The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Vicissitudes of the Eighteenth-Century Subject

E. König

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137382023
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction explores how the figure of the orphan was shaped by changing social and historical circumstances. Analysing sixteen major novels from Defoe to Austen, this original study explains the undiminished popularity of literary orphans and reveals their key role in the construction of gendered subjectivity.

1

Introduction

Orphans are ubiquitous in novels. Not only do they people the pages of many eighteenth-century novels, they have also been indispensable for the literary imagination of successive generations.¹ However, the plots of eighteenth-century novels are strikingly far-fetched and fairy-tale-like. They create a semblance of a flesh-and-blood orphan on the level of character, yet this orphan figure stands for something beyond itself. My contention is that the orphans in these texts are primarily the means of working out various symbolic contents with which eighteenth-century society is troubled. This metaphorical level signifies an emptiness, a cipher-like quality, at the heart of the idea of ‘orphan’. The orphan is thus a trope, always already abstracted from actual reality.

Orphans in the eighteenth-century imagination are radically different from their previous incarnations in ancient mythology. The orphans of ancient myths such as those of Moses or Romulus are foundlings whose fundamental rootlessness allows them to float free of their cultural circumstances, and to become the founding fathers of something radically new, be it a new religion or a new civilization. In Totem and Taboo, Freud describes the origins of civilization in a similar vein: the expelled sons of the primal horde envy the ‘jealous father who keeps all the females to himself’ and they decide to kill him in order to succeed to his privileges.² For Freud, this murder of the father represents the founding moment of civilization as such. However, it can also be seen as a kind of wilful self-orphaning, a conscious rejection of one’s roots. Nothing could be farther from the fictional orphan’s experience in the eighteenth century. The worst that can befall a character is the loss of his or her origins, and the work of the text is to find the missing link and heal the trouble in the family that has caused the orphaning before reintegrating the orphan into the family.

Some of our most cherished fairy tales feature orphans. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty have taught us sympathy for the plight of the victimized orphan child. Fairy-tale orphans share a number of characteristics with their novelistic counterparts, such as the absence of the biological mother, the persecutions and deprivations the child has to endure, and the happy resolution coupled with social elevation. To justify their usefulness, novels as well as fairy tales promise to perform a socializing function and serve educational needs. Thus, when fairy tales become incorporated into published collections, the nature of their protagonist changes. In particular, ‘the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a “passive princess” waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her.’³ This shift matches not only that of the novelistic hero(ine) but also the development of the early novel. These similarities are partly due to the concern of both genres with affairs pertaining to the family and society. Another factor is their need to conform to a broadly bourgeois morality. Aimed at unruly women and children, many cautionary tales harp on ‘the evils of pride, disobedience, stubbornness, and curiosity, … to promote a safe docility while also participating in the cultural project of stabilizing gender roles.’⁴ Despite the many similarities, the differences are also telling. Crucially, they differ in the class origins of their protagonists: in novels we find almost no labourer or peasant heroes and heroines, except in disguise. Placed in middle-class circumstances, the orphans of eighteenth-century novels aspire to a more exalted status. A further difference lies in aesthetic choices: the eighteenth-century novel largely dispenses with fantastic elements and magic in favour of verisimilitude and the depiction of quotidian life.

These manifold similarities between fairy tales and novels beg the question regarding the origins of their affinity. In Before Novels, Paul Hunter provides a potential answer. He shows that by the early eighteenth century, fairy tales had fallen into disuse or suffered from active suppression by Puritans as well as progressive intellectuals of the Enlightenment. The resulting narrative void was subsequently filled by the novel.⁵ As narratives, fairy tales cater to human needs and perform social and cultural ‘functions that written literature would need to take on when oral tales were not available’.⁶ The newly developing novel was well suited to take on these functions and shape them to its own needs. Consequently, the novel retains various elements of fairy tales in its ‘genre memory’, thus preserving them in the cultural imagination.

Eighteenth-century fictional orphans also differ from their nineteenth-century counterparts. Our cultural imagination has become dominated by the persecuted orphans created by Dickens and the Brontë sisters. We root for these poor orphans and hope that they can survive their trials and tribulations. In contrast to the Victorian Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century fiction rarely deals with the orphan’s formative childhood experiences. With the exception of Moll Flanders and Tom Jones, the orphans usually appear as characters on the threshold of adulthood. Most texts deal with wealthy families, focusing on questions of property transmission and succession to aristocratic titles, as well as on the legitimacy and thus the marriageability of the child. Also in contrast to Moll Flanders, whose exciting but roguish picaresque adventures come to a respectable end, the majority of eighteenth-century orphans follow a different path. The female orphans are less and less physically mobile as they acquire gentility. Eighteenth-century novels seem to be pervaded by various forms of threat; those who venture outside generally risk the loss of life, limb or virtue. This harassment is calculated to teach women the need to resign physical mobility and turn to the virtuous pleasures of domesticity. Jane Austen’s Persuasion signals a shift in class orientation that already gestures towards the new orphans of the nineteenth century: its motherless Anne is eager to leave her family and give up her aristocratic status.

During the eighteenth century, English society and culture underwent enormous changes due to various social, legal and economic forces. This period saw the creation of the modern state, the commercialization of agriculture with the resulting displacement of the rural poor, the reorganization of inheritance law, the development of a credit economy and a modern industrial society, the newly evolving ideology of gender difference, as well as a fundamental change in the kinship system, described by Ruth Perry in Novel Relations.⁷ These changes occasioned a profound revaluation of people’s images of themselves in society. Old certainties about social roles were being eroded, forcing individuals as well as families to work out acceptable and legitimate responses to a bewildering array of changes. The image of the individual caught up in this historical shift perfectly captures the way orphans are portrayed in eighteenth-century fiction. We can see the age-old analogy between the state and the family at work behind the ubiquitous use of this figure.

The orphan mediates between individual aspirations and the existing social order, while also modifying the social order in some ways. The reintegration of the orphan is the way to cure the ills of eighteenth-century society. The nature of such ills depends on the period as well as the outlook of the writer. The eighteenth-century orphan starts out as an outsider, an ambiguous figure who becomes an insider by the end of the story, (seemingly) happily settled. The orphan’s essentially comic plot typically ends in marriage. Marriage is an imaginary solution to cover over the problems that cannot really be solved at the time: middle-class claims for power and – the most burning issue – the increasing subjection of women in the domestic ideology developed by the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Laqueur has argued that during the eighteenth century our modern notions of sex were invented. The ideology of women’s inferiority was facilitated by a new need to remap status hierarchy onto sex.⁸ From 1600 to 1750 the situation of women in England changed fundamentally. Between the early and the late decades of the eighteenth century, middle-class men moved into wider, more egalitarian positions and partook of more power as political citizens, legal subjects and aspiring economic individuals, while women of all classes were gradually deprived of their previous rights and spheres of action. In other words, middle-class (male) mobility and ambitions were achieved at the cost of reducing women’s autonomy and confining them to matrimony and motherhood.⁹

Novels are a means of inculcating in subjects ‘the social and psychological meanings of gender difference’.¹⁰ They depict the deprivation leading to the development of gendered subjectivities, although this is different for men and for women. Thus, Moglen asserts, ‘male- and female-authored fictions are structured by divergent fantasies of desire and employ distinct strategies of expression, resistance, and containment.’¹¹ While I fully share these assumptions, in my view Moglen’s exclusive focus on canonical male-authored texts produces a blind spot that can only be remedied by examining novels written by men and women. Not until then can we assess the psychic costs of the process of acculturation for both genders – what we might call the vicissitudes of the eighteenth-century subject.

The orphan is a resilient, fertile and oscillating literary figure that culture can put to numerous uses. It is not a humanized figure but ‘a system of communication’, ‘a message’, ‘a mode of signification’ in Roland Barthes’s sense. The orphan is a mythologized concept emptied of real experiences, pains and history of its own. Late-eighteenth-century orphans, for instance, tend to be reunited with their families and their misappropriated patrimonies are returned to them – a fate rarely shared by real orphans. That is to say, these orphan figures are ‘rewarded’ in the cultural imagination for important services done to society. The orphan is not an ‘innocent’ sign; rather, there is a second order of signification at work that – motivated by a partial analogy – fills the notion of the ‘parentless child’ with ideological meaning in order to interpellate the reader.¹² How the figure of the orphan is used differs from time to time, country to country, ideology to ideology. Thus, the orphan seems to be a privileged cultural signifier. This manifests itself in the fact that this figure continues to crop up frequently in all phases of the novel’s development throughout the English-speaking world. The endless repetition of orphan fictions testifies to the fact that the orphan represents the characteristic anxieties of its age and contributes to the ideological creation of the new bourgeois subject. Class ideology is relational and it advocates ‘values’ in opposition to the ruling class in order to contest and undermine it, while the dominant class attempts to legitimate its own power position.¹³ Such ideological dynamics are revealed in the themes, the character constellations, the twists and turns of the plot and its resolutions that are presented in fictional orphans’ stories, variously supporting or subverting the dominant ideology.

I discern a conspicuous connection between the bourgeoisie, the birth of the novel and the orphan figure. All three are on a similar quest. Just as the bourgeoisie contests an older aristocratic culture, the novel as a new literary form must fight for its place in literature by claiming kinship with some and dissociating itself from other literary ancestors. If mediaeval romance, the genre of the old order, promotes the figure of the knight on a metaphysical quest fighting creatures of fantasy, the bourgeois subject creates its own image of the self-made man in the world of the here and now.¹⁴ Thus, orphan narratives can be seen as the attempts of the bourgeoisie to narrativize its own claims to power. Moreover, the novel, like the bourgeoisie and the orphan, is a protean form. This genre undergoes various transformations in form and subject matter and still retains the characteristics by which we can identify it.

The orphan figure is marshalled to undergird the notion of family, which is being reconceptualized in this period. Foucault claims that the nuclear family is instituted in the eighteenth century as part of a dynamics of power that is shifting from the aristocratic deployment of alliance to the bourgeois deployment of sexuality.¹⁵ Fictional orphans represent this shift by the way in which names and legitimacy figure in their stories. In aristocratic culture, the paternal name signifies aristocratic origins as well as having a title and landed property tied to it. Characters with right to a proper name are also entitled to a share in the family’s property. Without proof of legitimate birth, orphans cannot claim family membership and inherit family property, which leads to loss of social status. More generally, in modern patriarchal culture the father’s name signifies the person, giving him or her an identity rooted in a family. Without a known family, an orphan cannot be placed within a network of familiar relations and is therefore marginalized. Thus, within the cultural configurations of family (the primary site of orphan fictions), an orphan, without roots and family history, represents a radical break with the notion of family.

This radical break has significant consequences for society as well as for the individual. Society must deal with the threat posed by the rootlessness of the nameless individual. This brings into play what a society places within the realm of the acceptable and what it deems to be abject, which involves a question of normativity. Thus, the orphan, cut loose from family as a site of legitimation but also of socialization, is often represented in literature as a dangerous destabilizing force, or at the very least an ambivalent figure. The nameless individual in turn must also deal with this problem: the Name-of-the-Father represents the social order itself that assigns each individual its place. Therefore, the orphan narrative may centre on the successful quest of the orphan for his or her lost origins in order to be able to occupy his or her assigned place. At this point, the orphan is reabsorbed into the social order. Alternatively, the orphan’s identity is irrecoverably lost and must be created anew. Since being inserted into the symbolic order is a kind of symbolic castration, the orphan in fact commits self-castration by aspiring to and attaining a subject position in society. In all cases, what is at stake is a definition of self and subjectivity possible within a given social realm.

The increasingly powerful middle class has a different relation to the proper name. It has no illustrious name to set against the name of the aristocracy, to whose social and political power it aspires in the eighteenth century. Instead, it can only boast newly acquired capital-based wealth and merits. Thus, the metaphysics of the aristocratic name is displaced by the moral values of the middle class. In analogy to the nameless orphan, the middle class can see itself as nameless but meritorious and deserving of a more exalted place in society. This is historically underpinned by the fact that ‘rich bourgeois used their capital not to overthrow aristocracy, but to join it’,¹⁶ buying landed property and titles ever since the early seventeenth century.

Female orphans loom large in the eighteenth-century imagination, presumably because both their identity and their self-definition are complicated by their relation to patriarchy. The woman’s identity cannot be said to reside in her paternal surname, which she exchanges for her husband’s. Thus, nominal identity for a woman is unstable. The excessive recurrence of upper-class daughters without fathers points to an anxiety that unconsciously recognizes a woman’s essential namelessness by investing the paternal signifier with undue significance. As women are increasingly barred from creating an identity independently of the patriarchal signifier, eighteenth-century novels repeatedly argue that a woman’s identity must be created by and in marriage. Yet, a truly nameless female orphan is worthless as an object of exchange because she is without exchange value: paternal recognition of the daughter is crucial for an advantageous marriage. Thus, lacking a father is a serious problem for eighteenth-century heroines, one often presented as an extreme form of orphanhood.¹⁷

While fatherless children suffer abjection, motherless children can still thrive in eighteenth-century novels. Curiously, the fictional mother’s absence is taken for granted. Nevertheless, absent and dead mothers still often get short shrift from writers. Mothers of foundlings are portrayed as sexually incontinent, thus plunging their children into difficulty. Lack of knowledge about the mother raises the spectre of incest. This enmity towards the mother can be read against the grain as indicating the mother’s diminishing social power.¹⁸

The orphan figure can represent various forms of mobility. The orphan is an excellent plot device, as the lack of a fixed place and familial allegiance provide...