly fertile” (Genesis 17: 6); nations and kings “shall come forth from you” (Genesis 17: 6). “I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come” (Genesis 17: 7). And “I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding” (Genesis 17: 8). The land is a sign of God's favor, but God requires a sign from his people as well, and the sign again points to generation: “You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you” (Genesis 17: 11). As God expounds upon this commandment, again he emphasizes Abraham's numerous offspring: “throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days” (Genesis 17: 12).

Up until this point, Abraham seems to be simply listening. He does not react to the demands or to the promises, taking even the edict of circumcision in stride. Although he and Sarah have had no children, Abraham has a son, Ishmael, whom he fathered by Hagar, Sarah's handmaid, at Sarah's insistence. Sarah's selfless dedication to preserving her husband's seed had been repaid by haughtiness on Hagar's part—an attitude for which Sarah chided Abraham (“The wrong done me is your fault! I myself put my maid in your bosom; now that she sees that she is pregnant, I am lowered in her esteem” [Genesis 16: 5]), but domestic tension notwithstanding, Abraham seemed proud of and dedicated to his son. So he no doubt had confidence in Ishmael's eventual ability to begin fathering those generations that the Lord was speaking of. In fact, significantly, at the time of this conversation, Ishmael was exactly thirteen years old, the age at which Jewish boys would become men when such rites and rituals were established in the culture and tradition. Abraham's complacent silence speaks of awe and reverence for his God, but it also attests to his sense of his and his son's own abilities and strengths.

The next thing God says, however, shakes Abraham's self-possession: “As for your wife Sarai, you shall not call her Sarai, but her name shall be Sarah. I will bless her; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she shall give rise to nations; ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In the Voice of a Woman
• 1 Matriarchal Desire and Ethical Relation
• 2 Men and Women in the Garden of Delight
• 3 Sexual Awakening and Political Power
• 4 Hieroglyphics of Desire
• 5 His Sister's Song
• 6 The Forgotten Woman
• 7 The Lot Motif and the Redaction of Double Desire
• Works Cited
• Index