Memory and Memorials, 1789-1914

Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Matthew Campbell, Jaqueline M. Labbe, Sally Shuttleworth

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415229760
• eBook ISBN: 9781134582990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Ranging historically from the French Revolution to the beginnings of Modernism, this book examines the significance of memory in an era of furious social change. Through an examination of literature, history and science the authors explore the theme of memory as a tool of social progression. This book offers a fresh theoretical understanding of the period and a wealth of empirical material of use to the historian, literature student or social psychologist.

Part I
Memory

Cultural constructions in literature, science and history

Chapter 1
Romanticism and the re-engendering of historical memory

Greg Kucich

History and memory intersect in various, complicated ways throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the rise of autobiographical discourses, but I wish to distinguish a particularly volatile, gendered form of this intersection. My focus centres on a relatively understudied component of that cultural process, associated by Benedict Anderson with the growth of European nationalisms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through which history was constructed to produce collective memories that help solidify ‘imagined’ communities and their political aspirations.¹ The ‘desire’ for this kind of historical memory, as Stephen Bann terms it in his recent book on Romantic historiography,² emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century as an intense compulsion, shared across multiple class and national boundaries, that pervaded European academic institutions, literary discourses, philosophical circles, scientific inquiry, antiquarian societies, the visual arts, architecture, museum culture, public theatre and spectacle. Bann, following Foucault, attributes this unprecedented fascination with the past, in part, to an extreme historical nostalgia caused by the general decentring of the subject in the later eighteenth century. But the most immediate force mobilizing Clio’s massive popularity, Bann and Anderson would agree, involved the growing power of historical memory to authorize competing political communities, along with their postulated rights and imperatives, amid the social dislocations caused by the French Revolution and the spread of nationalisms. Hence the prodigious, creatively exuberant outpouring of countless narrative, theatrical, and pictorial histories of nationalities, ethnic groups, economic classes, monarchies and nobilities, artistic traditions, linguistic and religious communities, all of which transformed history into a commanding discipline of knowledge and power around the turn of the nineteenth century. I am particularly concerned here with the gender dynamics of such a formidable cultural investment in historical memory. For the gendering of historical memories and their related imagined communities bears striking and generally unexamined implications for the recovery work on women writers that is currently revolutionizing studies of British literary Romanticism

Recent groundbreaking studies on Romantic era women writers and gender by Anne Mellor, Marlon Ross, and Stuart Curran, among others, have inspired one of the most vigorous reassessments ever of literary Romanticism, through which major reappraisals of women writers and their resistance to the gender codes of their time continue to open up the canonical and ideological limits of Romanticism.³ This revisionary endeavour generally springs from a shared commitment to historicize the literatures of Romanticism, particularly situating the alternative writing practices of women authors within their immediate historical contexts; but it has not yet substantially addressed the way many of the period’s women writers took up historical writing itself, and the empowering forms of memory it could produce, to forward their gender politics. In a survey of the recent pioneering work on Romanticism, gender, and women writers, Stuart Curran notes that we have only begun to recognize ‘the pervasive engagement with history’ that runs throughout the period’s writings by women.⁴ The astonishing range and diversity of this ‘engagement’ include various types of straightforward and parodic historical narratives by figures like Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Hester Piozzi, Lucy Aikin, Anna Jameson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Benger, to name but a few, as well as countless forms of historically grounded poems, novels, and plays attempted, it would seem, by the great majority of women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such a massive investment in the field of historical construction by so many women who, to varying degrees, thought of themselves as champions of their sex implies that they clearly recognized the power of historical memory in shaping social relations and the politics of gender. That recognition is fully borne out, as we shall see, in their multiple strategies for re-engendering historical memory in the service of producing new, more progressive social relations of gender and power. Yet as Gary Kelly, Nanora Sweet, and Antoinette Burton reveal in their recent exploratory studies of the historical writings of Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Austen, we are only in the earliest phase of trying to map this crucial site of contention where Romanticism interrogated its own ideologies of gender and power.⁵

To extend our reappraisals of Romantic writing, politics, and gender into this field of historical revisionism is thus to widen considerably our maps of alternative Romanticisms and the gender negotiations that stretch the limits of traditional Romanticism. As a step toward that goal, I will first sketch the general contours of a sustained effort among the period’s women writers to re-engender models of history, memory, and community. My focus will then narrow to the specific challenges, opportunities, and problematics of several different but representative examples of this historiographical strategy for re-imagining gender relations.⁶

Our neglect of the revisionary gendering of history among women Romantic era writers is probably owing to the general absence of gender considerations in much of the most important theoretical work on the interrelation of Romantic historicism, memory, and politics. Anderson, for instance, unquestioningly assumes a masculine principle of organization for all communities produced by historical memory, which he generally refers to as ‘fraternities’ or ‘brotherhoods’. Bann’s record of the nineteenth-century’s popular fascination with history similarly traces, also without overt considerations of gender, what appears to be an exclusively masculine ‘desire’. In response to the gender blindness that continues to preponderate in academic historiography, even among the more theoretically sophisticated forms of the discipline, feminist historians like Joan Scott have focused critical attention on the gender hierarchies and subordinations broadly enforced by nineteenth-century constructions of historical memory. However much those powerful modes of knowledge production may have imagined different kinds of national ‘truths’ and varying forms of social communities, Christina Crosby argues, they generally combined to affirm, on a deeper epistemological level, the absolute priority of ‘man’s truth’ and, one might add, man’s community.⁷ History’s emergence as the guardian discipline of ‘truth’ in the nineteenth century, Crosby concludes, thus made it one of the most potent discursive mechanisms for articulating the period’s divisive ideologies of gender and power. The critical response of current feminist historians to these disciplinary regimes can provide the most useful guidance to the strategies and problematics of those efforts by women Romantic era writers to re-engender the past.

Interrogating and dismantling the disciplinary procedures of nineteenth-century historiography, and their persistence into our own time, has become one of the principal objectives of many feminist historians today. ‘[W]e cannot understand history’, Catherine Stimpson representatively argues ‘unless we graph the causes and effects of sex/gender systems’.⁸ To map the workings of those systems is not only to become conscious of ‘the deeply gendered nature of history itself, as Joan Scott puts it, but also to recognize that ‘[u]ntil recently, most history written exemplified the centrality of white men and the marginalization of most others’.⁹ The resulting imperative to contest these sexist biases has mobilized feminist historians to produce new histories that feature women’s experience and the functions of gender in social relations. But writing women back into history does not simply mean, as Janet Todd warns, creating new feminine memories— ‘herstory’—and imagining new communities of women in binary relation to masculine time and experience.¹⁰ Instead, a feminist approach to the past re-imagines history and social relations altogether by reconfiguring the fundamental structures of knowledge in masculine historiography that authorize its visions of the past and the social systems they enforce.¹¹

On this radically transformative level, feminist historiography seeks to displace the rhetorical and epistemological ‘categories’ of ‘men’s history’, as Elaine Showalter puts it, with what Josephine Donovan calls a ‘women’s way of seeing, a women’s epistemology’.¹² Such a basic re-engendering of the structures of knowledge and power in mainstream history makes up a unifying project for the group of feminist historians that Ann-Louise Shapiro introduces in her new volume, Feminists Revision History.

Although feminists in the academy have attempted to refocus attention on the lives of women and to recover [their] lost stories, the goals of feminist theoretical work are considerably more far reaching. Feminists theorists have called upon scholars to examine the way that knowledge is constituted: to unpack the processes that select and preserve evidence, to decenter the narrative…to interrogate the categories of analysis within each discipline; to demonstrate the way that gender works to legitimize structures of power.¹³

The ultimate goal of such narrative and epistemological decentrings is not to produce, in nineteenth-century fashion, new exclusionary memories that authorize yet another dominant community, but rather to dismantle such hierarchical structures of power completely as well as the traditional formulations of historical memory that continue to authorize them. Generating this different kind of interrogative historical memory finally opens up the possibilities in the present for new types of social relations, for more fluid, egalitarian communities liberated from divisive organizations of race and class as well as gender. This revisionary agenda may be fraught with difficulties and internal divisions—Denise Riley, for instance, warns against the essentializing tendencies of universal histories of ‘woman’, and Cécile Dauphin critiques the scenario of perpetual victimization in much feminist historicism.¹⁴ But it is precisely in this combination of priorities, interventions, and liabilities that current feminist historiography bears its most revealing connections to the gender contestations among women writers of the Romantic era.

Although the assumption still persists among many feminist historians that, as Scott argues, ‘Concern with gender as an analytic category has emerged only in the late twentieth century’,¹⁵ ‘man’s truth’ did not go unchallenged among women writers of the Romantic era. In fact, their massive intervention in the discursive structures and imagined communities of masculine history anticipate many of the central practices and problems of contemporary feminist historiography. Their prolific experimentation with different historiographical forms, moreover, often coalesced in resistance to the procedures of knowledge production and community building that current feminists critique in masculine history. And while their own historical experiences of severe gender inequality may have inflected their views on the past and their visions of the future differently from their twentieth-century counterparts, deepening their sorrow over the wrongs of woman and limiting their outlook on the prospects of gender reform, they did produce multiple types of alternative narratives that ‘brush history against the grain’, as Walter Benjamin puts it,¹⁶ by re-engendering historical memory and reimagining new, socially progressive communities. They even struggled with the same problems of essentialism and victimization that continue to challenge contemporary feminist historians. If current feminist historiography can help us recognize such patterns in its earlier incarnations, its own revisionary effort may also profit from a greater familiarity with the relative successes and liabilities of those early practioners of feminist historicism.

That many Romantic era women writers-were alert to and keenly critical of men’s history may be judged from Catherine Morland’s representative response to conventional historiography in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.‘[H] istory, real solemn history,’ she declares,

I cannot be interested in… I read it a little, as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.¹⁷

Austen’s more mature heroine, Anne Elliot of Persuasion, is more precise in locating the problem of these ‘tiresome’ histories in the masculine consciousness that produces them. To Captain Harville’s insinuation that ‘all histories’ prove the inferiority of women, Anne responds, ‘if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.’¹⁸ It is certainly no coincidence that just as Anne delivers this charge against male authorship of history, Captain Wentworth drops his pen—and, perhaps along with it, the phallic attributes of his social and writing demeanour—in order to begin a new kind of writing performance, a love letter or history of his heart. For if the ‘truth’ of ‘solemn history’ alienated female consciousness, inciting Anna Jameson to complain that ‘history…disdains to speak of [women]’,¹⁹ its exclusions also provoked the formulation of alternative, feminine models of history and community that seek to transform the contours of man’s truth by writing women’s experience back into historical and political life. The most important and potentially redemptive history that ultimately emerges in Persuasion, the one historical narrative that displaces the public recordings of aristocratic and military history pored over by Sir Walter Elliot and his followers, is ‘the little history of sorrowful interest’ tracing the interior drama of Anne’s troubled but enduring love for Captain Wentworth.²⁰

This interiorized reformulation of the abstract ‘truths’ of ‘solemn history’ suggests how the alternative historicism of women writers could go beyond simple irritation at the absence of women in traditional accounts of the past. Their revisionary projects tended to focus even more significantly on the exclusionary basis of masculine history’s fundamental narrative and epistemological structures of understanding. This critique centred on its totalizing inclination to delineate grand sweeps of historical process that subsume and efface individual subjects, particularly women, within universal paradigms of historical development. For all of the rich variety of tropological, narrative, and political strategies that theorists like Benjamin and Hayden White have uncovered in mainstream historical writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of these diverse historical renderings share a common tendency to organize their accounts of the past and the truths of human destiny within abstract, totalizing frames of linear progress and decline. The drama of this type of history subordinates human actors to such universal patterns of growth and degeneration, which may be construed variously as the liberal progressions of Whig history, the millennial advances of Priestley, Godwin, and the early advocates of the French Revolution, the perfectibility scenarios of Godwin’s Political Justice, the cyclical patterns of destruction and renovation outlined by Volney, Condorcet, Cuvier, and Hegel, the brutal oscillations of supply and dearth in Malthus’s population theory, or the degenerative motion of Gibbon’s history of empire. The most sophisticated form of this universalizing strategy collapses the historical lines of progress and decline into a dynamic tension of contrary motion. Thus Hume presents a theory of ‘contrary’ linear ‘direction[s]’ of progress and decline that is developed with increasing sophistication by historians throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.²¹ Indeed, the leading historiographical theorists of this era—such as Gibbon, Goldsmith, Condorcet, Volney, Kant, Hegel, Malthus—may differ widely in their political investments and in their conclusions about the relative progress of different cultures at different historical moments. But they all tend to conceptualize human history and the truths of experience with abstract models of universal tension between the linear contraries of progress and decline. For liberal historians like Godwin and Condorcet, learning how to recognize those contraries establishes historical memories of gain and loss from which imag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Memory
• Part II: Writing and remembering
• Notes