Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818

Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism

Fiona Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754660262
• eBook ISBN: 9781317063308
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How and to what extent did women writers shape and inform the aesthetics of Romanticism? Were undervalued genres such as the romance, gothic fiction, the tale, and the sentimental and philosophical novel part of a revolution leading to newer, more democratic models of taste? Fiona Price takes up these important questions in her wide-ranging study of women's prose writing during an extended Romantic period. While she offers a re-evaluation of major women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Price also places emphasis on less well-known figures, including Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Hamilton and Priscilla Wakefield. The revolution in taste occasioned by their writing, she argues, was not only aesthetic but, following in the wake of British debates on the French Revolution, politically charged. Her book departs from previous studies of aesthetics that emphasize the differences between male and female writers or focus on higher status literary forms such as the treatise. In demonstrating that women writers' discussion of taste can be understood as an intervention at the most fundamental level of political involvement, Price advances our understanding of Romantic aesthetics.

Chapter 1‘Real Solemn History’: Rethinking Tradition¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606347-2

In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, David Hume admits the difficulty of finding agreement in matters of taste but nonetheless suggests that, although the amount of requisite ‘delicacy’ differs between one person and another, ‘practice in a particular art’ improves the judgement: ‘One accustomed to seem and examine, and weigh the several performances acquired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view’.² Sir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy of Art, held a similar view, as William Wordsworth notes in both the 1798 Advertisement and the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: ‘An accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition’.³ The best way of improving taste is to look at those models which have been ‘universally found to please’, which are, in other words, already lauded or canonised (Hume, Essays 236).

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¹ Jane Austen, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed., 5 vols (London: Oxford UP, 1932–1934), 5: 108.

² David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 231–55, 242, 244.

³ William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, eds R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 8; this quotation is repeated in the Preface, with minor modifications (271).

Yet William Wordsworth finds this notion of taste being constructed through the canon problematic. In his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, Wordsworth provides ‘a hasty retrospect of the poetical literature of this country’. However, he establishes a tradition of writing often constructed through difference: the great writers share only originality and, significantly, Britishness. He argues such that great and original poets often experience ‘partial notice only, or neglect’ because their originality presents a challenge.⁴ Such originality represents an obstacle to the reader who has developed his or her taste by reading what has been ‘universally found to please’ – if a new work is strikingly different, his experience will not necessarily help him to judge it. As might be predicted, then, Wordsworth appears anxious about the taste of his audience. Since the ‘number of judges who can be confidently relied upon’ is ‘small’, the position of great writers within the tradition seems precarious (393).

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⁴ Essay, Supplementary to the Preface in William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 408.

While the concept of tradition is thus in some ways a problematic one, eighteenth-century commentators nonetheless often suggested that the taste of an artist or audience could be improved by looking back at the works of the past, works which formed a prestigious cultural or artistic tradition. Of course, it is a critical commonplace that during the eighteenth century the notion of what might constitute a prestigious tradition altered: the emphasis shifted from the classical to the indigenous literary heritage. The reason for this shift, criticism suggests, can, at least in part, be found in the discourse of civic humanism. In this discourse, taste was seen as a quality intimately linked with the ability to be a good citizen: to possess taste was to possess independence, the ability to generalize, and the ability to be detached. However, by the 1750s, there was a significant unease with the suitability of classical culture to develop a citizenry appropriate to eighteenth-century Britain. Indeed, as Michael Meehan suggests in Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (1986), ‘By the 1760s, most had accepted the fact that British liberty was neither particularly Roman nor Grecian in character’⁵ :

[This] assertion of national singularity, and the attempts to read in the nation's political fortunes the outlines of a new aesthetic, did promote a national confidence among writers, and offered a powerful theoretical urgency to a growing ideal of independence, of taking aesthetic character and artistic ideals from within the culture, from the directions offered in the national history, from the demands of local government and from the demonstrated strengths of local achievement. (Meehan ii)

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⁵ Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom, 1986).

Writers turned to indigenous literature (fake or actual) to foreground particular regional values or to gain prestige for particular cultural groups. As Jonathan Brody Kramnick suggests in Making the English Canon, such constructions of tradition involved fierce negotiation over cultural authority: ‘tasteful’ was a socially desirable label for which individuals struggled.⁶

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⁶ Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

Kramnick's study concentrates on the first 70 years of the eighteenth century. However, when the Romantic period is considered, scholarship tells us a rather different story. The interest in vernacular literature is still acknowledged. Indeed, it would be hard to ignore. As Joep Leerssen notes, ‘Between 1780 and 1840 a huge rediscovery of the early medieval vernacular roots and rootedness of the various European languages and literatures took place’ across ‘the fields of philology, antiquarianism, and imaginative literature’.⁷ However, Leerssen hints, criticism has frequently treated this tendency in the context of ‘literary poetics’ (222). More specifically still, it is possible to say that critical attention has been focused largely on the male poet's attitude to the ‘burden of the past’. Interest centres on the creativity of a few privileged individuals rather than on the taste of the public more generally. For W. Jackson Bate, for instance, looking at the history of the arts generates a question for ‘the poet or artist: What is there left to do?’⁸ ‘Anxiety’ (such as that displayed by Wordsworth above) is the response to this burden – along with a questioning of or even breakage with tradition. Harold Bloom suggests that ‘In the beginning, modern poetry abandoned most of what had served as the subject matter of European literary tradition from Homer to Pope. Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry, and he found no subject but himself’.⁹

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⁷ Joep Leerssen, ‘Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past’, Modern Language Quarterly 65:2 (June 2004): 221–43, 221.

⁸ W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970), p. 3.

⁹ Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 461.

Yet, quite clearly in this period, the concept of tradition was not only interpreted as a source of anxiety for the artist in relation to his work. Commentators were also conscious that (invented or otherwise) traditions could alter the perceived tastefulness, the cultural authority, of particular groups. As such, the use of tradition in relation to taste had a potential significance far beyond any myth of the creative psyche of the artist. Indeed, hints of the broader significance of the anxiety over tradition occur even in those critics (then and now) who concentrate on the mind-set of the male Romantic poets. For Hazlitt, when the Lake Poets rejected tradition and emphasized the importance of the new, they were influenced by the ‘sentiments and opinions which produced [the French] revolution’.¹⁰ And for Bloom, writing more than 140 years later, although Wordsworth's poetry represents a break with the literary heritage, his choice of the unconventional subject matter of self is influenced by Protestant or dissenting thought (Visionary Company xviii). To examine such suggestions and to contextualize the problem of tradition more accurately, a different approach (one that does not foreground the creative anxieties of the male Romantic poet) is necessary. Looking at the work of the period's women writers (often, because of their own position, acutely aware of the politics of marginality) exposes the complex role of tradition as a mechanism for developing or (more often) shoring up the authority, not only of poets but of more culturally disadvantaged social groups. Further, such writings can be used to demonstrate that this struggle over tradition and taste was seen as socially extremely significant: the construction of tradition was seen to have profound political and spiritual consequences for the health of the nation. In this area, the works of Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld form a particularly important resource, illuminating contemporary anxieties concerning state and church. Both recognise that cultural tradition (with its suggestion of sublimity) can be manipulated by those in power – and both suggest alternatives which redirect critical authority away from the establishment.

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¹⁰ William Hazlitt, ‘Lectures on the English Poets’ in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998) 2: 163–323, 314.

Although both Reeve and Barbauld foreground the problem of cultural (and political) tradition by embarking on canon-making enterprises (Reeve with her 1785 Progress of Romance, Barbauld with her 50-volume edition of British Novelists [1810]), at times their approach to taste is rather different.¹¹ Although there are some suggestions of the impact of the senses on the imagination in Reeve's work (most notably in metaphors around travel and in fears concerning luxury), she is overwhelmingly concerned with the written text, recalling Addison's definition of taste in The Spectator no. 409: ‘MOST Languages make use of this Metaphor, to express that Faculty of the Mind, which distinguishes all the most concealed Faults and nicest Perfections in Writing’ (6: 72–78, 72). However, Addison's papers on The Pleasures of the Imagination also acknowledge the role that sight in particular has to play in stimulating the imaginative faculty: sensory information, it may be posited, stimulating the imagination either directly or indirectly through memory, is highly significant when making judgements of taste. This approach, which acknowledges the impact of what would today be called the aesthetic, is the one taken by Barbauld. Nonetheless, both Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld share an awareness of the malleability of tradition; as a basis for aesthetic or critical judgement, it is contingent.

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¹¹ Anna Letitia Barbauld, The British Novelists; With an Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, 50 vols (London: Rivington et al; Edinburgh: Creech; York: Wilson, 1810).

In the case of Clara Reeve, this acknowledgement of the mutability of tradition is rather ironic. Reeve, who received an Old Whiggish education, wished to use romance and its criticism to combat what she saw as the political corruption that resulted from the Revolution of 1688.¹² Reeve wanted to revert to the earlier political traditions of balanced constitutional powers, which she arguably saw Sir Robert Walpole as having corrupted. To combat the luxury she connected with such corruption, Reeve posited an alternative, suggesting the re-evaluation of romance and its readers as a way of connecting with a more politically ethical past. However, in the process, she implies the malleability of tradition as a source of auth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Real Solemn History’:Rethinking Tradition
• 2 ‘Fashion’s Brightest Arts Decoy’:Fashion and Originality
• 3 Disinterest, Economics, and the Tasteful Spectator
• 4 Self-control:Romantic Psychologies of Taste
• 5 Rustic Tastes:The Romantic Tale
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index