Requerido

the trauma of gender
THE TRAUMA OF GENDER

A Feminist Theory of the Novel
HELENE MOGLEN
University of California Press

Berkeley . Los Angeles . London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England
q 2001 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moglen, Helene, 1936–

The trauma of gender : a feminist theory of the En-
glish novel / Helene Moglen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-22588-0 (alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-520-22589-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English fiction—18th century—History and crit-
icism. 2. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—
History—18th century. 3. English fiction—Male
authors—History and criticism. 4. Sex role in lit-
erature. 5. Sex in literature. 6. Gender identity in
literature. 7. Feminist literary criticism. 8. Women
in literature. I. Title.
PR858.F45 M64 2001

823'.509353—dc21
00-055965
Manufactured in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39 0.48—1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
To Seth,
my empathic witness
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes 1
1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism 17
2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination 57
3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy 87
4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History 109
Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory 139
Notes 149
Works Cited 185
Index 195
Acknowledgments
Many acts of generosity and friendship sustained me in the writing

of this book. A year’s fellowship from the American Association of
University Women gave me the precious gift of time, while several
faculty grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz, helped
to fund my research. Christine Berthin, Susan Derwin, Jody Greene,
Donna Haraway, and Myra Jehlen read and commented on one or
another of the chapters. Greg Forter put aside his own work at a
crucial moment to give me the benefit of his wonderfully analytic
mind. Wendy Brown was my intellectual and emotional support: a
wise, thoughtful and informed reader, a tactful critic, and a loving
friend. Carol Mavor placed her creativity at my service and brought
my search for a felicitous cover image to a happy end.
I have also been fortunate in the help I have received in the book’s
preparation and production. Ann Speno, Jessica Breheny, and Jessica
Goodman, my research assistants, were both inventive and assidu-
ous in their efforts. Betsy Wotten and Barbara Lee provided superb
staff support for this project, as they have for many others over the
years, and Cheryl Van de Veer and Zoe Sodya prepared the manu-
script with the exquisite competence I have come, because of them,
to expect. At the University of California Press, Linda Norton has
been the editor about whom every writer fantasizes: she had confi-
dence in the project from the earliest moment and shepherded the
manuscript through the complex review and publication process
with calm good humor, intelligence, and warmth. Dore Brown
proved her genius for book production once again—and left me even
deeper in her debt than I had been before.
Finally, there is my family: a family composed—with a single
exception—of men. Each in his own way has influenced the world-
view upon which this project rests. With Sig—my closest friend for
more than fifty years and, for just a few years less, my husband—I
have lived out and endeavored to understand the meanings of gender
differences: how those differences are constructed and how those
ix
x Acknowledgments
constructions can be mined, adapted and transcended. In my three

sons, I have watched the evolution of subjectivities that are intri-
cately gendered. Eben—astute historian, lover of literature, intellec-
tual omnivore—who has brought a populist vision of the cyber fu-
ture to the theory and practice of law. Damon, an activist whose
courageous struggle for social change has been animated by great
personal integrity, cultural insight, and the abhorrence of power’s
misuse. And Seth, a gifted critic and dedicated teacher who recog-
nizes others as they would want to be known and is committed to
making the good things of society available to all.
Seth was, in all respects, the first reader of this book. He under-
stood its aspirations from the earliest moments and helped me to
embody them at every stage. To work with him as my editor, col-
league, and friend was to discover how luminous a flowering the
primal root of the mother-child relation can achieve. It is to him that
The Trauma of Gender is dedicated.
Introduction
The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes
I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and

critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of
capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly re-
sponsible for the development of the novel. The second is that real-
ism represents the novel’s dominant tradition.1 I want to propose
instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class
relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender
system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.2 My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been
structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the
fantastic and the realistic.3 The constitutive coexistence of these two
impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental:
their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the
novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains
and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individ-
ual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and
gender as the novel’s defining concern is also to recover the dyna-
mism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay
of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to
explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of
imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender dif-
ference.
The historical foundation of the project is the recognition that the
alteration of class structure in this period was inseparable from the
reconceptualization of gender differences and the reconfiguration of
gender relations. Synthesizing a simple story from complex ac-
counts, one can say that by the middle of the seventeenth century,
there was a shift away from a feudal and Puritan patriarchalist order
that saw cosmos, state, and family as analogically related and social
position as established through inherited status. As the authority of
the father and husband were distinguished from the authority of the
1
2 Introduction
sovereign, the family became a distinct unit of organization, with the

evolving role of women more restricted than the emerging role of
men.4 While sexual difference had been less significant than rank in
earlier forms of social organization, the modern form of patriarchy
that replaced it was organized according to essentialized, biological
distinctions.5 So, at the same time that permeable boundaries of class
were replacing inflexible differentiations of inherited position, the
boundary that separated male from female was increasingly expe-
rienced as too formidable to be crossed. Qualities of masculinity and
femininity, seen as natural and treated as immutable, anchored per-
sonal identity as they grounded the sociocultural order.
Socioeconomic changes that accompanied the rise of capitalism
contributed significantly to the transformation of the sex-gender sys-
tem. Although the recent work of feminist historians emphasizes the
dependence of these changes on class status and geographical loca-
tion, there is broad agreement that the situation of women in En-
gland altered radically from 1600 to 1750. In the sixteenth century,
when women had been involved in production for the subsistence
of their households and for market, they had participated in a range
of economically significant functions. The next hundred and fifty
years saw the breakdown of domestic economy, as lands were en-
closed, estates consolidated, and work that had traditionally been
performed at home was removed from domestic space and profes-
sionalized within a public sphere to which women were barred en-
try. The family ceased then to be the primary unit of production,
and the interdependency of its members was replaced by a division
of labor structured along gender lines.6
As middle-class men moved into an expanding public world—as
political citizens, legal subjects, and aspiring economic individuals—
their female counterparts were restricted to a diminished private
sphere in which they performed their duties as mothers and as
wives. Infantalized by her legal, social, and economic dependence
on her husband, a woman was likely to be an object of ambivalence
for her children, whose psychic lives she dominated. Her sons de-
fined themselves in opposition to her maternal qualities, while her
daughters read their futures in the functional limitations of her life.
Both were prepared by the patterning of the nuclear family to as-
sume the attitudes, roles, and forms of subjectivity that were re-
quired by emerging gender arrangements. In this bisected world,
Introduction 3
male interiority was identified with reason, female interiority with

feeling. With masculine rationality enabling the creation and com-
mand of culture, female sensibility, while valued, required cultural
embodiment and control.7
In the same way that the sex-gender system was reinforced by the
division of labor, with its comprehensive discriminations between
public and private spheres, it was strengthened by a shift in scientific
ideology, which identified the female body as the center of the bina-
rized new order. No longer understood to be a variant of the male’s,
as it had been since the work of Galen in the second century, a
woman’s body was perceived as fundamentally different from a
man’s.8 Nowhere was that essentialized difference more remarked
than in the redefined areas of her sexual and reproductive function-
ing. Although female sexuality had been thought throughout the
Renaissance not only to have mirrored man’s, but to have been more
intense than his—more voracious and demanding—the eighteenth
century thought her desire to be more subject to the self-discipline
of a female character that was naturally mature and morally devel-
oped.9 By the century’s end, when scientists had ceased to regard
female orgasm as relevant to conception, there was assumed to be
much less libido for a woman to control. Her sexuality was detached
conceptually from her maternity, and the ideological commitment to
her sexual passivity was reinforced.10 Once her normalcy was asso-
ciated with her maternity rather than her sexuality, it remained for
her sexuality to be displaced onto the prostitute, her abnormal coun-
terpart, who was often represented as ambiguously gendered, even
mannish, with an enlarged and ejaculating clitoris.11 Further, as sex-
ual activity in women became more suspect, so did sexual passivity
in men, along with other forms of sexual anomaly. It was in this
context that the passive, feminized male sodomite joined the sexually
initiating whore as one whose aberrant status was crucial to the
maintenance of the emergent sex-gender system.12 Heterosexuality
was prescribed not just as normal but as compulsory, and mar-
riage—ideologically based in mutual feeling rather than in prop-
erty—became the romanticized site of its expression.
It would be difficult to overestimate what it meant for masculinity
and femininity to be defined not just as different from one another
but as mutually exclusive. Conceptions of the self were shaped by
that opposition, as was the self’s experience of others. Differences of
4 Introduction
class, race, and nationality were filtered through the lens of sexual
alterity, and they were tinged by fears and desires that such alterity
produced. With manners, linguistic expression, and morality dic-
tated by gender as well as class affiliation, society became a more
ambiguously charted territory, which men and women had to ne-
gotiate at risk. And because the sex-gender system helped to deter-
mine which aspects of the self would flourish and which would be
suppressed, the psychological reverberations of differentiated social
practices were profound.
It was in the novel, more than in any other expressive form, that
the social and psychological meanings of gender difference were
most extensively negotiated and exposed. At one level, these inno-
vative fictions demonstrated how the ideals of masculinity and fem-
ininity were translated into social roles, and they established norms
for that translation. At another level, they expressed resistance to the
wrenching system of differentiation and revealed the psychic costs
that it incurred. By combining social and what we would now call
psychological perspectives, novels facilitated acculturation while
also formulating damning cultural critiques. Through their detailing
of character and situation, they enacted the feelings and desires of
their authors and exposed the ambivalence that underlay the fabri-
cation of gendered subjectivities. Through the full range of their ex-
pressivity, and their availability to fantasy and dream, they disclosed
psychic excesses that were unassimilable to the coercive sexual or-
der.
The novel imposed and resisted the sex-gender system through a
bimodal narrative form that was molded by another major cultural
transformation. At the same time that radical changes were occur-
ring in socioeconomic and sex-gender systems, a significant form of
self-awareness was created by the development of individualism.
Like the class and gender systems, this new structure of conscious-
ness saturated every aspect of social, psychological, and epistemo-
logical interaction. Self-aware individuals experienced themselves as
preeminent in their relationships and were intensely focused on
themselves. At the social level, they believed themselves to be au-
tonomous and independent: active agents in a world available to
rational comprehension and control. Stamped by the spirit and prac-
tices of capitalism, they were acquisitive, pragmatic, and competi-
tive. When they encountered others, they treated them instrumen-
Introduction 5
tally, as objects. At the psychological level, the individual’s obsession

with its own interior life produced a division between the self that
scrutinized and the self that was watched. Subject and object simul-
taneously, the socially self-possessed individual was psychologically
riven.
The historian Norbert Elias has traced the progress of the “civi-
lizing process” through which individuals became increasingly self-
centered and aware.13 Detailing changes in everyday behavior over
a period of two hundred years, he shows how modern individuals
differentiated themselves, socially and psychologically, from the col-
lectivities with which they had previously identified. As self-interest
was asserted against the traditional practices of the group, the man-
agement of behavior became an increasingly private matter, handled
by the family on one side and by personal conscience on the other.
When social prohibitions were internalized and experienced as self-
control, the psychic self was deepened and divided.14 Manners in-
creasingly achieved the intensity of morality, and morality con-
structed desire as perversion. Pervasive feelings of guilt and shame
marked the partitioning of the self into the judging and the judged,
and inexpressible resistance to social interdiction signaled the exis-
tence of the unconscious mind.15 In this same period, affective im-
pulses, which should have bound individuals to one another, were
incorporated into a claustral psychic economy that defined them as
private and interior. Men and women shared this solipsistic structure
of self-awareness, but the conscious and unconscious contents of
their minds were not the same. Different social relations produced
different aspirations and forms of self-control, as they also produced
different fantasies, resistances, and desires.
The novel’s two narrative modes reflected the outward- and in-
ward-looking aspects of the consciousness of individualism. Real-
ism, the more familiar of the two, was fundamentally a social form.
Its narratives were shaped by the consciousness of the self in its
moral, ethical, and psychological relationships with others. Repre-
senting the hegemonic order of individualism, as Ian Watt and other
critics have suggested, realist narratives described a world that was
appropriate to the aspirations of middle-class subjects, in terms that
reflected their cultural assumptions and beliefs. They erased signs
of class inequity by naturalizing social differences—which were cru-
cial to the construction of the bourgeois subject—in order to present
6 Introduction
them as timeless and inevitable. Mediating between the power of

self-interest and the need for social integration, they showed how
modern self-awareness could produce an egotism threatening to so-
ciety, and they delineated strategies for its containment. The formal
methodologies of these narratives supported their ideological sup-
positions. Creating coherence from a single overarching perspective,
they affirmed the possibility of psychic wholeness and structured
desire in conformity with communal need. Projecting the reader into
the omniscient narrator’s place, they confirmed social consensus for-
mally and rejected subversive eccentricity. Presenting truth as a func-
tion of reliable representation, they employed language as if it could
be adequate to its object, projected characters that were possessed of
intelligible interiorities, and shaped linear narratives that synchro-
nized personal and collective histories.
In the same way that realistic narratives functioned to disguise
signs of class inequity in the interests of the bourgeois subject, they
also functioned to disguise, by naturalizing, inequities of gender. The
stories that they told concerned the sons and daughters who strug-
gled to accommodate themselves to rapidly changing social and per-
sonal relations. In the modified picaresque, the bildungsroman, and
the novel of psychological realism (all genres written predominantly
in the realistic mode), the son who either bears or must discover his
father’s name also assumes his father’s place: his property, social
position, capacity for economic survival in the public world, and
authority as founder of a family. His is ultimately a fiction about
autonomy achieved and competitions won—in material, epistemo-
logical, psychological, and vocational terms. His emotional detach-
ment from social and spiritual communities may be noted, but the
costs of his affective disengagement are not explored.
The daughter’s story is recorded in the domestic novel, which as-
sumes the female’s embeddedness in family. Tracing the father’s re-
placement by the aspiring suitor, it maps the complexities of court-
ship and carries the protagonist to the threshold of marriage: what
follows, unspoken in the eighteenth century, is her maternity. Often
it is the girl’s first name that supplies the novel’s title—Pamela, Ce-
cilia, Evelina, Emma—emphasizing the extent to which her social
identity is suspended as she moves from the shadow of one patro-
nymic into the shadow of another. It is in this liminal moment, when
she selects a husband, that her potentially subversive sensibility is
Introduction 7
subordinated to her socially responsive moral consciousness. The

“correctness” of her choice is signaled by the improvement of her
class status and, with it, the class status of her family. Once that is
accomplished, her particularized narrative is appropriated for a uni-
versalized female plot. Her future happiness, which is presented as
secured, rests on the foreclosure of agency prefigured by her
mother’s insignificance in, or absence from, the text. So while the son
assumes the father’s active position at the fiction’s end, the daughter
slips into the invisibility of the maternal role. For both, the marital
union, which is romanticized as healing isolation, reinscribes the
differences that contribute to isolation’s cause. This is made explicit
in nineteenth-century realistic novels, where the wedding is prelude
rather than conclusion, and marriage focuses the strains created by
the oppositional structure of gender arrangements.
In contrast to the social emphasis of the realistic mode, fantastic
narratives had an intrapsychic focus. They mapped interior states
produced by possessive and affective forms of individualism, and
they exposed the anxious melancholy that the modern order of social
differences induced. Unmasking the belief in autonomy as false, they
bared its roots in the fear of psychic vulnerability. Revealing the link
between materialism and desire, they exposed the libidinal invest-
ments of patriarchal capitalism. They demonstrated that obsessive
self-awareness could yield to madness and that paranoia was the
product of a guilty conscience. Most significantly, they uncovered
the psychological dynamic that helped to structure the new sex-
gender system. Focusing on the fundamentally divided nature of the
self, fantastic narratives depicted a subject who knew itself predom-
inantly as object: a subject who struggled for integration, but learned
that fragmentation was its doom.16 Proliferating characters who were
both themselves and versions of one another, they enacted the pro-
cesses through which the subject found itself reflected in others and
others reflected in itself. And, finally, in the specular self’s fearful
but pleasurable transgression of boundaries that guarded its social
identity, they suggested the awesome attraction of an indeterminacy
that would undermine oppositional categories of difference.
There were elements of the fantastic in most eighteenth-century
realistic texts, but it was only in the late part of the century that
fictions written predominantly in the fantastic mode started to
appear. The gothic, which was the first of the fantastic genres,
8 Introduction
established the subjectivist form that was elaborated later in Roman-

tic, modernist, and postmodern genres. Its narratives rejected the
values of realism, interrogating moral judgment with psychic need,
reason with affectivity, and the fiction of objective truth with relative
perspectives. Desiring subjects were the focus of both male- and fe-
male-centered versions of the gothic, but because the desires of men
and women were conceptualized differently, their narratives as-
sumed quite different shapes.17 In coded forms, which represented
indirectly what women were not allowed to speak, the female gothic
unveiled the psychic costs of affective individualism and revealed
the price that women paid to achieve their places in a sexually seg-
regated social order.18 Excluded from the protective family by her
parents’ death, the female protagonist was subject to a predatory
patriarchy concerned with the material value of her sexuality. De-
pendent for knowledge on the sensibility by which she was defined,
she moved among sexual and economic horrors that, although imag-
ined, reflected a world that was genuinely fearsome for dependent
women. Because intensity of feeling was associated with passion
unacceptable in a lady, she strove for self-control, which meant the
suppression of her expressivity and the denial of threatening reali-
ties. In learning to reject the evidence of her feelings, she refused her
own capacity for self-awareness and gave to others the authority to
mold her life. Identified with their appropriative power, she com-
plicitously adopted a masochistic model of desire, which signaled
her socialization while revealing its fundamentally disabling na-
ture.19 In the text, her fate is shadowed by the lives of women who
are represented as possible versions of herself: bad women whose
passion leads them to madness or to death, and good women who
cannot survive the hardships of their marriages to sadistic men.20
The female protagonist can escape her tragic fate only if the fantastic
narrative yields to the impulse of romance. Then she marries not the
sadistic gothic hero to whom she is magnetically drawn, but the
feminized hero whose passivity precludes his participation in the
gothic plot.21
The character of the anti-hero, who dominates the gothic narra-
tive, is fully elaborated in the male-centered text.22 His tragic story
exposes the dark side of possessive individualism as unrestrained
egotism, greed, and lust, and it shows how the materialistic urge,
which is fostered by capitalism, permeates sexuality. In him, the sol-
Introduction 9
ipsistic tendencies of modern self-awareness are intensified as a toxic

masculinity that femininity cannot alloy. Possessed by paranoia, he
tries to resist objectification by objectifying and exploiting others.
Motivated at once by misogynistic heterosexuality and homophobic
homosexuality, he defines love as erotic domination, in which the
domination that is practiced is always his.23 Although he needs a
male or female counterpart to complete himself, he is doomed to
eradicate or be eradicated by the subjectivity of the other whom he
desires. And because he destroys himself when he destroys that
other, his story culminates in madness or in death.
Situated in a psychic past that haunts a social present, predomi-
nantly fantastic narratives suggest that desire is structured and de-
formed within the family. Saturated with incestuous longings, these
stories expose intrafamilial relations as psychologically determining
and the sexuality of parents and children as multiple, ambiguous,
and complex. In these narratives, the absence of the mother is as
crucial to her sons and daughters as her presence: it is a spectral
reminder of the lost other, which is also a lost aspect of themselves.
The female protagonist recalls the mother’s nurturance and love as
a powerful but now foreclosed alternative to sexual difference and
erotic domination by the male. As anti-hero, the son experiences her
in the perilous, interior void, which his denial of affectivity has cre-
ated, and in the sexually voracious woman, who threatens him with
boundary loss and psychic appropriation. As the feminized hero, he
finds her reflected in the desexualized woman whom he loves and
ultimately marries. For female and male protagonists alike, the father
is an object of intense desire and fear. His sadistic sexuality terrifies
and attracts the daughter, whom he craves, and arouses in the son
virulent competitive feelings and an ambivalent homoerotic fasci-
nation. For both of them, he holds the magnetic power of the eroti-
cized patriarchal family in which children remain mired throughout
their lives.
While realism takes the individual’s accommodation to society as
its subject, then, the fantastic reveals the psychic costs of social de-
formation. While realism traces the generational displacement of pa-
rental authority, the fantastic exposes ways in which intrafamilial
identifications, which are etched into the psyche, reproduce them-
selves in subsequent relations. While the trajectory of realism is
toward an improving future, the movement of the fantastic is
10 Introduction
backward toward a regressive past. While realism poses the possi-

bility of the self’s union with another, the fantastic insists on the self’s
alienation from others and itself. Finally, while realistic narratives
struggle for textual intelligibility, completeness, and coherence, fan-
tastic narratives gesture toward an affectivity that lies outside of lan-
guage and, therefore, outside the text. Eighteenth-century philoso-
phers defined that intense experience of affectivity as the sublime,
while Freud later calls it the uncanny, Lacan associates it with the
Real, and Kristeva explores it, in its positive and negative moments,
as the semiotic and abject. For all of these speculative thinkers writ-
ing in the fantastic mode, it represents a realm of indeterminacy that
is rooted in the unconscious mind. Utopically a place of subversion,
it is also a place potentially of madness. It is that place which fan-
tastic narratives struggle, repeatedly, to reach.
I want to argue, therefore, that the modern form of self-awareness
born of individualism was articulated through two narrative modes
that represented distinct, but related, ways of knowing and of telling.
These modes constituted each other through diverse genres that
were shaped by changing cultural assumptions and shifting rela-
tions of desire.24 Together they suggest the interpenetrability of fan-
tasy and reality, and the mutual dependence of the unconscious and
the social. Early fantastic fictions, which were rooted in a long ro-
mance tradition, revealed the price paid in the Enlightenment for the
increasing rigidity of epistemological, racial, national, and, above all,
sexual boundaries, which realism functioned to perpetuate. First, in
the gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-
ries, the anxieties and wishes that had been excluded from realistic
fictions appeared in a supernatural—but incipiently psychological—
form to belie realism’s myths of distinct differences, progressive his-
tories, and integrated texts.25 Then, as realist fictions used sexual,
social, and racial “others” thematically in order to reinforce hierar-
chical orders of difference, fantastic fictions (which had acquired an
explicitly psychological focus) dissolved the distinction between self
and “other” and revealed how the “other” serves instrumentally in
the self’s construction. With the advent of modernism, reality was
filtered through a subjectivist lens and fantastic narratives tended to
move, in most novels, from the periphery to the center.26
Literary historians have generally aligned themselves with the
values and assumptions of one of these two narrative modes, ignor-
Introduction 11
ing or devaluing the other. Those who have constructed realism as

the novel’s dominant tradition have dismissed subjectivist fictions as
popular and ahistorical, while those who have privileged fantastic
texts see realism as bound to the hegemonic values of an ascending
middle class. By separating social from psychological discourses,
both groups have repeated the gesture that divides the internal from
the external world and one aspect of modern self-awareness from
another. As a result, they have tended to overlook the full interactive
spectrum of ideology, subjectivity, and narrative structure.27 Pursu-
ing an alternative route, I will argue that few fictions are actually
elaborated through one narrative form alone. Most are composite
structures that reveal personal ambivalences and ideological contes-
tations through interactive modes and genres. Because the male-
authored, canonical novels that serve as my case studies overflow
the definitional categories to which they have been assigned, they
implicitly call those categories into question. For example, Robinson
Crusoe, which is ordinarily read as formal realism’s founding fiction,
reveals in its fantastic subtext an obsessive, claustral, appropriative,
and haunted subjectivity that is defined through the projections and
introjections of gendered—as well as racial and class—“others.” A
classic study of modern psychosexuality, Clarissa has generally been
read as a novel of psychological realism. In fact, its realistic narra-
tive—which examines the encounter of sexual with socioeconomic
interests—is interrogated by a fantastic fiction, which exposes psy-
chic fragmentation and social alienation, sexual anxiety and gender
confusion, and interpretive relativity and authorial uncertainty. Tris-
tram Shandy, which has been dismissed as formally anomalous by
theorists of realism and ignored altogether by theorists of the fan-
tastic, explores the limits and possibilities of both narrative modes
in their mutually constitutive dynamic. In that text, it is the repeated
conflict between the need for sexual definition and the desire for
indeterminacy that creates the contestation of epistemological per-
spectives and modal forms. And, finally, The Castle of Otranto, which
is the first English novel in which the fantastic mode is dominant,
shares many of the thematic concerns and formal realistic strategies
that Walpole, its author, explicitly wrote against. More importantly,
it unmasks the sexual obsessions that derive from intrafamilial re-
lations and lays open the melancholic nature of the loss incurred by
the cultural imposition of gender difference.
12 Introduction
Together and separately, these canonical texts explore, from male

perspectives, the relation of gender identity to social authority and
unconscious impulse. Charting the cultural dynamic through which
the gendered subject is constructed, they also examine the psycho-
logical processes through which it attempts to deconstruct itself. Re-
vealing how modern subjectivity is configured by the sex-gender
system, they demonstrate how it resists, and at times subverts, that
patterning. They show us that from its inception, the novel placed a
self that is socially armored and coerced against one that suffers
from, and even at times evades, the difficulties caused by that coer-
cion. They enable us to see that the problem of gender lies at the
heart of the process of subjectification and that while the novel has
functioned to produce the gendered subject, it has also revealed that
subject’s radically ungendered and complexly sexual nature.
To the extent that eighteenth-century novels examined the pro-
duction and destabilization of gendered identities, they anticipated
the psychoanalytic project that Freud initiated at the nineteenth cen-
tury’s end. The problems that were thematized by fantastic narratives
were also problems that he and his successors tried to solve. Like
the protagonists of fantastic fictions, the subjects of Freud’s case stud-
ies were governed by desires they could not understand. Torn by
conscious and unconscious impulses, they revealed the self to be not
unitary but divided. Compelled to action by their affective inclina-
tions, they testified to the limits of the Enlightenment’s rationalist
ideal. Freud set out to explore the underworld of feeling and desire
that the civilizing process had produced. Considering psychic resis-
tance to culture as inevitable, he subordinated moral to psycholog-
ical imperatives. He devised interpretive and therapeutic strategies
that gave him access to the unconscious and invented a language
that captured the symbolic meanings of fantasy and dream. Like the
novelists whom he resembles, Freud was centrally concerned with
the ways in which the self is sexualized and gendered; and like those
novelists, he was implicated in the elaborate system of differences
that he explored. In his blind spots, as much as in his explanations,
he revealed that the sexual division of labor, which contorts individ-
uals in the process of gendering them, limits their comprehension of
the effects that the gendering process has had upon them. Like the
male novelists whom I examine, Freud and, after him, Lacan have
been the products and producers of male-centered histories of sub-
Introduction 13
jectivity and sexuality. They use sexual difference to anchor psychic

and linguistic meaning, and male sexuality to anchor the meanings
of sexual difference. In their narratives, which—although not fic-
tions—are still fictive, they structure the contingencies of subjectivity
and sexuality as necessarily male and female.28 At the same time,
they reveal the inevitable failure of the socializing process by ex-
posing the depth of psychic resistance to any absolute identity, as
well as to gender roles that are culturally prescribed.
I make use of Freud’s interpretive method to bring fantastic nar-
ratives to the surface of realistic texts and to locate the deep layers
of meaning that fantastic narratives contain. Just as the juxtaposition
of text and subtext forces revisionary readings, so too does the con-
junction of revisionary readings with appropriate psychoanalytic
theories.29 For example, Heinz Kohut’s theory of narcissism illumi-
nates Defoe’s conception of character, at the same time that Defoe’s
early modern fictions provocatively interrogate the ideological as-
sumptions of Kohut’s bourgeois self-psychology. Read together, the
narratives of Kohut and the narratives of Defoe expose the palimp-
sestic formation of modern self-awareness and the collaborative psy-
chological and social shaping of subjectivity. In a similar way, Tris-
tram Shandy is uncanny in its Lacanian presumptions. It reveals how
the male body is castrated by the cultural mind and suggests the
nature of the compensations that men seek for their deprivation. La-
can’s formulations elucidate Sterne’s view that the restrictions of lan-
guage reflect and reproduce all other lacks. At the same time, Sterne’s
comic vision provides a critique of Lacan’s misogynistic assump-
tions: assumptions which—to some extent—Sterne also shares. The
work of the feminist object-relations theorist Jessica Benjamin
strengthens and is reinforced by a reading of Clarissa as a develop-
mental story that shows how the individual’s struggle for autonomy
and recognition yields relations of erotic domination, which are gen-
der coded and culturally specific. And, finally, Walpole’s two gothic
texts, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, exemplify and
extend Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s speculations about the
relation of desire to personal and cultural loss.
Whether fictive or psychoanalytic, all of the texts that I consider
in these chapters are shaped by conscious and unconscious loss:
psychic losses inflicted by social accommodation, intrapsychic losses
that have taken social form, cultural losses that testify to the
14 Introduction
haunting presence of the past. Hostage to memory and dependent

upon fantasy for substance, these ghostly exclusions stamp the
novel, as they fashion personality and culture. Experienced symp-
tomatically, they are never completely recognized and are therefore
never mourned. Their product is melancholia, which is represented
as personal in the fantastic text and as a cultural effect in the realistic
narrative. Like psychoanalytic theory, the novel charts the develop-
ment of gendered subjectivities in the face of traumatic deprivation.
Because deprivations imposed on men are different from those that
women must endure, male- and female-authored fictions are struc-
tured by divergent fantasies of desire and employ distinct strategies
of expression, resistance, and containment.
In the chapters that follow, I initiate a theory of the gender politics
of narrative modes, examining developmental stories about men and
women that have been conceptualized by men.30 All are authoritative
texts, popular in their own time and canonical in ours. It is their
familiarity that recommends them for my purposes. Because they
have been accepted as characteristic of either realistic or fantastic
traditions, and middle-class and masculinist ideologies, they can
usefully be read against the grain. In my interpretations, their fan-
tastic and realistic narratives interact to form composite texts that
function to manage gender relations even as they reveal the precar-
iousness of selfhood and identity. Although these novels are male-
centered, and can even be called misogynistic, they powerfully rep-
resent the ambivalent yearning that lies at the heart of misogyny: a
yearning that originates not in hatred, but in love and loss. It is the
unacknowledged nature of that loss that is inscribed, as melancholia,
in the texts.
This book’s implicit claim is that fantastic narratives unman these
master texts with their persistent urge for indeterminacy. That urge
expresses itself in the text’s struggle for the experience of sublimity:
an experience that, associated with the earliest stages of subjectifi-
cation, survives in memory as a reminder that gender differences are
disguises that the self assumes but that it wishes also to discard. The
fantastic narrative answers to that urge when, in its shaping of char-
acters and its development of themes, it demonstrates that to estab-
lish a radical distance from the biological other is to deny that kind
of otherness in the self: to reject it altogether is to undergo a form of
psychic mutilation. The entombment of fantastic narratives within
Introduction 15
realistic texts and the burial of the subtexts of fantastic narratives are
both symptom and cause of the social intransigence that blocks the
personal and cultural work of mourning. To make those invisible
narratives visible is to facilitate mourning’s productive, recuperative
work. That is the primary project of this book.
1
Daniel Defoe and the Gendered
Subject of Individualism
A pivotal and provocative figure, Daniel Defoe embodied in his own

life the ideology of individualism: the powerful fantasy of social,
economic, and psychological autonomy that was central to the de-
velopment of capitalism. Emphasizing his frequently illicit exploits
and adventures, his biographers have represented him as the social
outsider who improvised himself, seeking survival or, better still,
success in a world that eluded his mastery, despite his resourceful-
ness and wit. Born in 1659, a year before the Restoration of Charles
II and the initiation of a new political order, Defoe was marginal
from birth: a child of Dissenters, whose civil and religious rights
were legally restricted. Not simply a matter of inheritance or the
result of hostile social forces, marginality was also a position that he
continually chose: professionally, politically, and personally. Aban-
doning an early plan to join the Presbyterian ministry—with its as-
signed responsibilities and its community of values—Defoe selected
the secular, morally ambiguous, and materially uncertain life of busi-
ness: the brave new world of capitalist investment and expansion by
which Puritanism had itself been overtaken.
Initially successful in a variety of merchant and trading ventures,
Defoe plunged—within ten years—from affluence to insolvency.
Perilously overextended in the boom that followed the Glorious Rev-
olution, he tried desperately to recoup his losses, but by 1692 his
failure as an entrepreneur was clear. Hounded by creditors, he was
sued for the nonpayment of contracted debts, for mismanaging his
factoring responsibilities, for trying fraudulently to corner the per-
fume market based on civet cats, for appropriating a patented in-
vention for the recovery of buried treasure, and for cashing a bill of
exchange that was drawn on a person who had died. Declaring bank-
ruptcy, he endured the first of several imprisonments. His reputation
17
18 Defoe and the Gendered Subject
went the way of his financial dealings as ethical judgment was over-
taken by self-interest.
In adapting himself to a rapidly changing society, Daniel Defoe
was an exemplary modern subject who continually reinvented him-
self. As easily as he added a prefix to his name—changing it from
the simpler “Foe” in 1695—Defoe assumed, discarded, and resumed
disguises, declared affiliations, inhabited positions, and spoke in a
chorus of dissonant voices. While some of his impersonations were
ironically undertaken, their consequences were real. In 1702, he was
arrested, imprisoned, pilloried for sedition, and fined for adopting
the High Church point of view too persuasively in his tract “The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters.” Ten years later, he was impris-
oned again, this time for writing anti-Jacobite pamphlets that em-
ployed a pro-Jacobite perspective. Other impersonations were un-
dertaken literally—with stakes that were equally as high. At the turn
of the century, Defoe acted as a political spy for Robert Harley, one
of Queen Anne’s leading ministers, and for nine years (from 1704 to
1713), he single-handedly published The Review as an Independent,
while being paid by Secret Service money. Beginning in 1715, he
spied for the Whig ministry but wrote for Tory periodicals. Perhaps
less self-consciously, but with equal inconsistency, he inhabited con-
flicting, even contradictory positions on a range of important con-
temporary issues. In his poem “The True-Born Englishman,” he sat-
irized a xenophobia with which he identified in other writings;1 he
participated in the slave trade while condemning slavery as evil; and
he joined Monmouth’s Rebellion against James in 1685—the last ep-
isode of the democratic English Revolution—only to support Wil-
liam and the Revolution of 1688. Throughout his adult life, he was
a deeply secularized man of faith and a ruthlessly pragmatic ethicist.2
A great deal has been written about the prodigious versatility of
Defoe. He was merchant, trader, entrepreneur, court adviser, editor,
journalist, poet, novelist, essayist, travel writer, spy, double agent,
and also (the fact usually emerges incidentally) a husband and a
father. But it is difficult to learn how it felt to be Defoe: the nature of
his affective ties to family and to friends; his emotional responses to
financial failures, loss of reputation, and personal and political dou-
ble-dealings; at what moment in his life optimism was overtaken by
despair and how ambivalence was negotiated. To the extent that his
biographers have submerged his psychological depth in the flat mul-
Defoe and the Gendered Subject 19
tiplicity of retold events, they have shaped his life (as he shaped the
lives of his protagonists) in the mode of realism and in the genre of
picaresque. But since most of his realistic narratives contain a strong
fantastic strain, the nature of his interiority may be glimpsed in the
divided subjectivities that he projected in his fictions. Indeed, while
Defoe’s protonovels have been read as founding texts because they
chart the origins of the possessive individual and (in the case of
Robinson Crusoe) a new political subject,3 they are equally deserving
of this status because of the insights they provide into the conscious-
ness of individualism.
In his fictions, Defoe set out to represent men and women who
successfully embraced the ideology of possessive individualism:
men and women who could survive and even prosper under the
volatile conditions of entrepreneurial capitalism. As he told their
stories, Defoe inadvertently exposed the conflict of values and beliefs
that the commitment to autonomy produced. Unconsciously chart-
ing the collision between the ideology of individualism and the
sex-gender system, he revealed how that clash created insoluble di-
lemmas for men and, for women, contradictory demands of such
intensity that the viability of female individualism itself was called
into question. He told the double stories of his protagonists through
the interplay of realistic and fantastic narratives—the former setting
out the contradictions through which the illusion of autonomy was
achieved, the latter tallying that illusion’s psychic costs.
I will examine the constructions of the male and female subjects
of individualism in three of Defoe’s novels—Robinson Crusoe, Moll
Flanders, and Roxana—and the relation of those constructions to nar-
rative form. Long recognized as a founding text of literary realism,
Robinson Crusoe articulated a powerful myth of the possessive, au-
tonomous, and masculine individual through the interaction of three
narrative modes, which were shaped by three forms of conscious-
ness. An allegorical narrative, which reveals the fiction’s origins in
an earlier, religious system of belief, is contested and ultimately dis-
placed by realistic and fantastic narratives, which trace the emer-
gence of the social and psychological aspects of modern self-
awareness. The realist narratives (in the midst of which the fantastic
narrative is embedded) detail the dependencies upon which the il-
lusion of autonomy relies and the forms of antisociality that follow
from it. The fantastic narrative, which dominates the account of
Crusoe’s island adventure, exposes psychic division as the dark un-

derside of Crusoe’s selfish egotism and shows how the solipsism of
individualism turns into paranoia. In the contestation between its
fantastic and realistic narratives—with the latter’s ultimate appro-
priation of the former—the fiction represents the psychological and
social processes that produce the self-dependent male as entrepre-
neurial capitalist, political agent, and imperialist. Fundamentally, it
suggests that the erasure of the female and the displacement of the
family are crucial to his definition.
In Moll Flanders and Roxana, Defoe attempted to represent a fe-
male individualist who would be equivalent to Crusoe, but his in-
ability to think beyond the values of the emerging sex-gender system
limited the possibilities of his representation. As Defoe applied to
women a concept of social, economic, and psychological autonomy
that was usually identified with men, he exposed the fundamental
incompatibility of individualism with the normative categories
through which women were defined. In Moll Flanders, Defoe assumes
the ideology that aligns women with their reproductive bodies and
their affective relations with children and with men. Because he sub-
ordinates maternity to his protagonist’s entrepreneurial interests and
comes close to erasing her emotional ties, he deprives the gender
category he employs of its customary meaning. Writing his fiction
exclusively in the mode of realism and the genre of picaresque, he
is able to evade the psychological implications of the definitional
disjunctions he creates, but the tonal fissures that develop in the text
indelibly mark the places where the woman separates from the in-
dividualist.
In Roxana, Defoe makes visible the ideological contradictions that
remain partially buried in Moll Flanders. In the realist narrative,
which initially dominates the fiction, Defoe tells the story of an en-
terprising woman who, abandoned by her husband, abandons her
children, signaling—as Moll had—the radical incompatibility of in-
dividualism with conventional maternity and the affective family.
As she becomes mistress to increasingly affluent and statused men,
Roxana invests her money and becomes a wealthy capitalist: truly a
possessive individual. But the material success she is given in the
realistic fiction is undermined when the reappearance of her children
motivates an intense fantastic narrative. As the story of the aban-
doning mother engages the story of the prosperous whore, Roxana

is forced to recognize the price she has paid for her rejection of a
proper woman’s role. The agonized consciousness of female individ-
ualism is explored by the fantastic narrative, which encounters, con-
tests, and finally overwhelms the picaresque plot. The ultimate trag-
edy of Roxana suggests the intransigence of gender ideology: how
it is internalized by women no less than men, and how it produces,
in those who resist it, guilt and shame that are destructively turned
back upon the self. Although Defoe’s continuing ambivalence is re-
corded in the convoluted structure of the narrative, the balance of
his feelings has shifted away from the celebratory impulses of Moll
Flanders, and he aligns himself against his protagonist and with the
party of misogyny.
Of these three studies of individualism, Roxana is the most for-
mally sophisticated and insightful. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, where the
fantastic narrative is cordoned off from the realistic, picaresque ad-
venture, and unlike Moll Flanders, which is without an intrapsychic
perspective, the realistic and fantastic narratives in Roxana are intri-
cately conjoined. That coherence reflects the interpenetration of psy-
chological and social forces in the construction of the subject, as it
also reflects the entanglement of a personal past and present. The
unassimilability of the fantastic narrative in Crusoe speaks to forms
of psychic repression that follow from the belief in male autonomy,
as the central metaphor of shipwrecked man suggests the funda-
mentally antisocial nature of individualism. The complete absence
of a fantastic narrative in Moll Flanders signals the psychological in-
adequacy of Defoe’s conception: his inability either to think past or
to accept the gender assumptions of his time. And as the painful self-
awareness of Crusoe on his island helps to identify the psychological
deficiency in Moll, Moll’s social embeddedness interrogates the lim-
itations of Crusoe’s definition. The representations of Moll and Cru-
soe inadvertently reinforce the oppositions of the sex-gender system,
which Defoe resisted but in which he also was invested. It is in Rox-
ana that Defoe achieves, for the first time in the English literary tra-
dition, the full potential of the bimodal form. That form allows him
to explore—through its integrated fantastic narrative—the psycho-
logical meanings of ideological contradictions that the realistic
narrative imposes. Writing a story of a female individualist that
demonstrates the impossibility of female individualism, Defoe lays

bare a central paradox of the ideology that shaped his thinking, as
it also shaped his life.
Defoe was situated at the boundary of two worlds, each with its own
economic, political, and cultural imperatives, and each with its own
system of belief. As Defoe’s life reflected the influences of that par-
ticular transitional moment, so also did his novels. Robinson Crusoe
is especially significant in its representation of old and new dis-
courses. It is imprinted by the Puritan form of consciousness, which
negotiated the shift from a decentered to a centered self, and it is
stamped by individualism’s double-sided self-awareness. In Crusoe,
the Puritan sensibility expresses itself through the residual mode of
allegory and the genre of spiritual autobiography, while the mind-
set of individualism is elaborated through the emergent forms of
picaresque realism and the fantastic.4 In their interactive dynamic,
the three narrative modes chart a history of the emergence and de-
velopment of modern consciousness.
In the adventures that precede the shipwreck, the text is domi-
nated by a picaresque narrative, which maps the progress of Crusoe
toward independence and autonomy. The family history that Defoe
provides establishes the context for his protagonist’s rejection of tra-
ditional values and inherited relationships. “Kreutznaer,” the fam-
ily’s German surname, has already been changed to “Crusoe” by
“the usual Corruption of Words in England.”5 The death in war of
one brother and the mysterious disappearance of the other have left
Robinson, the youngest son, in the position of unwilling heir. Cru-
soe’s father has planted the seeds of individualism by moving from
Hull to York and transforming his own worldly condition through
successful entrepreneurial activities. Rejecting his inheritance of the
“middle State,” along with the subjection to authority that it requires,
Crusoe chooses to oppose the “will” of his father and the “entreaties”
of his mother. He is driven by an irrational “inclination” for pros-
perity and power, and by a “rash and immoderate desire of rising
faster than the Nature of the Thing admitted” (38). Above all, he is
motivated by a wish for autonomy: psychological, social, and eco-
nomic.
For Crusoe, to be “free” of affective ties is to be self-possessed; to
be materially independent is to be powerful in possession. Striving

to create a self that is libidinally and economically autonomous, he
wants to be the active subject of his life, never subject to others. But
even as the realist narrative documents Crusoe’s achievement of that
desired condition, it also provides evidence that his success is more
a function of his dependence and social embeddedness than it is of
his autonomy. From the outset, Crusoe’s rupture with his parents
emerges as more apparent than real. He takes money from his
mother and imitates the trajectory of his father’s subversive adven-
ture, reversing it by leaving York in order to return to Hull. Similarly,
while he wishes to reject the complacency of his father’s bourgeois
position, he does so only to join him as a member of the rising middle
class, acquiring capital on his African voyages and investing it in
the purchase of his Brazilian plantation. After leaving home, he re-
peats the familial pattern in nonreciprocal relations with two cap-
tains and a widow, all of whom honor their commitments to him
while he does nothing in return for them. The widow acts faithfully
on his behalf as banker; the first captain befriends and instructs him
in the value of investment; and the second rescues him, gives him
free passage, and, by buying his goods, provides him with the capital
he needs for the acquisition of property. At still another level, the
falsity of his autonomy is suggested by the fact that voyages in-
tended to demonstrate his independence mark him as implicated in
a national imperialist project. That project is recapitulated in the or-
der of his adventures: his journey down the African coast, his en-
counter with Islam, his crossing of the Atlantic, his plantation own-
ership, and, ultimately, his exportation to the Caribbean of Brazilian
expertise.6
The egotism that makes Crusoe (and one assumes, Defoe) inter-
pret the personal and social exploitation of others as autonomy and
the selfishness that makes him oblivious to the social function of
reciprocity are displayed and intensified in Crusoe’s adventure in
Sallee. Captured by the captain of a Moroccan ship, Crusoe learns
what it means to be enslaved, a state which he describes as “the most
miserable of all Conditions of Life” (34). But his knowledge of hard-
ship makes him neither democratic nor empathic; instead, it
strengthens his urge to self-preservation and hardens him to the in-
strumental use of others, particularly others who are different from
himself. Behaving characteristically, he promises the young Muslim,
Xury, that if he will swear fidelity to him, he will “make [him] a great
Man” (34). But while his fellow slave takes such an oath and risks
his life to save him, Crusoe ignores the contract, claiming the heathen
as his property so that he can sell him into slavery. Protestations
aside, his selfish pragmatism easily wins the day. It is only later—
when he needs free labor on his plantation and help in escaping from
his island—that Crusoe decides that he “had done wrong in parting
from my boy” (35). Xury’s value changes with his potential uses, but
there is never any question for Crusoe (or, apparently, for Defoe)
that Xury’s value belongs not to Xury himself, but to his self-created
master. The objectification of others is, after all, a significant aspect
of capitalist self-sufficiency.
The aspect of Crusoe’s egotism that Defoe questions is not his
treatment of others: it is his relation to God. Searching for the moral
meaning of Crusoe’s project, Defoe subjects his protagonist’s entre-
preneurial adventures to allegorical interpretation by a retrospective
narrator—another, older Crusoe who imposes a religious reading on
his early experiences and on the journal he kept when he was ship-
wrecked on the island.7 The narrative strategy reflects Defoe’s effort
to understand the innovating individual through a typological sym-
bology rooted in an earlier traditional order. Emphasizing not the
uniqueness but the typicality of Crusoe as a sinner, the spiritual
autobiography represents him as alienated from God by his refusal
to obey his father. His sin carries him deeper into spiritual estrange-
ment and despair until he is finally converted to religious faith: a
healing of the soul that is also the integration of the self. Providence
provides the integrative principle of the elder Crusoe’s allegorical
interpretation: it is the origin of prophetic warnings, which he dis-
covers in the record of everyday occurrences, and it is the source of
overarching patterns of meaning, which he associates with repeated
events. Assuming time to be simultaneous instead of linear, Crusoe
sees, with hindsight, that when he was living on his plantation in
Brazil, he was “just like a Man cast away upon some desolate Island”
(35).8 In the storms that he endured in his first days at sea, he per-
ceives a punishment for the “wicked leaving of my Father’s house,
and abandoning my duty” (9); and in desire itself, he finds “a secret
over-ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our
own Destruction” (14). Sign reading, he understands that he de-
parted for his ill-fated voyage “in an evil hour—September 1—the
same day eight year” that he “left his father and his mother” (40).
Ending in shipwreck, this voyage initiates the spiritual crisis that
will lead to Crusoe’s reaffirmation of faith. It also initiates crises in
the values of individualism and in the narrative structure itself.
In the journal that Crusoe keeps on the island, there is a contes-
tation for dominance between the allegorical and the realistic nar-
ratives. From the beginning of the fiction, the thrust of the allegory
is fundamentally at odds with the defining interests of the pica-
resque. While the former functions to embed the recalcitrant self in
a network of symbolic relations, the latter seeks to free it from all
affiliational ties. In the spiritual autobiography, Crusoe’s confidence
in his own powers must ultimately be supplanted by his recognition
of the surpassing power of God, while in the realistic narrative, he
must achieve a fully confident conviction of autonomy. As the nar-
ratives move toward Crusoe’s conversion, allegory is itself trans-
formed and is forced to serve the ends of realism.
Crusoe’s crisis of belief is signaled by increasing despair, confu-
sion, and irrational anxiety. Although the retrospective narrator at-
tributes these feelings to Crusoe’s faltering faith, the text also asso-
ciates them with his horror of self-obliteration. To feel that one is
abandoned by God is to lose one’s conviction of autonomy and psy-
chic wholeness—it is to be plunged into a cosmic darkness, which
is also the disintegration of the self. After the shipwreck, an earth-
quake, and in the course of a severe illness, Crusoe experiences the
psychic terror that marks the outer edge of Puritan introspection.
Attempting to move Crusoe out of the spiritual and psychological
paralysis that then besets him, Defoe is torn between the spiritual
autobiography’s urge to reconcile him with God and individualism’s
requirement that the illusion of autonomy be maintained. Identify-
ing God’s power with the power of his father, Crusoe has a “terrible
dream” that gives a human shape to the divine. He sees “a Man
descend from a great black Cloud, in a Bright Flame of Fire.” His
“dreadful” countenance is also “bright as Flame,” and he holds a
spear with which he threatens the life of the rebellious son who has
not yet repented (87). Crusoe recognizes that “My dear Father’s
Words are come to pass: God’s Justice has overtaken me, and I have
none to help or hear me” (91). Reconciling himself only symbolically
to his father by reconciling himself explicitly to God, Crusoe is able
to maintain the fact of the familial rupture, which undergirds his
illusion of independence. Further, by identifying himself with the

omnipotence of God, Crusoe finds his own power and integrity af-
firmed. Conversion to God becomes, in this context, a conversion to
the centrality of the self. After the transformative moment, in which
the soul is replaced by the rational mind, there is no need for Defoe
to extend the religious reading of Crusoe’s experience.9 Realism—
the narrative of individualism—appropriates allegory, the narrative
of spirituality. The problem of interiority remains, but it is associated
now with the psychology of the autonomous self. Crusoe’s psychic
struggle is defined in relation to himself, not in relation to a higher
being. That new struggle evokes and shapes the fantastic narrative,
which interrogates the values that Crusoe self-consciously affirms.
In the realistic narrative, Crusoe describes his imposition of order
on an alien environment, explains how he establishes ownership of
the island through the efforts of his labor, and argues that he has
achieved mental stability through the cultivation of practical reason
and self-discipline. Adjusting private to public time, he chronicles
the passing of days, weeks, months, and years, detailing his patterns
of sleeping, eating, and working. In this mode, Crusoe presents him-
self as resourceful and resilient. He is capable initially of managing
an economy based on use and is able then to accumulate surplus
value with the grain and money that he saves. Experiencing himself
as powerful and autonomous, he believes desire—which is inevita-
bly “for Things which I had not” (129)—to be irrelevant to life in the
“kingdom” of his island: “I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I
was now capable of enjoying: I was Lord of the whole Mannor; or
if I pleas’d, I might call my self King, or Emperor over the whole
Country which I had Possession of. There were no Rivals. I had no
Competitor, none to dispute Sovereignty or Command with me”
(128). In this, as in other moments of unrestrained grandiosity, Cru-
soe experiences himself not only as integrated and whole, but actu-
ally as omnipotent.
At the same time, Crusoe’s isolation intensifies anxieties that un-
dermine his hard-won sense of internal mastery and coherence. In
the fantastic narrative that emerges, the island becomes a mirror im-
age of his mind. Crusoe’s “reign” proves to be also his “captivity “
(137), with himself the jailer, prisoner, and prison. His terror of an-
nihilation by unseen forces is the projected terror of a self that is
internally alienated and divided. From the moment of his arrival on
the island, Crusoe is acutely fearful of others whom he does not see.
On his first night, he sleeps in a tree with his truncheon; and, in the
days and years that follow, he carries his gun everywhere, despite
his belief that the island is uninhabited. His constant dread is that
he will be “swallow’d up alive” by wild beasts or cannibals (82),
as he was, very nearly, by the sea. Hiding himself in the “fortress”
that he erects, he continues to extend his barricades at the same time
that he enlarges and cultivates his domain. His anxiety is under ra-
tional control only when he believes his autonomy to be complete.
At the same time, it is the illusory nature of that autonomy that
continually threatens him with fear of existential alienation.10
In his eleventh year, as the fantastic narrative continues, Crusoe
encounters a sign of indubitable otherness in the form of a single
footprint on the beach. It is this uncanny presence—himself and not
himself—that finally subverts the delicate emotional balance that,
from time to time, he has been able to achieve. Standing “like one
Thunderstruck,” as if he “had seen an Apparition,” he feels “per-
fectly confus’d and out of myself” (153)—effectively divided. Losing
faith in his own integrity and power, he loses faith also in the om-
nipotence of the ideal other. “As wonderful Experience as I had had
of his Goodness, now vanished,” he observes, “as if he that had fed
me by Miracle hitherto, could not preserve by his Power the Provi-
sion which he had made for me by his Goodness” (156). Distraught
when he realizes that he cannot claim the footprint as his own, Cru-
soe experiences himself as an object in another’s world. Paranoid, he
frantically buries his possessions, builds fortifications, and plans
strategies of defense. “In two Years Time,” he explains, “I had a thick
Grove and in five or six Years Time I had a Wood before my Dwell-
ing, growing so monstrous thick and strong, that it was indeed per-
fectly impassable” (161). When he ultimately finds “the Shore spread
with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other Bones of humane Bodies,” he
recognizes the cannibals’ “feasting spot” (165) and is thrust into the
paranoid hell of his imaginings. As his anxiety puts an “End to all
Invention” (176), his moods oscillate wildly; he is haunted by night-
mares and, in the daytime, by fantasies of revenge. His intense desire
for escape, which is a desire to elude himself, is satisfied only when
the solipsism that entraps him yields to a form of sociality in which
he can dominate others. This transformation is anticipated by Crusoe
in a dream in which he rescues a savage from cannibals who would
kill and then devour him. In the dream, the man he saves becomes
his servant and helps him to flee the island. When that dream be-
comes reality, Crusoe’s psychic economy begins to change. The nar-
rative enters a transitional phase, which facilitates a movement away
from the fantastic mode and toward a realistic resolution. A sub-
stantially extended version of his earlier relation to Xury, Crusoe’s
relationship with Friday is based on a series of contradictions, which
help to explain how the illusion of male autonomy is created and
sustained.
The consolidation of Crusoe’s precariously balanced and divided
self takes place through Defoe’s imaginative manipulation of a com-
plex, hierarchical system of racial, national, and gender differences,
which structure Crusoe’s relation to his servant. Together, these dif-
ferences work to establish for Crusoe an apparently autonomous but
actually exploitative male identity, which denies dependence on oth-
ers. Snatching the savage from the mouths of his captors, Crusoe is
no longer a son, but becomes at once a maternal, paternal, and god-
like figure. Giving Friday a miraculous birth, he reinscribes the fa-
milial relation from a position of power, preparing the way for a
new social persona. Treating the man as a clean slate upon which he
alone can write, Crusoe names him for the day on which he is saved
and designates himself as “Master.” Defoe’s fantasy is one of willing,
even delighted subordination, with the kneeling Friday placing Cru-
soe’s foot upon his head (203) as he offers appropriate signs of “Sub-
jection, Servitude and Submission” (206).11 Instructing Friday in En-
glish, Crusoe teaches him also what to eat and how to dress, deters
him from cannibalism, and attempts to convert him to the Christian
faith. Their relationship is written in the form of a domestic idyll.
Friday, whose affections are tied to him “like those of a Child to a
Father” (209), is feminized as well as infantilized by the paternalistic
order. Crusoe begins to love the “Creature,” who loves him more
“than it was possible for him ever to love any Thing before” (213).
They live together in Edenic bliss and Crusoe believes it to be “the
pleasantest Year of all the Life I led in this Place” (213).
Defoe’s representation of Crusoe’s “natural” superiority rests on
his assumption of an ideology of geographical diffusionism that is
linked, on one side, to English nationalism and, on the other, to cap-
italist individualism.12 The basic presumption of that ideology con-
cerns the centrality of Europeans and Europe and the marginality of
“others, “ who are reduced to the level of childlike “primitives.” As

he had described Xury previously as “my boy,” Crusoe now de-
scribes Friday as “my man.” Both are as available for appropriative
ownership as is the “empty” island that Crusoe has “discovered”
and which he develops and exploits for his own use. Because Friday
is at the periphery of Defoe’s worldview, he is defined as uncivilized
and savage. But if he were only that, he would threaten Crusoe’s
convictions of autonomy. Because he is also identified as the “good”
native, he can be perceived as innocent and childlike—educable in
his primitivity. In this way, Friday becomes the object of a love
shaped by its partners’ inequality. Caring for him as a child and,
implicitly, as a wife, Crusoe is morally justified in requiring his obe-
dience and fidelity. Friday’s labor, like his affections, belongs “nat-
urally” to his master. The colonial project is therefore rationalized
through its domestication, and with Friday’s conversion to Christi-
anity, it is also sanctified.
Although the contradiction that structures the colonial relation
can be disguised, it cannot be erased. In his interactions with Friday,
Crusoe wavers between a fearful belief that the native is dangerous,
even deadly in his difference, and the sense that because of his dif-
ference, he is attractive and deserving of sympathy. Mediating be-
tween these polar attitudes, Crusoe creates fantastic compromises
which are intended to control an otherness that is threatening to his
identity. So, by defining Friday’s features as European and his skin
as “tawny,” Crusoe simultaneously accepts and denies the native’s
strangeness. Assigning him the role of an educable and loving child,
Crusoe splits off menacing qualities of difference, constructing a be-
nign hierarchical relation that allows the incorporation of the other
into the masterful self. That mastery is shattered, however, when
Friday dares to assert his own autonomy. Hearing Friday’s expres-
sions of joy when he sees his “country” and “nation” from a hill on
the island (223), Crusoe experiences himself as subordinate to Fri-
day’s subject self. And as paranoia returns, his xenophobia also is
aroused.
I made no doubt, but that if Friday could get back to his own Nation
again, he would not only forget all his Religion, but all his Obliga-
tion to me; and would be forward enough to give his Countrymen
an Account of me, and come back perhaps with a hundred or two
of them, and make a Feast upon me. (224)
Now, in Crusoe’s mind, Friday is no longer separable from the other

natives, and is therefore to be feared instead of desired. The realist
psychic economy of self and other exposes its roots in the fantastic
economy of the divided, intrapsychic self. The “jealousy” that Cru-
soe experiences for “some Weeks” marks the return of an anxiety of
obliteration and abandonment that can only be calmed by the res-
toration of his dominance in socioeconomic and national as well as
personal terms.13
Although Crusoe’s jealous anxiety is assuaged by Friday’s re-
peated affirmations of fidelity, it is his own rescue of Friday’s father
from the cannibals that proves decisive in ending his ambivalence—
and the modal vacillations of the text. After effecting the symbolic
substitution that installs Crusoe in the place of patriarch, the text
authorizes the values of individualism and the mode of realism.14 In
psychological terms, Crusoe’s relation to Friday enables the forma-
tion of the subjectivity of possessive individualism: a movement
away from the self-obsession of fantastic consciousness toward the
objectifications and hierarchies that belong to realist social discourse.
The affectivity of their domesticity is unthreatening because it is
grounded in inequity. It serves to naturalize the exploitation of Fri-
day’s labor while it masks the transition from a primitive island econ-
omy based on use value to a capitalist economy based on the alien-
ation of land and the values of surplus and exchange. Although
Crusoe had already established his possession of the land through
his accumulation of grain and his right to political sovereignty
through his holding of property, it is only when the island is pop-
ulated—by Friday, Friday’s father, and a Spaniard whom Crusoe has
also rescued—that he is finally able to exercise the full social au-
thority that he could, until then, only nominally claim.15
My Island was now peopled, and I thought my self very rich in Sub-
jects; and it was a merry Reflection which I frequently made, How
like a King I look’d. First of all, the whole Country was my own
meer property; so that I had an Undoubted Right of Dominion. 2dly,
My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute Lord and Law-
giver; they all owed their Lives to me, and were ready to lay down
their Lives, if there had been Occasion of it, for me. (241)
Here, the passion for domination is revealed to be the other side of

the liberatory spirit that initially motivated Crusoe’s quest, and the
individualistic self of capitalism is shown to depend for its consoli-

dation on the instrumentalization and appropriation of nature and
other human subjects.
As the population of the island begins to grows, Crusoe’s fantasies
of power proliferate. When he meets a ship full of mutineers with
their deposed commander, he presents himself as a combination of
conquering soldier and benign deliverer, with “a naked Sword by
my Side, two Pistols in my Belt, and a Gun on each Shoulder” (253).
The commander’s response to his “Spectre-like” form is fully appro-
priate to the grandiosity of Crusoe’s self-presentation. “Am I talking
to God or Man,” the commander asks, “Is it a real Man or an Angel?”
Proclaiming that “I am a Man, an Englishman” (254), Crusoe locates
himself at the intersection of individualism and nationalism, a lo-
cation to which the religious identifications of an earlier moment are
no longer relevant.16 In an ecstasy of self-confidence induced by this
strange new world of social, personal, and economic possibility, Cru-
soe tries out a variety of identities, playing “Generalissimo” (with
Friday his lieutenant-general), the island’s governor, and the gover-
nor’s delegated representative. In this way, he redefines himself to
accommodate the requirements of the society to which he is now
ready to return.
In the final segment of the fiction, Crusoe is fully restored to the
code of realism and to his newly integrated and socially adapted
self. Having completely suppressed the fantastic form of self-
awareness, he can tell the captain, with bravado, that “Men in our
Circumstances [are] past the Operation of Fear” (260). Everywhere
at once, he is a master of military strategy, an innovative planner,
and a courageous leader of his motley band of men. His island is at
first his empire—defended by arms—and then, as he prepares for
his departure, his “Collony,” a place that he organizes along class
lines, delegating authority while sustaining economic and political
control. After he returns to the mainland and finds himself rich from
the rentier share of his Brazilian plantation, he comes to appreciate
the power of capital for self-sustaining growth. Interpreting insti-
tutionalized privilege as personal success, Crusoe, like Defoe, cele-
brates a false autonomy that depends on the exploitation of racial,
national, and socioeconomic others—and involves not so much the
oppression but the erasure of women.
In order to be the free political subject and autonomous individual
that the ideology of bourgeois capitalism affirms and specifically dis-

tinguishes as male, Crusoe needs to liberate himself from kinship
ties, which have determined social position and limited personal
identity in the past. As he struggles to achieve the class status to
which he aspires, he must also learn to play the gender role that he
has been assigned. This means that he will have to displace the father
with whom, as a male, he identifies, while he tries to make himself
invulnerable to the challenge that would be posed by the son he must
produce if he is to play the patriarch at all. Further, in order to affirm
his gender difference, he not only has to deny affiliation with his
mother, he also must resist the sexual woman who, in replacing her,
would bear him the son he needs but also fears. Arousing his desire,
her sexuality would evoke his vulnerability; representing difference,
her femininity would threaten his masculinity; promising love, she
would explode his illusion of autonomy altogether. The realistic nar-
rative seeks to resolve the profound contradictions that emerge from
the historically defined dilemma, but the resolution it effects only
serves to reproduce them.17
Initiated by filial disobedience, Crusoe’s project is shaped by an
anxiety of paternity that makes him want to supplant his father eco-
nomically and psychologically, achieving property and status inde-
pendently, without becoming a father who himself can be displaced.
In order to accomplish this, Defoe makes a number of ingenious
interventions. The father who is rejected and made invisible at one
level reemerges at another in a disguised but recognizable form. In
the allegorical mode, God serves as a father substitute, as we have
seen, while the three ships’ captains function, at the level of realism,
in a similar capacity. Crusoe’s transformation from son to patriarch
is marked and facilitated by the text’s erasure of the religious alle-
gory, as it is by the inversion of Crusoe’s relation to the Portuguese
captain, who is indebted to Crusoe for his life and reinstatement to
power. Crusoe avoids the threat of parricide by playing the paternal
role with Friday, whose own father he supplants and who has no
power for him to fear. Further, his claim to his island property is not
legitimated and reproduced through Friday or through a biological
child, but descends through the children who are born as—and to—
subordinates: to the women captured for sexual purposes from the
mainland (305), to those whom he exports for his colonists from
Brazil (women “proper for Service, or for Wives”), and to those
whom he transports with other “necessaries” from England, who

are intended for higher-statused but still inferior Englishmen (306).
The oedipal struggle, which the text covertly maps, is avoided by
the introduction of an imperialist drama in which the threatening
affective family is replaced.
In its representation of Crusoe’s experience on the island, the text
metaphorizes the implications of the sexual division of labor. At the
heart of that representation is the need of the male to distinguish
himself from the feminine, which he then controls, appropriates, and
displaces. Exemplifying the male individual in the realistic narrative,
Crusoe succeeds magnificently in his project of sublimation. Self-
sufficient, he usurps the female role in the functions he performs:
cooking, sewing, baking, and domesticating animals. He gives sym-
bolic birth to Friday, first dreaming him into existence and then sav-
ing him from death, naming him, and treating him as a son. Later,
installing him in the domestic space as surrogate wife, he develops
an erotically tinged, homosocial relationship with the native that
makes it unnecessary for him to establish affective ties to women,
who are barely present in the text. The fact of his marriage (“and
that not either to my Disadvantage or Dissatisfaction”), the existence
of his three children, and the death of his wife are all disconcertingly
announced in a single sentence at the novel’s conclusion (305). These
four family members are bracketed as irrelevant. They are secondary
as a group to the families that proliferate on the island to which
Crusoe’s restless spirit repeatedly urges him to return. Because their
relation to him affirms his masculine authority while hiding his po-
tentially disruptive sexuality, the island families enable him to play
the surrogate God who here, as elsewhere, safely assumes the father’s
place.
The disjunction that is created in the fiction between woman’s
literal absence and her metaphorical presence signals the tension that
exists between the text’s need to repress and its urge to disclose her.
So, while male subjectivity is constructed through the appropriation,
subordination, and erasure of the female, her existence is also con-
tinually, if covertly, reaffirmed. The text refuses the exclusion of
women by representing the son’s connection to the female and ma-
ternal in coded terms.18 The feminine saturates representations of
nature, which serve as the crux of gender displacements, enabling
Crusoe’s mastery while revealing its fragility. Presented early in the
text as the primal maternal body, nature is simultaneously destruc-

tive and sustaining: the ocean, which has the power both to over-
whelm and to deliver, and the fertile island into which Crusoe ini-
tially burrows for protection and from which he derives security and
nourishment. The primal fear of engulfment—which is a fear of the
omnipotence of nature and the mother—reverberates in Crusoe’s ob-
sessive terror of the cannibals, a terror that is made more frightening
when it is projected onto alien others, who become more alien as a
consequence of the projection. In this sense, the island offers Crusoe
a transitional space—an opportunity to differentiate himself from a
feminized world that he is also able to control. Establishing distance
from the body of the island, he appropriates it first for his own use,
then alienates it as his possession, and finally cultivates and com-
modifies it through the exploited labor of others. In domesticating
nature, Crusoe affirms his masculine autonomy. By taking posses-
sion of the island body, which he has cultivated, he establishes
himself as a political individual. By populating it and governing its
people, he asserts his authority within the social community. Rep-
resenting Crusoe’s transformation of nature from untamed wilder-
ness to orderly polis, Defoe participates in the dominant political
and scientific discourses of his time. Constructed by—and also help-
ing to construct—the sexual division of labor that was then in the
process of revision, those discourses placed rational masculinity
against a feminine nature, subordinating the latter to the former, as
feminine feeling was subordinated to the masculine mind.
When Crusoe leaves the island—ostensibly rejecting the gender
indeterminacy that is typical of the male fantastic narrative—he has
become a political agent, an entrepreneurial capitalist, an imperialist,
and a self-dependent male: the last is the identity that undergirds
them all. Friday has become his faithful mate, effectively forswearing
father and country for Crusoe. After returning to civilization, Friday
kills a bear and Crusoe kills a pack of wolves. Both incidents are
described in the realistic mode of the fiction’s final segment and sug-
gest that the acculturated male individual, with his representative,
has masculinized female nature and then conquered it. As the ob-
session of fantastic self-awareness has been absorbed by the hierar-
chical relations of realism, so also has the problematic relation of
male and female been absorbed in the male’s relation to himself, to
a masculinized nature, and to other men. The realistic narrative of
the possessive male individual, as Defoe constructs it, is a narrative

that has no place for women.
Constructing Crusoe as a possessive individualist, Defoe reveals

contradictions that he tries to contain in the tensions of the realist
narrative, and that he exposes as psychic pain in the fantastic.
Mainly, the novel demonstrates that the illusion of autonomy rests
upon the transformation of relations of dependence into relations of
exploitation. Because men’s dependence upon women is the deepest
and most threatening dependency of all, any evidence of it must be
thoroughly expunged. In Moll Flanders and Roxana, Defoe sets out to
construct female individualists who will be equivalent to Crusoe. But
as he applies to women a concept that the sex-gender system asso-
ciates exclusively with men, he inadvertently exposes the social par-
adoxes that it is the function of the ideology of individualism to
disguise. Given their definition as women, Moll and Roxana cannot
disavow the sexual and affective needs that Crusoe either denies or
satisfies through substitution, nor can they dismiss their affiliation
with the family, which for them is the locus of emotional connection.
In the accounts of his female protagonists, Defoe exposes the dis-
crepancy that exists between the instrumentalization of others,
which is central to capitalist individualism, and the normative sig-
nificance for women of sexual desire and maternity.19
Clearly, the metaphor of man creating himself in isolation on his
desert island has little in common with the pragmatic circumstances
of Crusoe’s female counterparts, who are always embedded in social
relations. Conventionally seen as wives and mothers, and forbidden
legitimate routes to capitalist enterprise, women in this period were
defined biologically and relationally, not in terms of their autonomy.
Although Defoe accepts the normative categories of femininity, he
subordinates them to the requirements of an essentially masculine
individualism and deprives them of their ideological content. So,
while his mistress/whore shares with the idealized mother/wife a
sexual body that connects her to children and to men, Defoe denies
her affectivity and represents her motivation as purely instrumental.
Because he both exaggerates and perverts the female stereotype, he
creates tonal disjunctions in the text that many readers have inter-
preted as authorial irony—particularly in the case of Moll. These
textual fractures are not in fact ironic, but testify to the contradictory
nature of Defoe’s imaginative construction—as they do to the rigidity
of his culture’s gender categories.
Defoe’s assumption about his whores can be seen as oddly similar
to the assumptions that eighteenth-century novels make about re-
spectable women’s lives. Although status may differ, the essentials
of women’s experience remain, in many ways, the same. Defoe iron-
izes courtship, family life, and marriage, but he recognizes the
value—even the necessity—of such institutionalized forms for
women, even when those forms are utterly deprived of substance.
Drawn to conventional roles, Moll and Roxana do not choose entre-
preneurial adventure, as Crusoe does. It is forced upon Moll by the
faithlessness of her first lover and upon Roxana by the abandonment
of her husband. It is only after they have been deprived of licit re-
lationships with men upon whom they can economically rely that
they are willing to consider their alternatives. Resisting membership
in an exploited, laboring underclass, they can be supported as mis-
tresses or they can work as prostitutes. What the text reveals is that
the differences among their possibilities are more imagined than
real, and that none of their options will produce autonomy. If they
choose to be protected by a man, they are subject to his whims, as
well as to the misogyny of patriarchal institutions. If they decide to
live at the margins of the fathers’ law, they can seek economic self-
sufficiency by removing their bodies from the cycle of reproduction
in order to alienate them as marketable commodities. Whichever
path they choose, they remain subject to the contingencies of their
female roles and bodies. But when their sexuality is detached from
desire and maternity, it becomes merely entrepreneurial, and the
children who mark what becomes a parodic family must either be
commodified or ignored.
Although Defoe’s male and female narratives are necessarily en-
abled by the rejection of familial relationships, which ultimately re-
turn to haunt them, the ghosts that are laid to rest in Robinson Crusoe
indelibly stamp the female-centered fictions. All three texts resonate
with anxieties that are aroused by the transition from an extended
kinship structure, which is crucial to an agricultural economy, to the
nuclear family, which is responsible for socializing its members to
bourgeois capitalism and its gender roles.20 All three expose the ten-
sion that exists between the ideology of individualism, which priv-
ileges autonomy and instrumentalizes relationships, and the indi-

vidual’s need for affective, reciprocal, and sexual connection.
Testifying to the power of male sublimation, Robinson Crusoe shows
how needs and desires that ordinarily seek satisfaction in the family
can be redirected to the production of culture and the exploitation
of others. (In that novel, as we have seen, women who are too threat-
ening to be exploited must be eliminated altogether.) But in Moll
Flanders and Roxana, the tensions that exist between the demands of
individualism and those of the sex-gender system prove to be intol-
erable. Perverting normative conceptions of femininity, they also
provide a distorted image of the nature of the family.
For women, there is no world elsewhere: no desert island, no place
beyond society. But the domesticity that binds women to society also
deprives them of choice, of agency, and therefore of a story. As Moll
herself points out, a woman without a man is “left alone to shift for
[her]self”—and it is precisely such a shifting that provides Moll her
adventures and Defoe his plot.21 The empty spaces and silences
within Moll’s adult narrative are those in which she lived “as if mar-
ried” and “like a woman”: bearing children with a single man. To
the extent that she functions outside of the legitimate domestic
sphere—as a mistress, whore, and finally thief—Moll does appear
to be a social and an economic agent. But her reference is always
back to the private female world that continues, however perversely,
to mold her experience. Marriage provides the model from which
she diverges, and which she also cynically duplicates: legitimate
marriages which she contracts, bigamous marriages in which she
participates, and illusory marriages which she feigns. The children
whom she bears (and who identify her with the female sphere) are
ubiquitous despite the fact that she relinquishes them with as little
ceremony as her mother had relinquished her. And although they
slip as easily into death as they do from her memory, each one is
immediately replaced.
Just as Moll reproduces the family through distorted versions of
the wife and mother, so she also acts as a daughter in perverse re-
lationships with several older women. There is the “nurse” who is
Moll’s foster mother in her childhood and the “governess” who, after
helping to rid her of an unwanted child, educates her in the strategies
of thievery. There is also her biological mother, whom she acciden-
tally encounters as a respectable plantation manager in America after
she herself has been deported as a thief. All of these women live
autonomously, without dependence on men, and all have pragmatic
skills to teach her. In this regard, they are similar to “real,” respect-
able mothers who socialize their daughters to the values and expec-
tations of the world in which they will have to make their way. But
because the survival techniques that Moll must learn involve the
instrumentalization of others, they are incompatible with the female
stereotype. These are the techniques that the false mothers know
through their own experience and that they must help her to acquire.
Still, perverse as familial relations in Moll Flanders may seem to
be, that perversity is merely an exaggerated rendering of the influ-
ence that patriarchal capitalism exerts on affiliational ties. The
twinned fear and desire that the new, affective nuclear family pro-
duces in the culture are reflected in the incest anxiety that haunts
this and other fictions of the period.22 Moll’s discovery that she in-
advertently married her brother in England, and is living with him,
their children, and her mother in Virginia, suggests at once the fra-
gility and indissolubility of familial bonds in a society that fosters
independence and anonymity.23 Moll’s response to “the odd and sur-
prizing” situation (“tho’ I was not much touched with the crime of
it, yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made
my husband even nauseous to me” [78]) reflects a deep uncertainty
about the relation of “natural” to social prohibition. This is also true
of Moll’s mother’s simultaneous expression of horror at her daugh-
ter’s “lying with” her son and her advice to Moll that she should not
abandon the marriage but should simply “bury the whole thing”
(85). Throughout the novel, Moll’s continuing references to her “hus-
band/brother” mark an anxious return to problems of consanguin-
ity. That anxiety is evident also in the obliquely incestuous attraction
that Moll feels for Humphrey, the son whom she meets years later
when she is transported to America as a thief. “About two hours
after [Humphrey] was gone,” she explains, “he sent me a maid-
servant and a Negro boy to wait on me, and provisions ready dressed
for my supper; and thus I was as I had been in a new world, and
began almost to wish that I had not brought my Lancashire husband
from England at all” (291). Although it is difficult to understand to
which of Moll’s several appetites Humphrey is intended to appeal,
her urge to displace her husband with her son is relatively clear.
Again through exaggeration, the primal scene of the novel sug-
gests how desire is constructed and distorted within the vaguely

incestuous family of capitalist individualism. This is the scene in
which Moll is seduced by the son of the surrogate family in which
she functions as almost-daughter and as maid. When her would-be
lover kisses her passionately and then thrusts five guineas into her
hand, she observes: “I was more confounded with the money than I
was before with the love; and began to be so elevated that I scarce
knew the ground I stood on” (23). It is to this experience that the
commodification of Moll’s desire can be traced: the redirection of her
sexuality into a material form that appears to weaken her erotic en-
ergy.24 Greed and sexual “inclination” become so hopelessly entan-
gled that when her suitor asks her to become his mistress, her “colour
came and went at the sight of the purse, and with the fire of his
proposal together” (27). Although it is not evident which of the two
leads more directly to her compliance, greed ultimately triumphs
when she comprehends that she could have sold herself more pru-
dently if she had not given immediately into inclination. “I had been
trick’d once by that cheat call’d love,” she observes, “but the game
was over; I was resolv’d now to be married or nothing, and to be
well married or not at all” (53). Although Moll’s discourse of desire
draws increasingly on the languages of biological instinct and bour-
geois respectability, it is shaped throughout by the capitalist form of
economic relations, which is doubly exploitative of women. Feeling
is experienced as a snare and a delusion. Coins alone are real and
their value is the sole measure of success. Much like the capitalist
worker who, devoid of property, has only his labor to sell, Moll’s
body is her only marketable commodity. She can trade it contrac-
tually in marriage, which brings her some degree of security and
legitimacy, or she can make other less formal, less permanent—and
less reputable—arrangements. Either way, as wife or whore, she is
likely to find that alienation is the price she pays for the self-
commodification required of women by the social system that or-
ganizes their existence.25 Moll’s warped form of femininity heightens
a truth that normative female roles function to disguise.
The commodification of desire that produces alienation in Moll
(as it did also in Crusoe) is part of a larger process of reification that
transforms the relation of the self to itself and to others into relations
between things.26 It is in just such a reified environment that Moll
perversely comes to thrive. This apparent contradiction is at the heart
of the tonal dissonance of the novel, which both confuses and dis-
turbs the reader. Because her world is deprived of affective and sym-
bolic meaning, it is oddly insubstantial: devoid of depth, as Moll
herself is without interiority. With nothing stable to which social and
psychic significations might be anchored, all appearances are equally
valid and all are equally misleading. Seeming to anticipate the late
modern subject, Defoe’s realistic, early modern self creates an always
shifting identity through the roles it copies, adapts to its own pur-
poses, uses, and discards. Each semblance is designed for a specific
end: an illusion invented to mediate between the individual’s expe-
rienced needs and the resistances of others. Moll plays at mistress as
she plays at wife, and she plays at both as she will later play at thief.
Indeed, it is from her thieving that she derives the greatest pleasure.
Released from the more restrictive roles that are associated with her
sexuality, the older Moll can “appear in new shapes every time [she
goes] abroad” (229), pretending to be everything from a shoplifting
male to a gentlewoman as fine as those whose pocket watches she
steals to a beggar woman dressed “in the coarsest and most despi-
cable rags I could get” (221). But despite the range and multiplicity
of her performances, Moll persists in her belief (it is the belief also
of Defoe) that she is possessed of a “real” self. She knows it because
it is the very thing that she is always driven to hide, protecting it
from others like “the grand secret” that is her name. This illusion of
coherence disguises the dissociation implied by her many roles and
shifting practices, and it is identified—significantly—with the mys-
tery of her “worth,” which no relationship (not that of son, husband,
lover, or friend) can persuade her to unveil.
Because she is deprived of the traditional moral values that would
be linked to normative femininity, Moll recognizes pragmatic self-
interest as the only appropriate guide she has to individual behavior.
Driven to criminality by whatever she defines at the moment as an
authorizing “necessity,” she has plenty of judgments to make, but
all are of her victims, none of her own conduct. She blames the
mother, whose child she almost murders, for vanity in adorning her
daughter with the necklace that she steals (169). She condemns the
gentlewoman, whose watch she tries to take, as a “naive fool” be-
cause she is ignorant of Moll’s thieving stratagems. And she comforts
herself that by stealing money from a man whom she seduces, she
might dissuade him from running a daily risk of being “undone”
(198). Not content with being a hypocrite, Moll chooses at times to

“play the hypocrite,” an identity that is as valid—and without self-
consciousness—as any other (121). From the beginning of the fiction,
Moll denounces everything but herself for her plight: everything
from the “unenlightened” state that, by not providing care for chil-
dren who have been orphaned by the deportation of their mothers,
is responsible for the “scandalous” life which she has lived (9), to
the devil who bestowed upon her the enjoyment of thievery, which
prevented her from repudiating criminality even when “my neces-
sities were not so terrifying” (176).
Self-enclosure, which is both cause and effect of individualism,
justifies belief in one’s own supremacy and in the relative unimpor-
tance of others. (For this reason, it is ordinarily linked to masculine,
not feminine, “nature.”) Locating creativity in the pragmatic making
of identities, it identifies power with various forms of falsity. Symp-
tomatically, when Moll describes how she discouraged the proposals
of her first lover’s brother, she explains that she “said everything to
disswade him that I could imagine except telling him the truth” (28).
In this novel, it is truth that is literally and figuratively unimaginable.
Because it cannot be manipulated to serve defensive purposes, it is
also dangerous to what is paradoxically experienced as the integrity
of the isolated self. Moll is conscious of the loneliness of individu-
alism only when, caught between identities, she is forced to face
reality: in moments of stasis when, without a role to play, she actually
feels the psychic disjunction that it would be the function of a fan-
tastic narrative to explore. One of these moments is in midlife, when
she sees the appearance fading upon which her sexual identities
have relied. It is then that she perceives herself to be an object that
others might, to their advantage, use: “When a woman is thus left
desolate and void of council,” she observes, “she is just like a bag of
money, or a jewl dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next
comer” (112). By becoming a thief when she is no longer attractive
enough to be a whore, however, she is restored to a masculine form
of subjectivity that allows her to be exploitative rather than exploited.
It is only later, when she is imprisoned for her crimes, that she falls
again into a psychic limbo. In prison, she finds it difficult to inhabit
the role of penitent until she believes herself about to die. Under-
standing then that she has “forfeited all hope of happiness in the
eternity that I was just going to enter into” (250), Moll ensures the
availability of identities in the next world by lamenting those that

she has embodied in this one. The moral pieties she subsequently
mouths recall an earlier religious discourse and substitute for the
self-reflection that a fantastic narrative would articulate. They be-
come increasingly vacuous and finally disappear after deportation,
when she and her Lancashire husband are able to live “as new people
in a new world” (264).
Of course, the one obvious role that we never see Moll play is that
of conventional mother. It is the role that would openly challenge
her status as an individualist by aligning her with a stereotypical
femininity. With the intriguing exception of her grown-up son,
Moll’s children are notable only in their absence. As we have seen,
it is this absence that frees Defoe from binding her to a legitimate
domestic plot. Still, the frequent pregnancies and births, which are
the side effects of her work, subvert Defoe’s representation by ex-
posing the reproductive relations that underlie (however tenuously)
relations of production in a woman’s life. They make Moll’s embed-
dedness in nature visible, and they shatter the illusion of her social
freedom and control. Marked by its own temporality and rhythm,
the reproductive cycle invokes forms of connectedness that implic-
itly challenge the alienated relations of capitalism. That the alterna-
tives it raises cannot find a place within this text is indicated by the
absence of a fantastic narrative. Defoe can maintain his realistic ren-
dering of possessive individualism’s female configuration only by
appropriating the female body’s reproductive energies for capitalist
enterprise, while foreclosing the self-awareness that would suggest
that appropriation’s psychic costs.
The subordination of maternity to an appropriate individualism
is achieved through the interventions of Moll’s “governess,” Mother
Midnight. A thief who has “left off the trade,” Mother Midnight
becomes a midwife “of the right sort” (140), operating at the thresh-
old between male and female worlds of value: reifying, profession-
alizing, and commodifying. As a business woman, she transforms
the reproductive into the productive body, acting as procuress and
abortionist, and profiting from other women’s labor by buying and
selling the infants that her clients bear. As Moll understands, the
children who cannot be accommodated by the market are simply
done away with: “muther’d or starv’d by neglect and ill-usage, which
was much the same” (148). Mother Midnight takes cares of Moll
through one of her unwanted pregnancies, delivering and disposing

of her child so that she can continue to function in an individualistic
world in which sexuality is commodified and separated from ma-
ternity. When Moll becomes a thief, Mother Midnight serves as men-
tor once again, acting as “fence” and pawnbroker for Moll’s stolen
goods and assigning her a “schoolmistress” who instructs her in the
tricks of her new trade. With a harsh pragmatism that reduces all
value to the values of exchange, Mother Midnight makes explicit the
antifeminine motivations and practices that drive entrepreneurial
capitalism. Her ability to apply her managerial skills with equal
competence to the criminal and sexual underworlds suggests the
commonality of these diverse activities within the dominant eco-
nomic system.
While Defoe cannot allow Moll’s maternity to interfere with an
aspiring individualism in which he clearly has substantial stakes, he
is not finally able to separate her success as a bourgeoise from the
ideology that is associated with female identity. Although Moll
achieves prosperity as a capitalist in the New World, advancing to
plantation owner from self-sufficient farmer, her respectability—and
even her redemption—as a woman must be established in the private
sphere. Ironically, the appearance of gentility (which is all the gen-
tility that Moll or Defoe desires) rests ultimately on her enactment
of the roles of wife and mother. Accordingly, her melodramatic rec-
onciliation with Humphrey toward the end of the novel is offered as
compensation for the lack of feeling that has characterized all of her
previous relations to her children. Unaccountably described as her
“own and only child” (288), the adult (and desirable) Humphrey is
apparently intended as a substitute for his sisters and brothers who,
once abandoned, are now forgotten. Anticipating her meeting with
her long-lost son with “a confus’d mixture of joy and fright,” Moll
describes how “lying on my face [I] wept, and kiss’d the ground that
he had set his foot on” (280). Having succinctly displayed Moll’s
credentials for a devoted maternity, Defoe swiftly vindicates her as
a proper wife. He accomplishes this with the death of her husband/
brother and the legitimation of her bigamous, if long-standing, mar-
riage to Jemy. The concluding scene of the novel is one of connubial
happiness, with the wealthy old couple spending their last years
“in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived” (297).
Having followed an extremely circuitous route, Defoe concludes his
picaresque fiction with a peaceful domesticity that is as undisturbed

by analysis or self-reflection as Moll’s previous career has been.
While Defoe’s concluding effort to suture individualism to the
normative sex-gender system is as unbelievable in Moll Flanders as it
was at the end of Robinson Crusoe, it cannot be undertaken at all in
Roxana. There, an integrated fantastic narrative suggests that the
need to choose between autonomy and maternity produces a tragic
dilemma, which is endemic to the situation of the female individu-
alist. In the realistic narrative, Roxana’s history is a variant of Moll’s.
Initially embedded in the domestic sphere, Roxana is sold on the
marriage market by her father to an “Eminent Brewer” whom she
describes as “not ungentle,” “handsome,” and “a sportsman,” but
“[o]therwise a weak, empty-headed, untaught Creature,” who was
essentially “a Fool.”27 Abandoned by him and left penniless, with
five children to support, Roxana pawns her possessions so that she
will not see “my Children starve before my face” (46). Since her
primary concern is with her own survival, however, she fears that
in her hunger she might behave “like one of the pitiful Women of
Jerusalem . . . eating up my very Children” (50–51). In fact, she turns
out to be only slightly less ruinous in her selfishness. Because, as she
explains, “the Misery of my own Circumstances hardened my Heart
against my own Flesh and Blood” (52), she forsakes her offspring to
the uncertain care of relatives and the certain cruelty of the parish.
Once forsaken, they are, for fifteen years, forgotten.
Relieved of the children who would have bound her to the do-
mestic plot, Roxana—like Moll—initiates her adventures by com-
modifying her body, trading it to her landlord for security and com-
fort, a transaction in which eroticism is diverted to meet the material
aim that then appropriates it. Although Roxana acknowledges that
she has some “inclination” for sex, she also insists that “my Spirits
were far from being high; my Blood had no Fire in it, to kindle the
Flame of Desire” (75). Like Moll, her desire is subordinated to ac-
quisitive instrumentality and is reduced and deformed by that sub-
ordination. Also like Moll, her alienation facilitates her career, as she
fornicates upward, a mistress to merchants and noblemen who rep-
resent rungs on the ladder that she climbs to prosperity. Not content
with the uncertainties of a courtesan’s life, she carefully constructs
an economic safety net, investing and saving in order to advance
“from a Lady of Pleasure, [to] a Woman of Business, and of great
Business too, I assure you” (169). Her shrewdness keeps her from
confusing—as Moll does—the relatively unconstrained circum-
stances of a mistress with the subjugation of a wife. She insists that
after her “bad luck” with marriage, she has no desire to become a
wife again:
I found, that a Wife is treated with Indifference, a Mistress with a

strong Passion; a Wife is look’d upon, as but an Upper-Servant, a
Mistress is a Sovereign; a Wife must give up all she has; have every
Reserve she makes for herself, be thought hard of, and be upraided
with her very Pin-Money, whereas a Mistress makes the Saying true,
that what the Man has, is hers and what she has, is her own; the Wife
bears a thousand insults and is forc’d to sit still and bear it, or part
and be undone; a Mistress insulted, helps herself immediately and
takes another. (170)
She remains resistant to wedlock even when she is pregnant with

the merchant’s child, despite his insistence that if they should marry,
he would not claim any part of her estate. Acknowledging that “it is
not you . . . that I suspect, but the Laws of Matrimony [that] puts the
Power in your Hands” (190), Roxana provides a sweeping condem-
nation of the patriarchal order, contending that a woman who mar-
ries becomes a willing slave, surrendering her “Liberty, Estate, Au-
thority and Everything, to the Man” (187). Her protofeminist
position distinguishes her from Moll, but its inconsistencies suggest
the extent of Defoe’s own ambivalence. At a later point, she claims
that her rejection of the merchant “was the most preposterous thing
that ever Woman did,” a mark of her possession by the devil (197),
and she names vanity instead of principle as her motivation, explain-
ing that she was driven by “nothing less than being Mistress to the
King” (201).28 Her vanity proves to be well-justified and she defers
marriage repeatedly until she perceives the decline of her beauty and
her reputation when middle age puts “an End to . . . the intriguing
Part of my Life” (287). Her marriage to the merchant returns her to
domesticity and marks the end of the predominantly picaresque fic-
tion.
Although in the realist narrative Roxana, like Moll, instrumental-
izes normative female roles, unlike Moll, she is conscious of the sim-
ilarities between normativity and perversity. And because she
is intensely self-conscious, her feelings are always mixed. Her
vacillations about the value and desirability of marriage are matched

by fluctuating assessments of her own motivations in living the life
of a whore. She argues material need, for example, claiming that love
is “a Point so ridiculous to me, without the main thing [which is] the
Money” at the same time that she describes herself as so “immensely
rich” that “even Avarice itself seem’d to be glutted” (225). She ex-
plains that after twenty-six years in the profession, she has become
“so long habituated . . . to a life of Vice, that really it appear’d to be
no Vice to me” (229), just before she proclaims herself thoroughly
disgusted with her wickedness, although “without the least Hint . . .
from what may be call’d Religion or Conscience, and far from any-
thing of Repentance” (243). And while she attributes her early be-
havior to the “Devil’s doing,” she acknowledges that it was really
“that greater Devil of Poverty [that] prevail’d” (243). At one point,
in a spirit of resolution, she acknowledges that while she “lov’d it
for the sake of the Vice, and . . . delighted in being a Whore as such,”
poverty and necessity also stimulated in her excesses of avarice and
vanity (244). The mixture of moral judgment, pragmatism, and desire
characteristic of Roxana’s self-reflections is significantly different
from the rationalizations of Moll, who prefers any illusion to the
truth. In his protagonist’s struggle to understand the irrational de-
sires by which she is driven, and in her inability to divorce herself
effectively from her past, Defoe does manage to create the impression
of psychic depth for the first time in his novels. It is this more com-
plex interiority that prevents a simple attribution of Roxana’s dis-
crepant views to a disjunction of personality (like Moll’s) or to De-
foe’s own ambivalent misogyny. Rather, the odd combination of
Roxana’s superficial materialism and her increasingly tortured self-
awareness suggests a complicated if contradictory conception of sub-
jectivity, which is reflected in an equally radical (and quite prophetic)
textual form.
In Robinson Crusoe, as we have seen, the fantastic narrative dom-
inates the island experience but is bracketed by the protagonist’s
picaresque adventures. In Roxana, the fantastic narrative continually
interrupts the picaresque and, after the protagonist’s marriage, sub-
verts it completely by focusing on Roxana’s feelings of guilt and
shame. As Defoe moves toward the secular self-reflexivity and in-
wardness of the fantastic mode, which will not develop fully until
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he defines a power-
ful new form of female subjectivity. The dilemma he sets out is one
that will ultimately yield the hysterical women of Freud, and his rep-
resentation of the divided consciousness of his protagonist antici-
pates sophisticated formal strategies that will not emerge until much
later.
It is Roxana’s female body that seals her within the fantastic form
of consciousness, initiating a deep interior division that Defoe ulti-
mately shapes in tragic terms. Although Roxana instrumentalizes
her family in the interests of self-preservation and autonomy, she
soon discovers that she cannot escape the contradictions of her per-
verse position. Like Moll, she is forced repeatedly to a maternity by
which she is repelled—not least of all because “breeding” will ruin
her value as a commodity, impairing the beauty which is “the Great
Article that supported my Interest” (143). Wishing to preserve her
appearance, she “is not sorry” when she sees some of her children
die and, after experiencing “the first Touches of Affection” (142), she
does not shrink from sending the others away—even to the “She-
Butchers” who are certain to starve and murder them (116). But un-
like Moll, whose consciousness functions in a continuous present
that enables her to bury her infants without regret, Roxana cannot
overcome a vexed relation to a past in which she has traded her body
and abdicated her maternal responsibilities. Her pain is reflected in
recurrent feelings of guilt about her “life of wickedness” and in her
contradictory sense of herself both as a “sorrowful Penitent” (111),
haunted by memory, and as one who, unable to repent, is possessed
by “a silent, sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either
in Words or Tears, and which was, therefore, much the worse to
bear” (167). Because her moral urges are not animated by religious
faith, they assume a psychological reference that embroils them in
an obsessive, repetitive, and self-destructive dynamic. In this context,
the crucial distinction to be drawn between the fixed subjectivity of
Moll and the more fluid subjectivity of Roxana derives from the fact
that Moll is socially alienated, while in Roxana, Defoe explores the
internal division that self-alienation yields. While Moll’s conscious-
ness is flattened—composed of disjointed moments and contradic-
tory positionalities—Roxana’s consciousness is complex, shaped by
irrational impulses of which she is herself aware. While Moll’s world
is solipsistic and self-enclosed, Roxana’s comes to be characterized
by collapsing boundaries between self and other, self as other, and
other as the self. And although this fantastic aspect of Roxana’s

interiority is present in the “Dark Reflections” and “Heaviness of
Heart” (83) that occur early in the fiction, it is mainly through her
increasingly important relation to her servant, Amy, and later in her
troubled association with her daughter Susan that Roxana’s psychic
fragmentation and ultimate breakdown are represented. It is also
through her relation to them that the untenability of the contradic-
tion between autonomy and normative femininity is fully articu-
lated.
As several critics have noted, Amy serves as Roxana’s “double”
in the fiction, an other who is the self.29 She functions as the site of
Roxana’s psychic fragmentation at the same time that Roxana finds
in her a source of affectivity and a proof of personal continuity. Serv-
ing these several functions, the representation of Amy deepens the
portrayal of Roxana’s inner life, while it contributes a level of sym-
bolic meaning that complicates the text. From the beginning of the
novel, Amy works as an active agent on Roxana’s behalf, often exe-
cuting desires that are not explicitly articulated by her mistress. She
is described by Roxana as “the Girl who lov’d me to an Excess” (64),
“a cunning Wench, and faithful to me, as the Skin to my Back” (75),
“an ambitious Jade, who knew my weakest Part” (275), and—per-
haps most tellingly—as “Amy, who knew my Disease, but was able
to do nothing as to the Remedy” (283). It is Amy who arranges and
carries out the abandonment of Roxana’s children and then per-
suades her mistress to succumb to the landlord’s seduction. Frequent
bedfellows themselves, their sexualities intertwine so that each acts
as the instrument of the other’s desire while enacting her own desire
through the other. In the beginning of the fiction, after Amy has
indicated to Roxana her willingness to “be a Whore, or anything, for
your sake” (62), she participates in the landlord’s game of seduction
by playing pimp and acting as voyeur. Roxana then reverses their
roles, undressing her maid, thrusting her into the landlord’s bed, and
remaining to watch their coupling. The ambiguous explanation she
offers speaks to a compelling intermingling of their identities. “[A]s
I thought myself a Whore,” Roxana observes, “I cannot say but that
it was something design’d in my Thoughts, that my Maid should be
a Whore too, and should not reproach me with it” (81). Amy must
not only be neutralized as Roxana’s conscience; she must share her
mistress’s pleasure and desire.
Validating her mistress’s behavior, Amy shadows Roxana through

her picaresque adventures, preparing for the fiction’s shift to the
fantastic mode when the tension between autonomy and normative
maternity explodes. While Roxana conducts her affair with a prince,
for example, Amy sleeps “below,” with the prince’s gentleman. As
Roxana amasses enormous wealth, Amy achieves more affluence,
dressing “like a Gentlewoman,” serving as Roxana’s “companion”
instead of as her maid (206), and ultimately becoming “a Woman of
Business” capable of managing her mistress’s economic affairs (290).
She travels repeatedly as an emissary to the representatives of Rox-
ana’s past: to her lover and her first husband, to the Dutch mer-
chant—and, finally, to the two daughters and the son who, of the
five deserted children, are the only ones who have survived. This
last mission completes the transition from a predominantly realistic
narrative to one that is predominantly fantastic. It is undertaken by
Amy to calm a tormented Roxana who looks back upon her life with
“horror,” “detestation,” and “terror.” But when Amy plays the role
of mother in order to assuage Roxana’s guilt, a crisis develops in
their relationship. That crisis reflects Roxana’s psychic disintegration
and reveals its origins in the radical incompatibility of maternity,
female sexuality, and individualism. Too ashamed “to think of ever
letting the Children know what a kind of Creature they ow’d their
being to, or giving them an Occasion to upraid their Mother with
her scandalous Life” (248), Roxana delegates to Amy “the authority
to manage everything in the Family” (239). But as Amy establishes
herself as the benefactress of the children, she and the past elude
Roxana’s mastery, and the horror of her evil maternity overwhelms
her life. It is at this point that Defoe loses the power to shape and
bring his narrative to closure.
In its barely controlled, obsessive, and repetitive movement, this
lengthy final segment of the fiction has much the feel of nightmare.
Its focus is the confused and finally deadly relation of Roxana to
Amy and Susan (who is Roxana’s namesake as well as daughter),
both of whom play out Roxana’s most ambivalent desires and fears.
Amy initiates the fantastic crisis, inadvertently compromising her
mistress’s anonymity by making “an unhappy Discovery of herself”
to the girl, who is seeking passionately for her mother. Having
worked as a servant in the establishment of the “Lady Roxana,”
Susan had seen her mother dance in the exotic guise of a Turkish
princess (the performance that represents Roxana’s unrestrained

sexuality in the text). Although she knows the courtesan’s “story,”
she is not certain of her “real” identity. It is that story of illicit sexual
performance which a disguised Roxana hears Susan recount: “In a
word,” she says, “I was in a kind of silent Rage; for the Force I was
under of restraining my Passion, was such, as I never felt the like of:
I had no Vent; nobody to open myself to” (331). Objectified by Susan,
Roxana experiences the full horror of self-knowledge as the rejecting
sexualized mother. It is this that makes her hate her daughter and
wish for her destruction. Unable to resolve Roxana’s dilemma, the
narrative is trapped between the intensity of Susan’s desire to com-
plete herself by discovering her mother’s identity and Roxana’s desire
to avoid self-shattering shame by evading her daughter’s discovery.
The compulsive pursuit by the daughter of the compulsively fleeing
mother prefigures the fantastic journey of Frankenstein and his mon-
ster. Like that deadly interdependence of father and son, which
marks the impossible but inevitable division of the self, Roxana can
rid herself of the psychic continuities of the past only with a murder
that seals her own psychic destruction. Acknowledging that she
“would shed but very few tears” for Susan if the girl were to die
“naturally” (350), Roxana shrinks overtly from the murder that she
then calls implicitly upon Amy to commit. It is as though the
mother’s sexuality poisons the maternity to which it is opposed.
The ambivalence of Roxana’s desire is expressed through her con-
tradictory behavior toward her faithful double: implicitly encour-
aging while condemning the crime, and turning her self-hatred as
rage on the only one who has shared “the Secret History of my Life”
(365). Although she recognizes that “to have fall’n upon Amy, had
been to have muther’d myself,” Roxana initiates a fight so serious
that Amy leaves “and was gone for almost good-and-all” (350). The
revelation of the murder’s circumstances is continually promised by
the text and continually deferred as Roxana distances herself from
the action to which she felt herself compelled. That her connection
to Amy is ineradicable is suggested by the final passage of the novel,
which works simultaneously to affirm it and obscure it:
Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy

Circumstances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy
also: the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven
seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I
was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only
the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime.
(379)
As Roxana acknowledges Amy’s crime to have been her own, the

distance between them disappears and their fates are merged. The
story that began by placing instrumentalized sexuality in opposition
to maternity ends by demonizing the sexual mother, who cannot be
saved from moral failure and psychic dissolution. This demonization
will motivate fictions written by men and women over the next two
hundred years, often in novels that duplicate Roxana’s central formal
strategy.30 It can also be found in accounts of the hysterical women
whose divided minds psychoanalytic theory will explore.
A contradictory, inconsistent, and ambivalent fiction, Roxana is
also Defoe’s most fully realized study of individualism. In Robinson
Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Defoe identifies with the entrepreneurial
aspiration of his protagonists and vindicates it in the social discourse
of realism. This identificatory relation causes him to appropriate the
paranoia of Crusoe’s island adventure for the grandiosity of his col-
onizing effort and leads him to preserve the autonomy of Moll by
disavowing, while affirming, her female nature. As the fantastic nar-
rative overwhelms Roxana’s realistic plot, Defoe fully exposes the
price that women pay for the cultural role that they have been as-
signed. In the process, he achieves a formal breakthrough that brings
individualism’s divided form of consciousness to the surface of the
text.
That Defoe should anatomize possessive individualism most ef-
fectively through the representation of a female subject, to whom
possessive individualism is foreclosed, suggests what the writings
of future generations of male authors will confirm. The gendered
division of labor, which celebrates women’s capacity for feeling, en-
courages men to articulate culturally devalued aspects of their own
psychic lives through cross-gender representations. And although
these representations are not free of misogyny, they are more than
simply misogynistic. Misogyny is clearly woven into Defoe’s repre-
sentation of Roxana, but the female struggle for self-awareness that
he describes offers an implicitly radical, even protofeminist critique
of the individualism that he celebrated in Robinson Crusoe and tried,

in his own life, to embody.
Finally, I want to speculate about an intriguing problem that is posed

by Defoe’s depictions of his male and female individualists and by
our reception of them. Most contemporary readers have observed
the heterogeneity of Defoe’s characters, as well as their lack of intel-
ligibly complex and integrated interior lives. The absence of coher-
ence and interior depth (which Roxana ultimately achieves and
which protagonists of nineteenth-century fictions will possess) has
been attributed by some to authorial irony, by others to authorial
naı̈veté. It is only recently, however, that some critics have found
these characterizations to be uncannily familiar, convincing in a
postmodern mode precisely because of their seeming discontinuity
and flatness.31 While one can readily comprehend how the discrepant
values of Defoe’s protagonists might reflect shifting structures of
feeling in a moment of extraordinary social change,32 it is more dif-
ficult to understand how that earlier form of subjectivity should have
come to seem simultaneously primitive and eerily prophetic. Read-
ing the temporal relation palimpsestically, so that the past prefigures
a present through which the past is also seen,33 we can surmise that
the development of the modern subject, which began to crystallize
in the early days of capitalism, contained the seeds of that subject’s
maturation and change, just as capitalist relations of production con-
tained the promise of their own dialectical transformations.
In this context, Defoe’s stories may be seen to have provided em-
bryonic versions of selves that nineteenth- and twentieth-century fic-
tions then explored and that psychoanalytic theory has dissected.
His protagonists are familiar because we glimpse them at the deepest
level of the palimpsest of modern subjectivity, in which we have also
been inscribed. We recognize them as different but experience them
as similar: a doubled perception that signals an affiliation of early
and late modern structures of consciousness, ideology, and narrative
form. I want to explore the nature of that affiliation through a brief
comparison of Defoe’s conceptions of the self with those of Heinz
Kohut, the American object-relations theorist. Positioned on oppos-
ing sides of the Romantic, depth model of interiority, and repre-
senting anticipatory and nostalgic forms of individualism, Defoe and
Kohut can be seen as converse images of one another. Between the

writing of Crusoe and the writing of Roxana, Defoe moved from a
comic and realist representation of entrepreneurial capitalism to a
tragic and fantastic focus on the self-alienation that is its cost. In his
theorizing, Kohut specifically refused the fantastic perspective,
which had achieved its apogee in Freud.34 In its place, he installed
an alienated subject whom he could restore, through therapy, to
bourgeois sociality. When the realist fictions of Defoe are read in the
context of Kohut’s theory, their apparent prescience becomes expli-
cable. And when Kohut’s narratives are examined through the lens
provided by Defoe’s fictions, they suggest how the yearnings of en-
trepreneurial capitalism have persisted, not merely as economic mo-
tives but as fundamental psychic impulses.
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Kohut sought
to replace the therapeutic technique he had inherited with a modi-
fied theory and practice appropriate to what he defined as a new
form of subjectivity: the narcissistic personality.35 Performing mul-
tiple roles and exhibiting extreme and contradictory behaviors, his
estranged, narcissistic individual had only a void where an inte-
grated self should have been. Not unlike Defoe’s protagonists, who
display an emptiness that would previously have been filled by the
reflected presences of traditional authority, Kohut’s wounded nar-
cissists experience a hollowness that is the scar of their abandonment.
In Kohut’s judgment, the degeneration of previously supportive in-
stitutions (most notably, the family) has deprived these individuals
of empathic authority figures who facilitate the development of inner
coherence and strength. Without the introjected values of ideal “oth-
ers,” Kohut’s hollow men and women are doomed to seek despair-
ingly for “self-object” relationships that, mirroring them positively
to themselves, will substitute for the authority figures they have lost.
But because they are without a psychic core to which their introjected
objects might cohere, the fleeting self-representations that they ac-
cumulate are merely added to a chaotic, unassimilable mass.
Anticipating the postmodern perspective, Kohut views the self “as
a representation . . . quite analogous to the representation of ob-
jects.”36 And because he conceptualizes his subjects as constructed
surfaces (like Moll), he believes them to suffer not from the repres-
sion assumed by a depth model of the psyche—the barring of the
past from present memory—but from a “narcissistic wounding”: a
rupture in the narrative of the self, which is expressed in inconsis-

tency and incoherence.37 Much like Defoe’s protagonists, Kohut’s
narcissistic individuals fluctuate wildly between feelings of grandi-
osity and feelings of utter worthlessness. At times they are exhila-
rated and at times depleted by their interactions with “self-objects”
that they encounter in the external world.38 Both flattened and dis-
persed, they live in a depthless and foreshortened present. Described
as drafts in progress, they write themselves while also waiting to be
written.
According to Kohut’s conception, the function of the analyst is to
revise the deficient text that the analysand personifies.39 Empathi-
cally enacting the role of the parental self-object, the therapist re-
aligns the patients’ self-representations, exerting an influence that
moderates and channels grandiosity.40 A process of “transmuting in-
ternalization” is enabled by this intervention: the draft of the self is
ultimately “reformed,” and the individual is successfully integrated
(like Crusoe) and adapted to society. In his honoring of a self “re-
stored,” Kohut regressively rejects the fantastic form of subjectivity
in order to reinstate the bourgeois (and realist) myth of autonomy.
Attempting to enrich the patient’s “impoverished personality,” the
Kohutian therapist transforms the narcissistic individual into a re-
sourceful psychological entrepreneur, a “rational investor” who aug-
ments the value of its commodified self by cannily converting psy-
chic “debits” into “assets.”41 In the happy ending of Kohut’s realistic
narrative, the individualistic self is made adequate, through the ther-
apist’s purchased intervention, to its aspiring project of mastery and
self-creation. In this way, psychic and social organization are imag-
ined in the materialist spirit of capitalist individualism that Defoe
inaugurated in the novel.
In his nostalgic self-psychology, Kohut’s intention is to return nor-
mativity to the increasingly dispersed and hollowed subject of late
modernism, reconciling that subject’s desires and needs to the re-
quirements of a social world that eludes and overwhelms it. A lim-
inal figure, Kohut has been shaped by a Romantic epistemological
tradition that he rejects for a realism that cannot be disentangled
from its fantastic roots. In the realistic narrative that he scripts, Kohut
is the knowing subject who distances himself from a narcissistic
other who is the fantastic actor of discontinuous roles. His goal is to
integrate the multiple identities of the analysand in order to create
a coherent personality from the fragments of that ruptured, psychic

text. What is lost, imperceptibly, is that individual’s psychic depth.
As Kohut simplifies the Freudian narrative of interior conflict and
unfulfillable desire, he transforms the complex, eccentric, and irra-
tional subject of psychoanalysis into a two-dimensional character
with psychic wounds that he, the analyst, can recognize and heal,
and with an always available consciousness that can be manipulated
at will.42 But a fantastic effect ironically emerges from the strategy:
the object of Kohut’s rational exploration seems to become a projec-
tion of his own divided self, while his larger enterprise appears as a
defense against the psychic alienation that he fears. By deploying the
analysand as his alter ego, Kohut unwittingly reveals the Romantic
aspect of his practice and his theory.43
Giving primacy to social accommodation, Kohut repeats a gesture
that Defoe made in Robinson Crusoe. That repetition is provocative as
well as disconcerting. Provocative because it establishes lines of con-
tinuity among ideological assumptions, structures of consciousness,
and narrative forms across two hundred years; disconcerting be-
cause in abandoning the fantastic vision that lies at the heart of the
psychoanalytic project, Kohut unwittingly reveals how profound
and persistent the desire is to evade individualism’s painful contra-
dictions. Reading Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, we see
how those contradictions shaped the novel’s bimodal form, and how
the modal dynamic provides unique access to the ideological and
psychological struggles of the modern subject. Considering Kohut’s
self-psychology, we can also see how psychoanalytic theory—which
shares the bimodality of the novel—attempts to bring the conflicts
of the modern subject into consciousness while laboring, at the same
time, to evade them.44 In succeeding chapters, I will examine the
representations of these contradictions in the evolving English novel
and in psychoanalytic theory—particularly as they relate to the im-
position of and the resistance to gender identities.
2
Clarissa and the
Pornographic Imagination
Ian Watt placed Pamela and Clarissa at the center of the dominant
tradition of formal realism, but his defining category fractured and
dissolved beneath his own reading of the second of these texts. In
Pamela, Watt identified a social narrative shaped by middle-class con-
sciousness and the ideology of individualism. He tried to fit Clarissa
into a similar realistic mold, but his theory could not accommodate
the fantastic elements that his analysis exposed.1 Critics who suc-
ceeded Watt did not explore the anomalies that The Rise of the Novel
inadvertently laid bare. Instead of considering what the differences
between the novels might imply for narrative theory, they focused
on one or the other of these two seminal fictions. So Michael McKeon
and Nancy Armstrong, the most influential of Watt’s revisionists,
made Richardson unproblematically pivotal in their accounts of re-
alism by centering Pamela while omitting Clarissa altogether. Alter-
nately, the poststructuralist critics who produced the most extensive
studies of Clarissa disconnected the exhausting narrative from affil-
iated texts in order to explore it, exhaustively, alone.2 They success-
fully suggested its contemporary relevance but did not consider its
influence on the development of novelistic form.
A critical consensus has emerged about Pamela, which supports
and extends the analysis that Watt provided. It recognizes Richard-
son’s first novel as an ideological tour de force in which shifting
definitions of class are negotiated through the relations of an increas-
ingly inflexible and binarized sex-gender system. When Mr. B., a
libertine member of the gentry, fails in his tireless efforts to seduce
the servant girl who resists his advances, he is forced to recognize
the power of her “virtue”: the sign of a mystified and sublimated
sexuality. Their marriage proves her moral superiority, as it does the
responsiveness of the middle classes to social domestication and re-
form. Readers since Fielding have ironically observed that Pamela
57
58 Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination
(and her author) understood that she could acquire more money and
status from her virtue than she ever could have from her body, and
that for her—as for her suitor and her readers—desire resisted is
desire intensified. In this view, it is by playing the good girl so ef-
fectively that Pamela gets the bad girl’s pleasure, while avoiding the
stigma of her reputation. Mr. B. can be seen to profit equally from
the game. Although his marriage to Pamela signals the gentry’s ac-
cession to a bourgeois respectability that has been feminized, his
assiduous efforts at seduction suggest that the masculine libido is too
powerful to be morally confined. Whether it is read as naively or
ironically realistic, therefore, the narrative indicates that the sexual
and moral division of labor might satisfy the needs of women as
well as men, but it is ultimately masculine self-interest that shapes
the institutional forms through which female desire is allowed ex-
pression.3
Acknowledged as the founding fiction of domestic realism, Pamela
is generally understood to rationalize conformity to social regulation
by naturalizing gender conventions. Once universalized, female vir-
tue is deployed to disguise socioeconomic instability as class con-
solidation. The battle of the sexes, which is rooted in the categorical
differences of the new sex-gender system, achieves its comic reso-
lution in marriage, where gender antagonism is celebrated as com-
plementarity. Since female desire is merged with virtue, and the
body is disciplined by the socially instructed mind, the text does not
distinguish between the moral and psychological aspects of Pamela’s
character. Alternate realities, which would interrogate the dominant
fiction that Pamela propounds, are excluded from the novel’s con-
sciousness; and a clarity of perspective is achieved, which the writer,
reader, and protagonist are all assumed to share. This is typical of
predominantly realistic texts and it enables, in turn, the dominant
critical construction.
Such a construction is not possible with Clarissa, an epistolary
novel of a more fully bimodal sort. While the reality of Pamela is
shaped solely by the letters of its protagonist, the contesting realities
of Clarissa emerge from the epistles of four central and several sub-
sidiary characters. The first reader to find the text exceeding the
boundaries of his own interpretation was Richardson, who revised
it several times as he tried to control the promiscuous responses of
Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination 59
his audience.4 For contemporary readers, the fiction has proven

equally elusive. Watt fell into contradiction as he attempted to reduce
its several narratives to a single form, while more recent critics have
been attracted to it because of its multiplicity. Interested in problems
of textuality and the politics of reading, they have exploited its am-
biguities in order to make it an ally in our own critical and sexual
wars.5
I want neither to establish an opposition between Pamela and Clar-
issa—assigning the latter to a second monologic tradition—nor to
emphasize Clarissa’s idiosyncratic nature. Instead, I will examine
Richardson’s second novel in the context of its competing narrative
modes, insisting that this kind of contestation was actually central
to the development of the novel. Further, I will argue that Clarissa is
a product of an emergent pornographic imagination, which Rich-
ardson, in both senses, represented. Although the pornographic
imagination reflected a sensibility that was already visible in liber-
tine literature of the seventeenth century, it was fundamentally struc-
tured by the ideology of capitalist individualism as it interacted with
the modern sex-gender system. Produced at the intersection of public
and private experience, collective practices and personal fantasies,
shared beliefs and eccentric desires, it coalesced in the eighteenth
century into a structure of feeling that had a specifically psycho-
sexual reference. In its more extreme manifestations—which have
evolved and persisted into our own time—it can be described as
cultural psychosis.6
As Clarissa suggests, in realistic fictions (or in the realist strands
of composite texts), the pornographic imagination eroticizes gender
difference and the power relations by which that difference is organ-
ized and reproduced. These narratives are dominated by the per-
spective of a male character, for whom autonomy is a mainstay of
identity and dependence a form of psychic death. The impulses of
individualism block his recognition of others as self-conscious and
self-determining agents, although he needs those others to recognize
these same qualities in him. He struggles to maintain hierarchical
structures of difference (which create the illusion of his own psychic
wholeness) despite the fact that his illusion of psychic wholeness
is threatened by those whose difference from him he accentuates. For
this male protagonist, relationships involve manipulation and
exploitation instead of mutuality. The wish to control slips easily into

the desire to harm, and humiliation is the primary source of sexual
pleasure. Through the protagonist’s appropriation of the female
body, the presumptively male reader is invited to bond with the
explicitly male writer, reinforcing stereotypical gender identifica-
tions outside of, as within, the text.7
In fantastic narratives, the pornographic imagination exposes the
psychic roots of toxic masculinity in the primal need for both indi-
viduation and connection. These narratives suggest how threats to
male mastery and psychic wholeness evoke a condition before dif-
ferentiation, which men identify retrospectively with the feminine
and maternal. Because the conscious and socially supported urge for
differentiation remains linked to the disavowed, but still powerful,
wish for mergence, men’s desire for heterosexual connection is fused
to defensive forms of misogynistic hatred. Pornographic fantasies
uncover the primal, psychic past that underlies the cultural present,
and they expose the infantile experience that hovers at the outer edge
of memory. For both the writer and the reader, these fantasies de-
molish conventional categories of gender to the extent that they re-
veal ungendered bodies, which are solipsistic and indeterminate in
their desire. For those regressive bodies, the urge to power is, at
times, submerged in the forbidden pleasures of impotence.8
A complex bimodal fiction that takes psychosexuality as its sub-
ject, Clarissa provides a field on which a range of psychic and social
impulses can be played out. Its interactive narratives chart the pro-
cesses through which desire is shaped by cultural requirements that
it also actively resists. Eradicating gender differences while affirming
them as ineradicable, Richardson’s novel reveals at once the subver-
sive and conservative implications of the pornographic imagination.
In its realist components, it invites presumptive male readers to em-
brace a normative and sadistic heterosexual masculinity even as it
represents the ways in which heterosexual relations fail tragically in
a patriarchal and capitalist order that transforms sexual difference
into an unbridgeable chasm. Where realism yields to the fantastic,
that tragedy is tempered by an alternate form of knowledge that
precedes the imposition of the sex-gender system in its primal psy-
chic character. Because Richardson’s fantastic pornographic narra-
tive facilitates cross-gender identifications for the writer and his
readers, it provides access to the ungendered, as well as the gen-

dered, nature of the self.
Clarissa divides itself into three quite separate narrative moments.

The mode of realism dominates the first, which focuses—through
Clarissa’s and Anna Howe’s correspondence—on the conflict within
the Harlowe family. It ends with the elopement of Clarissa and Love-
lace. The fantastic mode is primary in the long middle section, which
examines the conflictual psychological dynamic between Lovelace
and Clarissa through the former’s correspondence with Belford and
the latter’s with Anna. Finally, after the rape, the fiction reaches for
the sublime—an aspiration enacted in both realistic and fantastic
modes. In this last segment, Lovelace functions in increasing isola-
tion while Clarissa’s audience is expanded. Clarissa dominates the
first and final portions of the novel, while Lovelace shapes and mo-
tivates the crucial middle section. The complexity of the text derives
from the psychological elaboration of narrative modes and genres
rather than from its plot, which is exceedingly straightforward and,
for its time, familiar. Clarissa Harlowe, the daughter of a wealthy
and aspiring middle-class family, is courted by Lovelace, an aristo-
cratic libertine. Her parents oppose the match on her brother’s behalf
and try to marry her to Solmes, a man whom she detests. Driven by
her family to despair, Clarissa is tricked by Lovelace into an elope-
ment that places her completely in his power. His goal is seduction,
and he is willing to marry her only if she succeeds in resisting his
machinations. In order to accomplish his purpose, he brings her to
a house of prostitution where he finally rapes her with the help of
the brothel-keeper, Mrs. Sinclair. “Ruined” but uncompromised,
Clarissa ultimately dies a spiritually satisfying death and Lovelace
is murdered in a duel instigated by Clarissa’s cousin.
In his initial depiction of Clarissa’s family, Richardson established
a realistic frame for the fantastic psychosocial portrait that he ulti-
mately, in minute detail, creates.9 Having already amassed substan-
tial wealth through prudent marriages and investments, the Har-
lowes are described as seeking to “raise a family”: not only to extend
and to augment their holdings, but also to gain status and political
power through the peerage to which James, their only son, aspires.
Clarissa stands as their most valuable asset and the most serious
obstacle to their success. A good daughter and a paragon of female
virtue, she accepts the dominant social fiction along with the role
that she has been assigned, but it is her strict adherence to its values
that brings to the surface the radical contradictions that the bour-
geois ideology conceals. Having inherited her grandfather’s estate,
she demonstrates her own capacity for moral choice when she gives
her father control of her inheritance, subordinating her own spiritual
autonomy to his materialism. But while her character, like her
beauty, is valued as a commodity, her ultimate refusal to be objec-
tified unmasks the sexual and economic motives that have worked
to perfect and sustain her “virtue.”
As Richardson portrays them, the Harlowes represent the insatia-
ble bourgeois family that would absorb all assimilable others into
itself. They assert the crude materialism of the middle classes against
the culture of the aristocracy, and they maintain male privilege
against the rights of women. They all bathe in the glow of accom-
plishments that identify their daughter with an older, more benefi-
cent order, which they want simultaneously to reject and to incor-
porate as their own. When Clarissa claims those accomplishments
for herself, insisting upon her right to choose a husband, she leaves
them exposed in their profound vulgarity. When she scornfully re-
jects the bourgeois Solmes and aligns herself with Lovelace, her ac-
tions radically threaten her family’s class and sexual hegemony.
Lovelace already distinguishes her from the other Harlowes, and if
he were to marry her, he would claim her decisively for the upper
classes. Since the family estate would then be settled on her (titled
as she would probably be), her position in the class struggle is con-
ceptualized as pivotal.
At the same time that Richardson details the socioeconomic mo-
tives of property marriage, he also reveals the sexual dimension of
the bartering of women. Placed at the center of the transaction, Clar-
issa is both object of exchange and object of desire. “Winning” her
signals entrepreneurial success in a business affair among men: it
marks material power and provides symbolic proof of masculinity.
Within the family, the question is who has the right of ownership
and who is entitled, therefore, to the erotic pleasures of the sale. The
fiction of the father’s power is belied by the controlling interest of
the son. The law, which makes the father a life-tenant on his heir’s
estate, inserts the son clandestinely in the paternal place. It is with

impunity that James treats his father “as a superior would do,”10 since
his father is merely an agent of James’s efforts to gain a peerage
through the consolidation of the corporate estate. Daughters are
mere “encumbrances” in this project: “chickens brought up for the
tables of other men” (77). James tyrannizes his mother, as if he were
her husband, and plots, “lover-like,” with Arabella against their sis-
ter, placing himself at the apex of the erotic triangle of the sibling
relation. Thinking it “proof of a manly spirit to be an utter stranger
to the gentler passions” (139), James indulges his violent temper as
an entitlement of patriarchal power, socioeconomic status, and sex-
ual virility. But none of those entitlements are secure against the
mocking presence of Lovelace, the “vile wretch” who tells James that
Clarissa is his, “and shall be his, and he will be the death of any man
who robs him of his property” (223). The privileges that James greed-
ily struggles to obtain belong by birth to Lovelace, who assumes
them gracefully. Refusing to recognize the crude upstart as his
equal—barely recognizing James at all—Lovelace has “taught him
to put his sword into his scabbard” (212), arousing sexual anxiety
along with class resentment. If he “loses” Clarissa to Lovelace, James
is vanquished in both the class and sexual wars. Once his social
ambitions are defeated, the sexual power of his misogynistic sadism
would also lose its force.
For these reasons, Solmes represents for the Harlowes an ideal
solution to the problems posed by the upwardly mobile and resistant
virgin. It is not only that he is willing to rob his own family in order
to purchase Clarissa from hers; it is also that, bonded with the Har-
lowes, he enables them to participate in the sadistic sexualized cru-
elty of his pursuit. The Harlowes are untroubled by the fact that
Clarissa is repelled by “the odious Solmes,” who “squates” in his
chair “with his ugly weight,” pressing on her hoop, “with so much
assurance in his looks” (87). Wishing her to be “humble and morti-
fied,” they berate her for resisting her disgusting suitor even as they
spy with pleasure on the painful meetings of the two. The Harlowe
males share Solmes’s view that “[t]error and fear . . . looked pretty
in a bride as well as in a wife,” and “if love and fear must be separated
in matrimony, the man who made himself feared fared best” (238).
The insistence of Clarissa’s oafish suitor makes her prey to the wrath
of her family. They eavesdrop on her conversations, read her letters,
peek at her through keyholes, and claim the right to ransack her
belongings, her clothing, and, as much as it is possible, her self. Con-
structed as an object of the sadistic misogyny through which the
pornographic imagination is articulated, Clarissa becomes a sacrifi-
cial victim. She is used to solidify the male, middle-class community,
and to protect the complicitous female members of the group (her
mother, her sister, her aunts, and her cousins) from being sacrificed
themselves.
From the beginning of the novel, Clarissa seeks nostalgically for
an alternative to the patriarchal family, by which she is manipulated
and disrespected. Christianity provides her the perspective she
needs to deny and even to transcend it. “[T]he world is but one great
family,” she insists, “originally it was so; what then is this narrow
selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remembered against
relationship forgot?” (62). It is a view that disadvantages her in a
world that is organized by social exclusions, where “one half of man-
kind torment[s] the other, and [is] tormented themselves in tor-
menting” (224).
Because Anna Howe has a more peripheral relation to the patri-
archal family than Clarissa, she can read its dominant fictions with
more ironic distance. Living in a matriarchal household since her
father’s death, she is, as she observes to Clarissa, “fitter for this world
than you, you for the next than me” (69). Her mother is not like Mrs.
Harlowe, who “sacrificed” the “inward satisfaction . . . of a gentle
and sensible mind” in order to maintain an “outward peace” with
her husband and her son (54). Having quarreled her own husband
into his grave, Mrs. Howe enjoys the independence of her widow-
hood, and the close if not always peaceful relationship it allows her
with her daughter. Still, while Anna’s situation permits her a
woman-centered view of sexual relations, she is not immune to the
social virus of patriarchal sexuality, which she examines with so cool
a gaze. Much too sensible to have accepted James Harlowe as a
suitor, Anna was not sensible enough to have rejected another lover,
Sir George Colmer, who—according to Lovelace—was very like
himself. Indeed, had it not been for Clarissa’s interventions, Anna
“would have followed him in all his broken fortunes, when he was
obliged to quit the kingdom” because of his transgressions (635).
Portrayed as more experienced and as less a proper lady than
Clarissa, Anna reveals a sexual ambivalence toward men that, while
grounded in the inevitable conflict between desire and reason, is

stamped specifically by the gender definitions and sexual proscrip-
tions of her time. She is extremely scornful of Hickman, her current
suitor. She finds him “bearable” because “he is humble and knows
his distance” (68), but she also experiences him as profoundly un-
attractive. Refusing to be objectified herself, Anna wittily feminizes
and objectifies him as a “fiddling” and “un-busy” man, “irresolute
and changeable in everything,” with too much “bustle in his man-
ners” and without any “manliness in his aspect” (208). In a comic
inversion of the clandestine, incestuous pattern that typifies relations
within the Harlowe family, Anna repeatedly proclaims that Hickman
would be a more appropriate suitor for her mother, “for what he
wants in years, he makes up in gravity” (70). But ebullient as she is
in her intelligent mockery of his “whining, creeping, submissive
courtship” (466), her deep resistance to her suitor reveals the dark
side of her conceptualization of the battle of the sexes. Her general
view is Hobbesian. “If I do not make [Hickman] quake now and then,
he will endeavor to make me fear,” she writes. “All the animals in
the creation are more or less in a state of hostility with each other”
(487). And while, in her worldview, all may be at the throats of all,
she knows that society validates the power of men, and gives to
women only the days of courtship, “our best days,” in which they
can briefly play at domination (274). After that, they are the helpless
victims of men’s abusive power: “To be cajoled, wire-drawn and en-
snared, like silly birds, into a state of bondage or vile subordination:
to be courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as
slaves for the rest of our lives—Indeed, my dear, as you say of Sol-
mes, I cannot endure them!” (133). Even her sober suitor is likely to
change once he is certain of her, she half believes, and “the ‘imper-
ative husband’ will come upon him while the obsequious lover will
go off” (277). She likes to imagine that the equality of female friend-
ship can provide an alternative to the power imbalances of hetero-
sexual marriage, and she occasionally suggests that she and Clarissa
would do well to run off together “and despise them all!” (133). But
the fact is that she does not want “passion without passion” (466).
She understands that “fear makes us more gentle obligers than love”
(213), and that she is, despite herself, drawn powerfully to the Love-
lacean man, as she is drawn, in fantasy, to erotic domination. Even
after she learns that Lovelace has actually raped Clarissa, she
continues to find Hickman “too meek” for her taste and, on the brink
of marriage to him, acknowledges that she would have preferred
him as a brother rather than have had him as a lover (1456).
The fluctuations that mark Anna’s analyses of her own desire re-
flect the pervasive eroticization not only of gender difference but also
of the power relations by which that difference is organized and
reproduced. Seeking to affirm herself as an active sexual subject in
a society that defines her as legally dependent and naive, Anna nec-
essarily participates in the dominant social fictions that she also ex-
plicitly, even virulently, rejects. With a kind of outrage, she inquires
of Clarissa: “[I]s it to be expected that I, who could hardly bear con-
trol from a mother, should take it from a husband?—from one too
who has neither more wit, nor more understanding, than myself?”
(1312). But “control” turns out to have deep psychological as well as
significant social meanings. At times, Anna reproduces her mother’s
former marital situation, bullying a man whom she considers to be
inadequately masculine and whom she then emasculates through
her own attempts at domination. Doing this, she asserts her sexual
agency by paradoxically denying her desire. The alternative is to
accept control by a man whom she perceives as her superior, taking
pleasure in being mastered and submitting. Lovelace understands
her quandary since he represents its obverse side. Believing the
“male-virgin,” Hickman, to be disadvantaged because “women like
not novices” (812), he confesses that he has imagined Anna to be in
love with him because “your sprightly ladies love your smart fel-
lows, and your rakes” (801). Although Richardson does not allow
Anna to enact her ambivalent and masochistically tinged desire, in
making her fantasies complementary to those of Lovelace he points
to the pattern of heterosexual relations with which the pornographic
imagination is most commonly identified. It is not the pattern that
he finally chooses to center. In Clarissa, he does not provide a mas-
ochist for Lovelace’s sadist, but creates a narcissist instead. Consid-
ered together, Clarissa and Anna suggest that female narcissism and
masochism are both shaped by the modern sex-gender system, and
are offered to women (in the way that Richardson offers them) as
alternatives between which they have to choose.11
From the beginning of the novel, and until her turn toward death,
Clarissa is not able—like Anna—to articulate the nature of her own
desire. Constructed as a paragon of virtue, she serves as an exemplar
for others of her class and sex. Guided by the motto “Rather useful
than glaring” (40), she has defined herself through the services she
performs for her doting grandfather, her proud, possessive parents,
her admiring neighbors, and the recipients of her prudent charity—
to whom she refers as “my deserving poor.” Worthy to mediate be-
tween the crass materialism of her family and the more refined val-
ues of the upper classes, she is a “matchless young creature” (53),
whose excellence marks her indelibly for sacrifice. Having assumed
physical independence to be a function of spiritual autonomy, and
having believed that virtue cannot help but be rewarded, Clarissa
discovers the fictive nature of the reality she has lived when she
claims the right to control the disposition of her body. At that point,
she understands that others can, with impunity, enslave her: im-
prison her in increasingly restrictive spaces, allow her neither to
speak nor to be heard, deprive her of her privacy, and cause her
“never [to be] at liberty to follow [her] own judgment” (37). Male
protection is revealed to be the pleasant face of unopposable privi-
lege, and when the Harlowe household keys are taken from her, she
finds that the role of surrogate mother is a symbolic one that she has
only, through their sufferance, been allowed to play. Wishing to send
her as his housekeeper to Scotland, her brother can readily transform
her willing service to unwilling servitude, just as the inherited prop-
erty that she has gifted to her father is lost to her forever if she does
not gain the intercession of a sympathetic male trustee.
What is true of her familial situation proves to be true as well of
her situation with Lovelace. Once she aligns herself with him, and
until he extends to her the protection of a husband, she is socially
and personally exposed—subject completely to his cruelest whim.
No longer an exemplar, she is without social identity. Without a so-
cial identity, she is solely dependent on a belief in spiritual autonomy
that sharply conflicts with her material condition. The ambiguity that
surrounds her flight (“driven on one side and possibly tricked on
the other” [405], according to Anna) reveals the absence of a strategy
that would allow her any measure of independence. Denied viable
alternatives, she is denied also the possibility of a moral decision. It
is not simply propriety, therefore, that keeps her from knowing
whether her “affections are engaged” and whether her cheeks
“glow” and her heart “throbs” in Lovelace’s presence. While she ac-
knowledges that “there be not, if he be out of the question, another
man in the world, I can think favorably of” (201), she is justifiably
aware of the fact that given the pervasiveness of misogyny, she might
not think favorably of any man. And while Anna can afford to the-
orize the erotic power of domination, Clarissa has had imposed upon
her an understanding of its profound social and personal conse-
quences. She asks, quite early in the novel, “[W]hat will not these
men say to obtain belief and a power over one?” (171), and her ex-
perience provides the answer to her question: they will say—and
do—anything she can imagine and a good deal more besides.
As Richardson constructs her situation, Clarissa is placed in a
series of double binds. These reflect the contradictory nature of social
fictions that require obedience to the father and fidelity to the self,
and that call on propriety to constrain her while pronouncing her
free to pursue the “dictates of her heart.” The responses available to
her all require a passively resistant stance. She has a minimal “power
of the negative” that she can exercise against her family, against
Lovelace, and, in a sense, against Richardson himself. This is finally
how she uses the “great and invincible spirit” (593) on which she
believes she must rely if she is to protect herself against the incur-
sions of others and assure herself of her own effective subjectivity.
Identifying seeming with being, Clarissa clings inevitably to a realist
fiction of the self (of her self) as unitary, closed, and self-dependent.
Believed to be reflected without mediation in its actions, that self is
emptied of mystery, complexity, or desire—and it is the only self
that she feels genuinely able to possess. The strength of her convic-
tion about the verisimilitude of the narcissistic posture that she de-
fensively assumes is suggested by the question she puts to Anna,
when she is urged to be more forthcoming with her suitor: “And
what mean you, my dear friend, when you say that I must throw off
a little more of the veil?—Indeed I never knew that I wore one” (433).
While she is adept at tracking down signs of inconsistency and self-
deception in others, Clarissa cannot risk discarding, or even exam-
ining, the protective disguise in which the social masquerade has
wrapped her. It is her obsession with what she calls “punctilio” that
makes her decline the three proposals of marriage that Lovelace
makes (only one of them deceptively), fatally reinforcing his con-
struction of her as unassailable and strengthening his resolve to
“penetrate” her hidden self.12 It is this unassailability that makes her
interpretable by the reader in a range of extreme, even parodic
forms—as sacrificial victim (Castle), as metaphysical spirit (Watt), as

mythic figure (Van Ghent), as ideological agent (Eagleton), or as nar-
cissistic bitch (Warner)—but seldom, as Richardson discovered to his
dismay, as a complex and fully realized subjectivity.
Lovelace is quite another matter. The obverse side of Clarissa, who
supports the values by which she is tormented, Lovelace wants to
unmask social hypocrisy while accepting the male privilege that the
dominant ideology bestows upon him. To the extent that he is con-
ceptualized through the discourse of realism, Lovelace is credible as
the only son and single heir of a “considerable family.” As Anna
describes him: “From his cradle . . . as an only child, and a boy, hu-
moursome, spoiled, mischievous: the governor of his governors. A
Libertine in his riper years, hardly regardful of appearances; and
despising the sex in general for the fault of particulars of it who made
themselves too cheap to him” (498). The grandiose form of Lovelace’s
individualism is appropriate to his situation as a propertied and sta-
tused male. Financially independent, he need not, like James, aspire
to the “building” of a family. On the contrary, his dominant fantasy
(like Crusoe’s) is to consolidate all past and future possessions in
himself, neither marrying nor bearing children. Already orphaned,
he has only to wait for his other, more distant relatives to die, which
he does with remarkable complacency. Represented as resisting
bourgeoisification at every level, he clings to a libertine ideology of
subversive “freedom” that allows him to believe himself the subject
who subjects others to his will. His relentless if ambivalent pursuit
of Clarissa is stamped, as are all his interactions, by an appropriative
spirit of competition to which he applies his not inconsiderable in-
tellectual powers. Lovelace claims that his aspirations as seducer are
grounded in the betrayal of “that quality-jilt, whose infidelity I have
vowed to revenge upon as many of the sex as shall come into my
power” (143). He adds to the sexual motive a wish for class revenge:
“Then what a triumph it would be to the Harlowe pride, were I now
to marry this lady?—A family beneath my own!—no one in it wor-
thy of an alliance with but her! . . . Forbid it the blood of the Love-
laces, that your last, and let me say, not the meanest of your stock,
should thus creep, thus fawn, thus lick the dust, for a Wife” (426).
And, finally, his situation as “leader” of the dissolute young men he
calls his friends depends upon the security of his reputation for a
“manliness” evidenced by his limitless “success” with women.
Although Lovelace is presented effectively in realistic terms, un-

like Clarissa, he is not conceptualized in that mode primarily.13 So,
while Clarissa is trapped in social definitions and is unable,
therefore, to speak her own desire, the articulation of desire is Love-
lace’s obsession. While Clarissa has identified herself with the ex-
tended family, particularly with women, Lovelace has competitively
distinguished himself from all of his relations, particularly from
men. While Clarissa yearns nostalgically for the reestablishment of
community, Lovelace is motivated by his megalomania. While Clar-
issa strives to represent her self as unitary—a single point of interior
and exterior convergence—Lovelace projects himself as multiple,
fragmented, and inconsistent. And while Clarissa’s efforts of self-
preservation appear as narcissism, Lovelace’s performances of him-
self proclaim his radical dispersal.
Consistent and coherent, Clarissa’s narrative contends with, strug-
gles against, and is increasingly appropriated by the audacity of
Lovelace’s desiring discourse. The narrative dynamic, which repre-
sents the personal incompatibility of the two characters, reveals the
radical disjunctions of the larger field of gender difference. Formally
and substantively, it suggests the impossibility of mutuality between
men and women who, having first been formed by the civilizing
process as self-dependent and enclosed, are then constructed by the
culture as so radically different that they are alien to one another.
Through the mutual interrogation of its modal forms, Clarissa tracks
the increasing separation of male from female and explores the con-
ditions that maintain and deepen that divide. Finally, through the
fantastic mode, which is dominant from the moment of Clarissa’s
elopement through her rape, efforts made to cross that profound
separation are shown to be emotionally deforming at best and, in
the worst case, psychically murderous as well as suicidal.
Quite early in the novel, Anna wisely asserts that “[t]he suiting
of the tempers of two persons who are to come together is a great
matter: and yet there should be boundaries fixed between them, by
consent as it were, beyond which neither should go: and each should
hold the other to it; or there would probably be encroachment in
both” (277). For her, the problem of establishing mutuality (the “suit-
ing of tempers” without the inevitability of “encroachment”) is po-
tentially solved by a consensual creation of limits, which mark each
person’s separateness and defend the integrity of each against the
invasive impulses of the other. Considered within the discourse of

realism, hers appears to be a rational solution. When considered
from the perspective of the fantastic, however, this drawing of
boundaries reveals itself as one-half of a strategy that complicates
mutuality by binding the need for separation to the needs for con-
nection and recognition. At one level, Clarissa’s wish to guarantee
autonomy by delimiting self and other can be seen as the other side
of Lovelace’s desire to submerge the other in the infinite depths of
the self. At another level, both impulses prove to be inseparable from
the equally profound and apparently contradictory need of Lovelace
and Clarissa to achieve recognition from the other: a need that, in
this text, destroys the boundaries on which autonomy relies.14
Dependent upon Lovelace for her social status after she has fled
her family’s house, Clarissa’s project is to mark off her psychic space
while not foreclosing the possibility of connection. In response to
each of Lovelace’s “encroachments,” she further retracts that bound-
ary, as she engages in a continuous process of withdrawal. Lovelace,
on the other hand, projects himself across the barrier she has con-
structed and seeks to claim her for a world of his own linguistic and
imaginative creation. On both sides, the frustrating process is fraught
with contradiction, for while each struggles for ascendancy—Love-
lace by proliferating interpretations and Clarissa by withholding
them—each also requires from the other acknowledgment of his or
her own subjectivity. “We are both great watchers of each other’s
eyes; and indeed seem to be more than half afraid of each other”
(460), Clarissa writes, suggesting the nature of their effort to know
and to be known: to grasp one another’s substance while fearing the
knowledge that comes from such discovery. Afraid of his power,
what Clarissa ultimately wants from Lovelace is confirmation of her
social identity. She does not wish to lose herself in his (or in her own)
desire or to become what he would clearly make of her: “a cipher,
to give him significance and myself pain” (567). When she resists
desire, however, she incites his rage. Once his rage is aroused, he
cannot recognize, let alone respect, the boundaries that she has con-
structed for her own protection. As soon as his stratagems threaten
her with erasure, subjugation, and even violent appropriation, Clar-
issa resists, withdraws, and, out of moral outrage, refuses to recog-
nize him at all. Indifferent to his desire, she appears to be enigmatic
and frighteningly inaccessible. Deprived of her resistance (which is
itself a form of recognition), Lovelace’s attempts at subjugation are

also deprived of meaning. His sense of himself—both grandiose and
fragile—is completely undermined.
While this psychic dynamic can appear as a universal existential
phenomenon—as explored by Hegel and Sartre, for example, as well
as by some psychoanalytic theorists—the novel suggests how indi-
vidual struggles for autonomy and connection can yield relations of
erotic domination that are gender-coded and culturally specific. In
this relational configuration, as we have seen, male sadism demands
female masochism as a response, but often produces narcissism as
an effect.15 The fantastic narrative problematizes the nature of those
roles, particularly the role of sadist, which it centers. It maps the
ways in which the positions are constructed and reveals the costs by
which they are maintained. In the process, the fixity of the gendered
terms is itself interrogated, and the sexual indeterminacy that un-
derlies them is brought fleetingly into focus.
The realistic narrative of the novel establishes the complementary
ways in which male and female identifications are constituted in
response to cultural expectations and demands.16 For Clarissa, no
female model of autonomy exists. Her deepest tie is to her mother,
whom she continues to “love and reverence” until her death, and
whose idealized image she seeks in a range of mother surrogates
from whom she futilely asks help throughout the fiction. Although
she perceives the extent to which her mother has sacrificed first her-
self and then her daughter in order to purchase peace with her dom-
ineering husband and bullying son, Clarissa defines herself similarly
through sacrifice in order to be worthy of the idealized feminine role
she has internalized. Even with Lovelace, her initial hope is that she
will be able to mediate his salvation by helping to effect his refor-
mation; and when she recognizes that she cannot serve that function,
she is unable to conceptualize another. Seeing her as “[s]omething
more than a woman, an angel, in some things, but a baby in others:
So father-sick! so family-proud” (521), Lovelace fears that she can
love none but her parents, and his fear is not misplaced. Her mother’s
love and father’s approval are the objects of her deepest longing until
she turns at last to God, their final representative.
Lovelace acknowledges that he was brought up by a doting
mother “to bear no control” (1431) and he seems to wish to repro-
duce that idealized relationship—with himself the recipient of an
infinite, unconditional love—at the same time that he needs to dis-

tance himself from that love’s potentially overwhelming source. He
looks to Clarissa to confirm the boundarylessness of a self that he
needs her also to delimit. Omnipotent, he is alone; vulnerable and
dependent, he can be destroyed. Believing that “if there was but the
shadow of a doubt in [Clarissa’s] mind whether she preferred me to
any man living, I would show her no mercy” (387), Lovelace expe-
riences his pride as “mortified” by the possibility that Clarissa would
be “governed in her behavior . . . by generosity merely, or by blind
duty” (669). On one hand, he wants to worship at the feet of his
“divinity,” his “angel,” his “exalted creature”; on the other, he is a
pure misogynist who questions whether there is “a soul in a sex,
created . . . only for temporary purposes” (1037). His ambivalence
yields rage, which he must inflict on others or turn back against
himself.17 Lovelace’s recollections of his boyhood suggest the extent
to which he claimed his maleness, from his early years, through a
sadistic form of self-expression that defined those external to him as
objects of his mastery. “When a boy, if a dog ran away from me
through fear, I generally looked about for a stone, a stick, or a brick-
bat,” he writes to Belford, “and if neither offered to my hand, I
skimmed my hat after him to make him afraid for something. What
signifies power, if we do not exert it?” (610). Because he believes that
one can be certain of one’s power only by seeing the effect it has in
causing pain, he finds it reasonable that “We begin with birds as
boys, and as men go on to ladies; and both perhaps, in turns, expe-
rience our sportive cruelty” (557). Perceiving no difference between
the careless torture of animals and the plotted victimization of
women—except for the challenge that is represented by each (“it is
more manly to attack a lion than a sheep” [610])—he acknowledges
that “Whatever our hearts are in, our heads will follow. Begin with
spiders, with flies, and what we will, the girl is the center of gravity,
and we all naturally tend to it” (419).
The girl does indeed prove to be the center of gravity for him—
and for reasons that concern “the heart” although, as the novel re-
veals, the heart has different secrets, which are probed by different
narrative forms. When those secrets are explored in the realistic
mode, they tell of heterosexual love and marriage in which differ-
ences are naturalized and social norms are reproduced—at times,
catastrophically. In the fantastic mode, the psychic meanings of
socialized “love” are interrogated, and its connection to heterosex-

uality is made problematic. Instead of examining the subject’s con-
nection to another, the fantastic exposes the mystery of desire and
the self’s complexly shadowed relation to itself. While Lovelace is
obsessed, at one level, with Clarissa—with the question of what
she wants and who, as a woman, she really is—at another level,
his concern is with the secret of sexual difference, which Clarissa,
in her impenetrability, seems to represent. Neither telling the story
of her own desire nor responding to his, she acts for him as a mir-
ror in which to rehearse his bafflement: a bafflement shaped at a
specific historical moment and rooted in the personal histories of
men.
At the level of realism, Lovelace assumes as natural the opposi-
tional gender structure that marked women in Richardson’s society
as radically different from men and as anomalous in their own sexual
nature. As female desire was split off from biological function, re-
spectable women were defined by their maternity while sexual pas-
sion was interpreted as aberrant, a disjunction reflected in men’s
attitudes toward women as well as in women’s experience of them-
selves.18 Those women who were capable of eliciting feelings of
“love” that were associated with early forms of affectivity were iden-
tified with the mother and placed out of sexual reach, while those
perceived as sexual partners were deemed unworthy of emotional
attachment or respect.19 In order to distinguish wives from whores,
men needed to read the signs of difference prospectively as well as
retroactively: in women’s knowledge, in their pleasure, in their bod-
ies, and in their minds. And all the time, what they were reading
were projections of their own desires and fears. It is in this way that
Clarissa provides Lovelace (as she does Richardson) an image of his
own ambivalence. On one hand, he wants her to be “an angel of a
woman” (429), “pure” and virtuous, without desire—the desexual-
ized mother who, as the essence of otherness, confirms his maleness
while depriving it of a libidinal object. On the other hand, he wants
her also to be that libidinal object, subject both to coercive control
and to prurient investigation. Trapped in the incessant fluctuation
of images that embody the double meaning of femininity, Lovelace
exclaims, “Oh, why was this woman so divinely excellent!” only to
ask, “Yet how know I that she is?” (694). Unable to believe that any
woman “can be said to be virtuous till she has been tried” (430), he
resolves to “try if I can awaken the woman in her . . . to try if she . . .

be really inflexible as to the grand article” (431). “The grand article”
is the mystery at the heart of the mystery of sexual difference, then:
the sign of female pleasure that is visible even though its originary
site is hidden. Excessive to her biological functioning, this “nothing
to see” of woman eludes and therefore motivates a search for knowl-
edge that is pornographic in its rejection of women’s subjectivity.20
Justifying his compulsive quest for the involuntary sign of her true
nature, Lovelace insists that Clarissa “cannot bear to be thought a
woman . . . and if, in the last attempt, I find her not one, what will she
be the worse for the trial?” (868). Of course, if Clarissa were to prove
herself proof against him, she would prove herself to be the woman
who cannot be for him a woman: on the social level, the not-woman
promoted by her culture; at a deeper level, the mother whom he
both fears and wishes her to be; and, at the deepest level, the mother
in himself which he has surrendered in order to become a man—the
mother in himself to which he also clings.
Through Lovelace, Richardson suggests how the exclusion of sex-
uality from the definition of woman in the realistic mode produces
in the fantastic an obsession with the mother’s sexuality. More, he
demonstrates how the pornographic fantastic with which Lovelace
is identified does not focus on incest, as other fantastic genres tend
to do, but regresses to a moment that predates the incest fantasy,
revealing the solipsistic nature of infantile desire in which accultur-
ated sexual relationships are rooted. In Lovelace, the pornographic
imagination rehearses the struggle of differentiation, with all of its
desire and rage, projecting it onto an adult world of erotic domina-
tion.21 Genital confusions and oedipal conflicts collapse into archaic,
preoedipal needs as bodily memory seeks to express itself in desub-
limated forms. The libertine desire for sexual conquest is shown to
enact simultaneously the urge to social rebellion, the need of sadistic
defense, the fear of impotence, the desire for sexual knowledge, the
wish to merge with the body of the mother, and the need to resist,
at any price, that merging.22 Symptomatically, Lovelace’s promiscu-
ous sexuality is identified with exploits of his past. In the present of
the novel, his is a sexuality related not to the body but to the mind.
It is not behavioral excess that characterizes this descendent of Roch-
ester and precursor of de Sade, but the insistence of compulsive cu-
riosity. It is not pleasure that he seems to seek but knowledge, and
it is in the interests of his epistemophilia that he finally undertakes

Clarissa’s rape.
The rape of Clarissa metaphorizes Lovelace’s dilemma, suggesting
the psychic complexity of his situation and the horror of its result.
The reader’s response mirrors the disjunctive levels of meaning: on
one side, empathic recognition; on the other side, revulsion. The an-
ticlimactic climax of the novel, the rape reveals the silence at the
fiction’s center by gesturing toward a scene that it refuses also to
make visible. Although intended by Lovelace as solution, the rape
fetishistically repeats the paradox it is called upon to solve. Neither
able to seduce Clarissa nor willing to force himself to marry her—
unable either to penetrate her virtue or to accept her virtue as im-
penetrable—Lovelace performs the function of pornographer, at-
tempting to write her, against her will, as harlot in the house of
prostitution over which Mrs. Sinclair presides. Failing to counter her
resistance, he has her drugged in order to perform what he later calls
“a notional violation” (916). In the aftermath he writes to Belford,
“And now . . . I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives”
(883). Instead of discovering the “grand article” that would have
proven her to be a woman, or the shudder of death that would have
proven her transcendence of that fallen state, Lovelace has elicited—
no sign at all. “I must own that there is something very singular in
this lady’s case[,]” he later says, “and at times I cannot help regretting
that I ever attempted her; since not one power either of body or soul
could be moved in my favour; and since, to use the expression of the
philosopher, on a much graver occasion, There is no difference to be
found between the skull of King Phillip and that of another man”
(885). The contradiction remains: Clarissa is both “singular” and in
all respects like every other person of her sex. Closed and imper-
meable, she is also only open: her vagina empty, like a skull—to-
kening not pleasure but a deathly void. Nothing marks her differ-
ence, except the thing that she proves finally not to have. Because
difference is both everywhere and nowhere, the rape is itself both
cataclysmic and unimaginable—unimaginable, at least, in the terms
one would expect to find.23
When he describes the fire scene, Lovelace represents his first,
failed effort to rape Clarissa in the excessive language of porno-
graphic romance. He is strangely silent, however, about the rape that
does succeed. Although he fantasizes endlessly about his appropri-
ation of her, this ultimate appropriation has no narrative reality. It

is the only event significant to them both of which only one account
is given. Clarissa presents it as a nightmare that, while experienced
in full horror, can only dimly be recalled: “I was so senseless that I
dare not aver that the horrid creatures of the house were personally
aiding and abetting: but some visionary rememberances I have of
female figures flitting, as I may say, before my sight; the wretched
woman’s particularly” (1011). She says nothing more specific about
the violation, but whenever she alludes to it, it is embedded in a
scene that takes place among women dominated by “the wretched
woman,” rather than between Lovelace and herself.24 Perceiving Mrs.
Sinclair to be “a frightful woman—if she be a woman” (894), Clarissa
remains more terrified of her “worse than masculine violence”
(1011) than she is of Lovelace’s attack. Lovelace also blames “the old
beldame” for “ruining the fairest virtue in the world” (1217) and
describes himself as impotent before her domineering powers. It is
significant that Mrs. Sinclair intervenes in the rape scene at the ap-
proximate moment that Lovelace withdrew, without her interven-
tion, in the fire scene: with Clarissa pleading, his own sympathies
aroused. So, although Lovelace is not absolved of responsibility for
the violation (as some have claimed), it can be argued that Richard-
son needs Mrs. Sinclair in order to complete the action that Lovelace
has undertaken.
The nightmarish woman at the center of the text, Mrs. Sinclair
functions as the subversive prostitute in the realist mode and, in the
fantastic, as the uncontrollable, sexual mother. A brothel-keeper, she
fosters a nonproductive sexuality that undermines the dominant fic-
tions associated with the gendered division of labor. In her parody
of the maternal role, she shows how mothers like Mrs. Harlowe serve
the interests of the patriarchy, acting as the pimps and jailers of their
daughters, performing their function as the heartless “breakers” of
women through the socializing process which they oversee. As a
grotesque figure of fantasy, she stands as Richardson’s hallucinatory
projection of unrestrained sexuality and boundless female power.
Described as brutish, with a “masculine air and fierce look,” “the
old dragon” is shown with “her eyebrows erect, like the bristles
upon a hog’s back. . . . She pouted out her blubber-lips, as if to bel-
lows up wind and sputter into her horse-nostrils; and her chin was
curdled, and more than usually prominent with passion” (883). Not
nurturant but destructive, the wicked witch instead of the virtuous

godmother, a mentor not of pure but whorish daughters, she drugs
Clarissa with her “bad London milk” and attempts to poison her
body, soul, and mind. As an incarnation of the phallic mother, she
is a man-woman who is autonomous and self-sufficient, a fetish ob-
ject both denying and claiming difference. Not castrated according
to cultural norms, she is, in her very presence, castrating: the primal
object of hidden desires and secret fears. It is in this role that she
serves as Lovelace’s “other”—what Belford calls “the mother of your
mind”: the frightening embodiment of Lovelace’s psychic and social
ambivalence.
After the rape, Lovelace dreams that Clarissa manages to flee Mrs.
Sinclair and her house of women with “a grave matronly lady”—a
good mother who offers protection to “a most unhappy young crea-
ture who has been basely seduced and betrayed.” Through “some
quick transition, and strange metamorphosis,” the benign old lady
is transformed first into a version of Mrs. Sinclair and then, when
she gets into bed with Clarissa, into Lovelace himself. The rape is
replayed as “a strange promiscuous huddle of adventures” with “all
the gentle and ungentle pressures of the lover’s warfare” and is fol-
lowed by “ensued recoveries, lyings in, christenings, the smiling boy
amply, even in her own opinion, rewarding the suffering mother”
(922). The dream concludes with one of Lovelace’s recurrent fanta-
sies: Clarissa “comparing notes” (922) about his sexual prowess with
Anna Howe, who bears him a daughter who will ultimately marry
Clarissa’s son. The strategies of the dream—those of splitting and
projection, condensation and displacement—repeat the strategies of
the literary fantastic through which Lovelace is created and through
which he continually and solipsistically creates himself.
Throughout the text, Lovelace’s identification is split between
Clarissa and Mrs. Sinclair: the good, pure mother and the bad, sexual
mother, the ego ideal and a phantasm of the fallen self. The impreg-
nation of Clarissa in his dream is grounded in his belief that with
“that foundation laid,” he can count on the “revived affection . . .
which a woman seldom fails to have for the father of her first child,
whether born in wedlock or out of it” (917). His wish for her mater-
nity is grounded also in his desire to prove his own masculinity by
proving Clarissa’s difference as a woman. And, finally, it is grounded
in his longing to be Clarissa’s child. “Let me perish, Belford,” he
writes, “If I would not forego the brightest diadem in the world for
the pleasure of seeing a twin Lovelace at each charming breast, draw-
ing from it his first sustenance” (706). In varying contexts, Lovelace
affirms his connection to the nurturant mother, attempting to claim
the totality of her love while seeking permission to be a womanish
man. It is this which motivates his pathological possessiveness and
expresses itself, theatrically, as an urge to the performance of an-
drogyny. Perceiving himself to have been a “bashful whelp,” Love-
lace concludes that “a bashful man has a good deal of the soul of a
woman: and so, like Tiresias, can tell what they think and what they
drive at, as well as themselves” (441). Significantly, Lovelace chooses
to interpret Tiresias not as masculine and feminine, but as a man
who can use his understanding of women to serve his masculine
ends. In this way, he is himself the Tiresias figure he imagines—a
bisexual subject who needs to be perceived as gendered. The com-
parison suggests how psychic longing is transformed by social ne-
cessity, how the fantasy of identification slips into the need for pos-
session, how the fear of impotence gives way to a wish for
omnipotence, and how the desire for erotic connection disguises it-
self in sadism. To be a womanish man, after all, is to be Hickman,
despised by men and women alike. An alternative is to convert the
feminized self into the mannish woman, as Lovelace does within his
dream, and as he (and Richardson) do, finally, in the rape.
Of course, the conversion can never, for Lovelace, be decisive—
oscillation is inevitable. Through the lengthy middle section of the
novel, Lovelace struggles with a sense of his own vulnerability, mov-
ing between the rage of love and the rage of revenge. The first takes
Clarissa as its object, the second strives for articulation through Mrs.
Sinclair. In both love and revenge, aggression dominates. Lovelace’s
small triumphs in outwitting his “vigilant charmer” fill him with a
sense of his own omnipotence: “I am taller by half a yard, in my
imagination, than I was!—I look DOWN upon everybody now”
(402). And when he tricks Clarissa into taking up residence at Mrs.
Sinclair’s, the sexual resonance of that sense of omnipotence is clear:
“What a matchless plotter thy friend! Stand by and let me swell!—I
am already as big as an elephant; and ten times wiser! mightier too
by far! Have I not reason to snuff the moon with my probiscus?”
(473). His sadistic fantasies proliferate from a desire for sexual power
that masks his dread of impotence and fear of castration.25 Because
he cannot bear the threat of a friendship between Clarissa and Anna

from which he is excluded, he fantasizes repeatedly that he will
“teach [Anna] submission without reserve” (637). The form of that
lesson is always rape, once with the help of “a dozen of her own
pitiless sex” (635), once in the company of her mother (671), once in
the presence of Clarissa (864), but always as a way of punishing her
independence. He can imagine Clarissa living with her friend only
if, as in his dream, both are pregnant with his children, both marked
and dominated by his phallic power. What incites him to the greatest
rage is Anna’s insult to his masculinity: her claim that “men of our
cast . . . cannot have the ardours that honest men have” (638), just as
he is incited to the final act of violence by Mrs. Sinclair’s “daughters,”
who “endeavoured to excite my vengeance, and my pride, by
preaching to me eternally [Clarissa’s] doubts, her want of love, and
her contempt of me” (1482).
In Lovelace’s promiscuous multiplicity, Richardson projects a
complexly gendered subjectivity that he himself could barely control
and that he could hardly have completely understood. In his sadism,
Lovelace identifies with the power of the father, not only rejecting
but punishing the mother in himself. In his peculiar deference to
Mrs. Sinclair, however—especially in the rape, when he surrenders
his will to hers—he accepts a masochistic subordination to the phal-
lic mother that, in its regression, subverts the patriarchal order. It is
as sadist and as masochist, therefore—from both masculine and fem-
inine positions—that he initiates his own psychic destruction.26
When he rapes Clarissa, he ruptures the fragile membrane that has
connected, however tenuously, the fragments of his divided self. Af-
ter the rape, as the fiction shifts back into the realistic mode, Mrs.
Sinclair and Clarissa no longer enact aspects of his conflicted sub-
jectivity but become autonomous figures in a morality play, while
he is abandoned as an empty shell. When Clarissa flees after his first
rape attempt, he asserts that “wanting her, I want my own soul, at
least everything dear to it” (740); and after her death, he writes to
Belford in desperation, “I am still, I am still, most miserably absent
from myself! I shall never, never more be what I was” (1428). Losing
Clarissa, he is not only deprived of a female object for his porno-
graphic, male imaginings—he also loses the capacity he has had for
empathic connection, however flawed and partial that capacity
might have been. Cut off decisively from the ego ideal that she has
represented for him, he is cut off as well from an internal source of

goodness identified with the female and maternal.27 After the rape,
and for the remainder of the fiction, Lovelace is only a shadowy
figure, repeating past gestures without energy, performing his am-
bivalence without conviction. Mrs. Sinclair’s ghastly end is dissoci-
ated from him completely. Played out in moral terms that are col-
orfully gothicized, her death provides parodic justice for the phallic
mother in the form of a metaphoric, gangrenous castration. Her leg,
broken in a drunken fall, becomes mortified and is amputated before
she “obscenely” dies. Categorically displacing her, Clarissa regains
the center of the stage, this time as an embodiment of Christ.
The rape that marks the disintegration of Lovelace, then, signals
the beginning of Clarissa’s triumph. Her impenetrability penetrated,
her narcissistic posture undermined, Clarissa feels at first without
recourse, “when all my doors are fast, and nothing but the keyhole
open, and the key of late put into that, to be where you are, in a
manner without opening any of them. . . . Oh wretched, wretched
Clarissa Harlowe” (894). Needing to close herself again, she must
redeem and revise the dominant fiction of her life, which has been
challenged by a brutal version of reality. The state of psychic frag-
mentation into which she falls initially is, in its extremity, madness
and, in its expressivity, a kind of truth. The poetic fragments that she
creates metaphorize both the instability and the receptivity of her
mind. They map her progress as she struggles to renew and
strengthen her reading of herself. A fallen Eve, she articulates in her
“mad papers” the despair and guilt she feels that in loving Lovelace
she has acted “out of nature, out of character, at least”: acted as a
“lady” who “took a great fancy” to a beast who, responding “in
nature,” has destroyed her “prospects of a happy life” (891–92).
Knowing that “[w]hen honour’s lost, ’tis a relief to die: / Death’s but
a sure retreat from infamy” (893), but recognizing that she cannot
overtly kill herself, Clarissa seeks a Christian martyrdom that re-
moves her from the vicissitudes of society while installing her irre-
trievably not just as exemplar, but as “divine example” (1306). Sleep-
ing and eating little while withdrawing from those who would
deprive her of autonomy, Clarissa rejects her “encumbering” body
and eliminates the “keyhole” through which Lovelace and her family
have tried to steal her self. Secured against incursion, she finds a
voice powerful enough to silence even Lovelace, forcing him to ask,
“Whose the triumph now!—HERS, or MINE?” (901). Claiming the

right to tell the story of the lady and the beast, she shapes a meta-
narrative that suits her needs and redirects desire by rewriting the
physical in spiritual terms.
With the last section of the novel, Richardson seeks to subject
Lovelace’s perspective to Clarissa’s—and the fantastic to the realistic
mode. It is not possible, however, for Clarissa to assert herself real-
istically against the patriarchal values that Richardson has both in-
terrogated in defining her predicament and employed in represent-
ing her sense of self. For this reason, realism ultimately gives way to
a regressive Christian allegory. Enacted socially and within the
boundaries of the law, Clarissa’s personal affairs remain matters for
male negotiation. She has no power to retrieve her property from
her father; she cannot hope for justice against Lovelace; she cannot
even appoint a woman as executor of her “will.” Now ruined, her
body is not a marketable commodity. Her family would make its
colonization explicit by deporting her, as a criminal, to Virginia. Psy-
chologically, she cannot free herself from the force of the fathers’
judgments until her character is demonstrated as superior to theirs
but still unthreatening to the socioeconomic order.
Clarissa’s embrace of a martyr’s death superficially resolves the
formal and moral dilemmas of the fiction. Shaping her narrative in
the genre of the religious sublime, and projecting her into a world
of spiritual rather than material value, Richardson is able to affirm
female autonomy and moral transcendence without testing their
pragmatic implications. From her position of moral unassailability,
Clarissa’s perspective is merged with Richardson’s. She gathers the
letters for publication, proselytizes actively for her interpretation,
and fantasizes that Lovelace himself will be reformed when he reads
the text that she is in the process of constructing (1177). Claiming
authority to literalize secular metaphors as allegorical Christian
truth, Clarissa deceives Lovelace by telling him that she is “setting
out with all diligence for my father’s house” (1233). With the ecstasy
of “supreme love,” she prepares herself as a “bride,” for her “last
house”: the coffin that she purchases and uses temporarily as a desk.
Overtly forgiving all and blaming none, she not only restores herself
to but exceeds the position that she held at the beginning of the novel.
She is a preferred child and the model for a now expanded and
adoring community. In the letter she leaves for Lovelace to read after
she has died, she suggests that the distance which has separated
them only figuratively in the past—“I have long been greatly above
you” (1427)—has now achieved its final, substantive meaning.
Still, the Christian sublime cannot conceal the contradictions that
Richardson intends it to resolve. Although it appears to transcend
the values of the dominant social fiction, Christian ideology in fact
reflects, extends, and reinforces them. So, in willing her own death,
Clarissa embraces with renewed determination the concept of an
autonomous, unitary self. Defended against the incursions of others,
she exposes the solipsism at the heart of affective individualism. A
grandiose form of narcissism, her spiritual unassailability makes hu-
man reciprocity irrelevant and reveals her earlier vision of the hu-
man community as impossibly naive. Clarissa’s martyrdom seems to
free her from the encroachments of the patriarchal family, but the
alternative she envisions functions to create a more potent version
of that same structure. Always the “good girl,” Clarissa identifies
herself completely with the Father’s judgment, as guilt and rage fuel
her desire for death.28 Wishing her virtue to be seen and recognized
as it was before, her dying is a prolonged performance staged in all
of its details. The body’s exhibition proves to be a crucial aspect of
physical denial.29 Having played narcissist instead of masochist with
Lovelace, Clarissa now reveals the interface of the two. As Christian
martyr, she is masochist and narcissist simultaneously and displays
the arrogance and pride of those positions.
Conceptualized both as an extension and a transcendence of the
realistic mode, Clarissa’s martyrdom strives for sublimity but real-
izes itself, through sentimentality, as ineffectual protest. Although
Richardson seeks to define her death as the redemption of a fallen
world, the Christian allegory confirms the radical social and sexual
disjunctions of her situation and reinforces the status quo. So, while
Clarissa’s spiritual empowerment can be interpreted, on one level,
as a rewriting of the psychic disintegration occasioned by the rape,
it ends with a form of psychic dissolution that, in material terms, is
more complete. Constructed by the gender arrangements that pre-
vail, her sexuality remains oddly indeterminate, not only through
her dying but in her death. Her rejection of her body reflects the
definitional vacuum in which that body is suspended, caught as it is
between virginal purity and possible maternity. The fact that the
coffin is the only home that she can claim suggests the vacancy that
“woman” in the “real” world represents. The multiplicity of her fig-

ural roles—the Father’s daughter, the bride of Christ, and Christ him-
self—only strengthens the ambiguous nature of her desexualized
androgyny. Sacralized first by Lovelace and then by Richardson in
his identification with her, Clarissa is projected as the mystical other
who holds the key to all meaning, while offering no meaning in
herself. To the fiction’s end, she is a cipher to be read—by Lovelace,
by Richardson, and by generations of readers.
The text’s desire for the sublime, then, reflects a desire also for the
dissolution of difference, particularly the differences that gender rep-
resents and structures. The ambivalence of that desire is reflected
within the modes through which it is projected: the positive sublime
of sentimental Christian allegory, which is ultimately associated with
Clarissa, and the negative sublime of the pornographic fantastic,
with which Lovelace is identified. The former is motivated by the
desire to achieve the oceanic experience of fusion; the latter is rooted
in a fear of fusion as erasure. Both articulate an urge to fill the space
left vacant by an increasingly secularized religion. Both mark a
doomed attempt to get beyond experience to the unconditioned: the
first, through an intensity of feeling posed to counter reason; the
second, in the negations of psychic appropriation.30 Lovelace tries to
locate in Clarissa a significance that will allow him to transcend ex-
istential isolation, while Clarissa seeks to evade the necessity of re-
lation altogether by locating her transcendence in death. Because
Clarissa has no space in which to express the subjectivity that she
wishes to affirm, and Lovelace cannot believe at all in a coherent
subjectivity, both stage performances of themselves that only enact
and exacerbate their alienation. Through his addiction to fantasy and
disguise, Lovelace obsessively replays the psychic and hermeneutic
instabilities that he wants to move beyond, while Clarissa literalizes
an allegorical version of the integrated self in a frozen figure that
refuses change. Mutually exclusive, their roles are also self-defeating.
Their futile repetition can only be halted in the physical deaths of
the protagonists.
In Clarissa, it is the relation of the socially constructed schisms of
sexual difference to the intrapsychic schisms imposed by psychic
differentiation that organizes realistic and fantastic narrative modes,
propelling them in the direction of the sublime. In the sentimental
form, sexual difference is absorbed in an androgynous Christian self
still stamped by impotent femininity. In the pornographic genre, the

difference that originates within the male self is projected onto an
objectified female other, and primal desires are then explored in the
necessarily failed, eroticized relation. It is in the solipsistic self-
referentiality of each narrative and, even more, in his disclosure of
the radical disjunction between the two that Richardson achieves a
vision more tragic than he could have understood. It is a vision that
exceeds both the sentimental and the pornographic in its represen-
tation of the fundamental incompatibility of men and women in his
world. In the oddly truncated rape of Clarissa—both over-
determined and only partially imagined—Richardson suggests the
extremity of the effort that must be made if the two narratives—and
the two worlds—are to be conjoined. At the same time, he reveals
the failure even of textual and material violence to effect that impos-
sible connection.
Where Richardson might have seen the possibilities of partial res-
olution was where he most rejected it: in the refusal of his readers
to conform to gender expectations. Women of his time refused to
read exclusively like women; men—including Richardson himself—
did not read simply like men. The truth that Richardson inadver-
tently unearthed is one that readers both continue to reveal and, at
the same time, continue to deny: that identifications and identifica-
tory resistance take place at social and at psychological levels, across
gender categories as well as within them. Like his society, his char-
acters, and his narrative, Richardson was himself intellectually, ideo-
logically, emotionally, and psychologically divided, a man who re-
vealed at the level of fantasy what, at the level of realism, he strongly
denied. In this, he was the protagonist of his own fantastic fiction,
playing out through male and female aspects of himself desires that
were not only male and female. The genuine complexity of gender
relations can be traced in the dynamic process of his writing, and in
those complex relations can be discovered the political possibilities
of interpretation.
3
(W)holes and Noses
The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy
In the past, Tristram Shandy has been erased from origin stories told
about the English novel or has required, within those stories, a Ster-
nean digression of its own.1 Although its affinities with the traditions
of learned wit and Menippean satire have been noted, they have been
used to justify arguments about the exceptional, rather than repre-
sentative, character of the work. In a similar spirit, Sterne’s rejection
of linear time, and his obsession with a contradictory and internally
divided self, have been viewed as remarkable in their anticipation
of modernism. Now Tristram Shandy has come into fashion as a pro-
phetically postmodern and even presciently Lacanian text, and while
these claims have attracted readers to the fiction, they have made its
position more anomalous than ever. It seems that every new appre-
ciation of the work’s complexity brings with it a renewed conviction
of its aberrance.
While granting—even celebrating—Tristram Shandy’s eccentricity,
I want to argue strongly against its critical marginalization. Despite
the fact that it has been dismissed by theorists of realism and has
not been considered at all by theorists of the fantastic,2 I want to
place the novel at the intersection of the two traditions, testing the
limits of each in the context of their mutually constitutive dynamic.
At the most basic level, the inclusion of Sterne’s novel expands our
understanding of the fantastic mode. It enables us to see how Tris-
tram Shandy, which was published at the same time as The Castle of
Otranto, shares the fundamental interests of “pure” fictions of gothic
horror—with one important difference: its investigations are enacted
through sentimental comedy that aspires to the sublime, while the
gothic is played out in melodrama that struggles to transform itself
in tragedy.3
Once placed in historical perspective, the impulses of the fantastic
can be seen to structure a range of overlapping genres—the gothic
87
88 (W)holes and Noses
novels of horror by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Rad-

cliffe, for example; the nineteenth-century romance that includes
Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and Dracula, as well as Freud’s case
studies; the comic absurd that begins with Sterne, moves through
Lewis Carroll to Joyce and Beckett, and then extends to the novels
of magical realism and the essays of Lacan. Although fictive and
theoretical texts in this tradition are stamped differently by their
differing historical moments, as we have seen, all depict a subjectiv-
ity that is internally divided; a desiring subjectivity that seeks to
articulate the absence and loss by which it has been shaped: a sub-
jectivity that resists societal forces that would appropriate it for fam-
ily, class, and nation; for language and for reason; for the gendered
division of labor and for forms of sexuality that are proscribed. Many
fantastic fictions are contained largely by the interior landscape that
the solipsistic mind projects, and most at least are dominated by it.
While Tristram Shandy is not unique in its resistance to containment,
it is certainly the first fiction to insist upon the necessary if partial
engagement of the fantastic subject with its social context: the en-
gagement of the fantastic with the realist mode.
At the center of Tristram Shandy is Sterne’s ironic interrogation of
Locke who, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, attempts
to mediate between the old rationalism and the new empiricism,
defining a subjectivity that functions in accordance with its own ec-
centric desires in a material world that still lies open to rational dis-
covery. Sterne recognizes the paradoxical nature of Locke’s search
for incontrovertible truths hidden beneath inescapable relativities:
absolute principles that could guarantee the relation of the idea to
its reality, the name to its object, private to public meaning, and self-
ish interest to social need.4 He sees the fragility of the bridges that
Locke had built to connect rationalism’s perspectives with those of
empiricism: his deployment of a theory of error to close the gap
between rational thought and the eccentricities of association, his
presentation of the slippage of signifier and signified as an abuse of
language, and his spasmodic appeal to a deus ex machina when other
forms of regulation failed. Positioning himself on the side of radical
empiricism, Sterne chooses to look directly into the chasm that marks
the divergence of fantastic discourses from those of realism, not ul-
timately to connect them through some clever sleight of mind but
rather to map the interaction of their constructive and deconstructive
(W)holes and Noses 89
strategies. From this perspective, he prefigures modern epistemolo-

gies that insist knowledge is produced and not discovered and argue
that what is known is inseparable from the subjectivity that knows.5
But titling his book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Sterne also suggests that although knowledge relies on our personal
constructions, the projections we call opinions are both privately ref-
erenced and socially embedded.
The point is that Sterne takes subjectivity as his subject. He does
not conceptualize that subjectivity as coherent in the mode of real-
ism, fully embodied and transparently available as character, if ul-
timately conflicted, still capable of integration. He conceptualizes it
rather in fantastic terms as multiple and even pathologically divided,
as mysterious to others and unknown even to itself. Following re-
alism’s familiar formula, Sterne has Tristram, his narrator, set out to
tell the story of his life. In the process, he discovers that the single
story he can write is “the history of what passes in a man’s mind”:
an analysis of the way in which the self knows and constructs itself
in language, and the way in which that construction marks him al-
ways as a character alienated from himself. This is a subjectivity that
does uncannily anticipate those phrased, dissected, and debated by
psychoanalytic theorists at later stages of the modern civilizing pro-
cess. Once this subject’s project is defined as self-retrieval it is inev-
itably doomed, since to know the self is also to recognize the self as
other, and to recognize the self as other is to lose the self one seeks
to know. As Sterne understood, the lost reclaimed is the loss denied:
a farce of misrecognition that can never be resolved but is continually
replayed as the telling—which is also the making—of a life.
But if Sterne took subjectivity as his subject, the form of subjec-
tivity that he explored was clearly and distinctly male. For him—as,
indeed, for Freud and later for Lacan—the central problem of this
self-eluding and self-deluded subjectivity is concerned with the mys-
tery of its engendering: the mystery of the origins of self, sexuality,
and sexual difference.6 The primal scene with which Tristram begins
his inquiries, and to which he compulsively returns throughout the
novel, is precisely the scene of origination—the scene in which he is
conceived by a man and a woman as a male. Haunting, shaping, and
prefiguring the text, it is a scene of interrupted coition that marks at
once the irreconcilable differences between men and women, the in-
commensurability of passion and reason, the ultimate disjunction of
the word and its referent, and the irrecoverable separation of desire
from its object. Radically ambiguous, it is a scene of indeterminacy
that is ultimately determining for its protagonist—as any scene of
primal fantasy must be.
“The pitiful misadventures” that Tristram is doomed to suffer
mentally and physically in a fundamentally unsympathetic world
are rooted here, in the eccentric associations and radical differences
of his parents: his father, the most “regular” of men, who “winds
up” both his house clock and his wife on the first Sunday night of
every month, and his mother who dares to speak as she is on the
verge of being wound:
Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up

the clock?—Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation,
but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—Did ever
woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such
a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing.7
Whether Walter is able to continue doing what he was (or was not)
doing before he was so literally interrupted can never be certain
since Tristram is born a scant eight months later, “as near nine kal-
endar months as any husband could in reason have expected” (7). It
is clear that Tristram’s personal fate might indeed have been sealed
on this occasion, along with the fortunes of the Shandy house, by
the scattering of animal spirits “transfused” from father to son, “his
muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread,” and his mel-
ancholy disposition thereby established prematurely. But whatever
the particular circumstances were of his conception, Tristram’s fate
as a man is necessarily determined by the anxiety of paternity that
structures relations of reproduction in his eighteenth-century
world.8 With his fatalistic comment about the inevitable prematurity
of infant births, Sterne suggests that a man’s identity as father can
never with certainty be fixed—although his name remains crucial to
the cross-generational inheritance of property.9 The male seed is
alienated at coition, and the secrets of the enveloping womb are as
final as the secrets of the grave. Man’s stakes in the reproductive
process are increased as he “discovers” his radical differences from
woman, whose identity is inextricably bound to her strangely func-
tioning body and her “essential” nature. So Walter sees that
from the very moment the mistress of the house is brought to bed,
every female in it, from my lady’s gentlewoman down to the cinder-
wench becomes an inch taller for it; and give themselves more airs
upon that single inch, than all their other inches put together.
“I think, rather,” replied my uncle Toby, “that ’tis we who sink
an inch lower.—If I meet but a woman with child—I do it—.” (213)
Walter’s resentment and Toby’s anxiety stamp the account that Tris-
tram gives of his begetting. It is a story shaped by a masculinist
science that centers the father and all but erases the mother, casting
the prospective infant as a homunculus who resides, fully devel-
oped, in the sperm, requiring only safe delivery to the passive and
incidental womb, which is “the place destined for his reception.”10
As Tristram ironically suggests, the erasure could only be improved
if after the ceremony of marriage and before that of consummation,
all the homunculi could be “baptized at once, slap-dash, by injec-
tion” (47).
In Sterne’s comic representation, the laws, scholarly treatises, and
medical practices that collude to help men establish women as un-
related to their children reflect the politics of reproduction, which
Mary O’Brien and other theorists have analyzed in a similar but
explicitly feminist mode. From this perspective, men bond together
seeking to repair their alienation in principles of continuity that lie
outside of nature. With their laws, they appropriate the children pro-
duced by female labor and substitute their own cultural productions
for women’s reproductive creativity. But while Sterne ironically re-
veals the defensive nature of the impulse that makes a mere container
of the fertile womb, it is the fear of that container as a malign vacuum
that shapes, at conscious and unconscious levels, the fiction that he,
with Tristram, writes. It is all very well for Tristram, having aban-
doned his mother for several chapters just as she discovers his elder
brother’s death, to bemoan the fact that, in rejecting her, he is acting
“like a Turk”: “as if Nature had plaistered me up, and set me down
naked upon the banks of the river Nile, without one” (277). Despite
his protests, the novel does proceed as if it would be better for men
to be spawned spontaneously from river mud than to be born of
women. Like the psychoanalysts who succeed him, Sterne is trapped
in the terrain of male development that he also, with much precision,
maps. Mrs. Shandy moves through his text in the way that many
subtly maligned mothers move through Freud’s case histories: ini-

tiating nothing, but vaguely responsible for everything unfortunate
that happens.11 Never knowing “more than her backside” what any-
body means, she is without intelligence, curiosity, or imagination.
Since a “temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins
in all months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day
and night” (451), she is without passion or desire, although Walter
refuses to see her as lacking in lust. Deprived of her own interior life
and disconnected from the interior lives of others, she cannot be
conceptualized in the mode of fantasy. Marginal to the social world
of family, she is barred from participation in the realistic mode as
well. Neither a “real” nor a spectral mother, she beckons toward
while veiling the places where those mothers should have been. As
an obstacle to narrative, she is refused all humane and humanizing
gestures by the text. Her long and difficult labor takes place offstage,
essentially unremarked by the Shandy men. We see her on the verge
of discovering the death of her elder son, but learn nothing of her
response to that discovery. As caregiver, she is similarly invisible:
we are told only that while Walter is writing his Tristrapaedia—the
educational theory intended to compensate for all of Tristram’s
woes—Tristram himself remains uneducated, “totally neglected . . .
and abandonned to my mother” (283). Her breast—the sign and con-
firmation of her maternity—is evoked by Tristram only once, in the
context of a theory that associates the nursing breast’s flaccidity or
firmness with the “length and goodness” of the infant’s nose (174).
“My mother, you must know,” he starts, but turns immediately from
description to digression. His mother remains clothed—the taboo in
place—but the few words he drops are adequate to seal his mother’s
fate in the curious reader’s mind. Given what we know of Tristram’s
nose, and of his association of nose and penis, we conclude—as we
are meant to do—that hers is not the good breast, flaccid and nur-
turing, but the firm, bad breast complexly identified, in this context,
with castration.
Already linked to Walter’s possible impotence through her un-
timely inquiry about the winding of the clock, Mrs. Shandy becomes
a victim of the castration fear that floods the novel. She is associated
with the lascivious Widow Wadman, who unmans Uncle Toby with
her penetrating gaze, and with Susannah, the leaky vessel, who “cuts
off spouts” and destroys bridges—Tristram’s significantly among
them. Throughout the text, the good mother—with the nourishing

breast and sheltering, creative womb—is known only in her absence,
an implied “other” of the women whose obstinate passivity or vo-
racious sexuality causes the primary experience of differentiation to
be displaced by fears of impotence and castration.12 Unrepresented,
the fantasy of that good mother is identified retrospectively with an
originary loss experienced by the subject as a lack that, while dis-
placed and veiled by language, persists as a desire that cannot be
answered and a fear that cannot be calmed. Once the barely percep-
tible, oddly attenuated figure of Mrs. Shandy is placed at the center
of Sterne’s fiction with the elusive space that she both confirms and
hides, the novel can be read as an effort on the part of the male
subject—both Sterne and Tristram—to deny, embody, and appro-
priate this present absence in and for themselves, with all the traces
of femininity by which it is stamped and with the promise of whole-
ness that it extends. Struggling to deny sexual difference by trans-
forming it into a male sameness, the text attempts on one level to
substitute father for mother, phallus for breast, word for thing, and
integral self for multiple subjectivity, but the fetishizing gesture nec-
essarily undoes the compromise that it is intended to effect. Desire
is intensified by displacement. The threat of lack and the knowledge
of difference are always present, and the need they arouse must con-
tinually be articulated in order to be allayed. Entombed within the
self, the unrepresented aspects of the female other become the source
of a perpetual mourning that seeks formal and thematic expression
in the text, where it is most obviously suggested in the melancholy
resonance of Tristram’s name.13
While the idealized woman, who is the object not of fear but of
desire, makes her appearance as the romantic other in both A Sen-
timental Journey and Journal to Eliza, she is largely excluded from
Tristram Shandy, where she is (mis)represented by the fathers: pri-
marily by Walter but also by Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Trim. Replacing
the triangulated, competitive, heterosexual nuclear family of realism
with an extended family that comprises a male homosocial com-
munity organized around the dyad of father and son, Sterne lovingly
brings the emotional logic of his misogynistic world into fantastic
focus. The occasion for relations between and among men, women
become mere background for the enactment of male passion and the
trading of male property. Central to the functioning of the private
as well as of the public world, men perform their emotional and

intellectual labor in the context of an ambiguous masculinity that
completes the appropriation of the female role on all but the most
grossly biological of levels. Without competition, Tristram’s relation
to the fathers—like their relations with one another—is erotic in its
longing for an unmediated connection that resurrects the imagined
primal bond: a desire not to be like, but to be. It is an empathic urge
that makes each male project himself into the other in order to re-
trieve that other as a version of himself. Moreover, since each, with
his ambiguously mutilated manhood, serves as a feminized other for
the others, each confirms the others’ masculinity in order to con-
struct a phallic economy that is based, ironically, on lack.
In this way, Sterne fantasizes a cultural form of the preoedipal
moment in which the identification with the mother is shattered and
the male child identifies with what Freud calls the ideal father of
personal history.14 It is a moment between the fall from Edenic
wholeness, retrospectively remembered, and entry into the conflic-
tual world of hierarchical difference, in which women can be sup-
pressed but not denied. It is a psychic moment that Sterne—with
Tristram and all Shandyean males—seeks to concretize as social
space. The primary lack, while not erased completely, is veiled by
each man’s attempt to connect empathically to other men who, pro-
jected as aspects of themselves, are also objects of desire. In the fan-
tasy, homosociality supplants the ambisexuality of infancy and an-
ticipates while suspending the engendering of culture. External
objects in which the prospectively male body finds parts of itself
symbolically reflected are often ambiguously male and rarely only
female. The penis is everywhere and nowhere; the breast has no
correlative; and cracks and holes and crevices have not only a vaginal
but also an anal reference. Walter “engenders” his dissertations “in
the womb of speculation” (78); and Toby, in rejecting the cold sexual
fact of the Widow Wadman, need never learn “the right end of a
Woman from the wrong” (463). Instead he founds his family with
Corporal Trim, with whom he happily raises Le Fever’s son.
But Sterne’s fantasy of wholeness is belied by the complex nature
of the subjectivity that he describes. The idealized identificatory re-
lation that he portrays reaches for erotic connection but reveals sol-
ipsism as its other side. To lose altogether the boundary between self
and other is to descend into the madness of a reflecting wall of mir-
rors, while to retrieve the self as other is to confront one’s own ul-
timate strangeness. Either way—and both are the ways of the fan-
tastic—the self is trapped, subverted, and destroyed by its own
projective and introjective strategies. Sterne both acknowledges and
partially averts these threats, refusing a tragic reading of the psychic
side of individualism and bringing his fantasy into humorous con-
versation with realism. Attempting to retrieve his subjects from the
brink of solipsism to which he carries them, he anchors them in
society while revealing the full narcissism of their natures. In order
to allow them to steer a course between their assimilation of and
their accommodation to a reality that can be known only through
linguistic representation, Sterne mounts the Shandy men on hob-
byhorses, which they ride along an edge that divides the internal
from the external world. “A secondary figure, and a kind of back-
ground to the whole” (13), the hobbyhorse is a comic double that
expresses a man’s eccentricity while defining the adaptive strategies
that he employs in order to function in his social world. As Sterne
explains:
A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-
act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do
upon each other: yet doubtless there is a communication between
them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is some-
thing in it more of the manner of electrified bodies,—and that by
means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into
contact with the back of the Hobby-Horse.—By long journies and
much friction, it so happens that the body of the rider is at length
fill’d as full of Hobby-Horsical matter as it can hold;—so that if you
are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you
may form a pretty exact description of the genius and the character
of the other. (57–58)
Functioning to mediate, initiate, and defend, the hobbyhorse seeks

to modify claustral psychic structures in a performative process
through which the self establishes its relation to itself.15 Accomplish-
ing the important work of sublimation, it allows the Shandy males
to channel sexual energy into activities that have nothing to do with
women and everything to do with other men. “Never did lover post
down to a belov’d mistress with more heat and expectations than
my uncle Toby did, to enjoy . . . in private” the war games that he
plays with Corporal Trim. Walter, “hugely tickled” by an intellectual
concept, is wont to “clap . . . both his hands upon his cod-piece” and
Tristram flees the temptations of Nannette—repelled by the slit in
her petticoat—in order to write the story of Uncle Toby’s courtship.
All the hobbyhorsical activities of the men—Toby’s war games, Wal-
ter’s theories, Tristram’s autobiography, Yorick’s wit, Trim’s inven-
tions—are forms of play that help the self to assimilate, instead of
accommodating to, the undeniable otherness of the real world. They
are transitional practices, in D. W. Winnicott’s sense, which allow
inner and outer realities to be maintained as separate yet interre-
lated.16 The balance is delicate, however, and the imaginative illusion,
with its productive compromise, can slip into a form of madness
when it is not shared by others. As Tristram suggests, “A man’s
Hobby-Horse is as tender a part as he has about him” (87), and the
bridges it constructs between the psychic and the social are very
fragile. Anxieties of difference—the difference of man and woman,
self and other, word and thing—can cause the dynamic interactions
of symbolic play to be frozen into the hardened strategies of obses-
sion. Because “it is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man
has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself” (114), the
hobbyhorse comes easily to exert a tyranny of its own. Attempting
to control the world through theoretical formulations that experience
belies, Walter’s “whole life [becomes] a contradiction to his knowl-
edge”: “his rhetoric and conduct . . . at perpetual handicuffs” (150).
Toby, enamored of the game he plays with Trim, attributes to it more
reality than the reality it imitates. He condemns the Peace of Utrecht
and “grieves the war was not carried on a little longer,” although he
would not wish more of his fellow creatures slain. Toby’s horse
throws him “somewhat viciously” in this collision of fantasy with
reality, creating “a sort of shyness” between them that gives the
Widow Wadman her opening and allows her to initiate her own cam-
paign (352). In a similar way, Tristram is written by the autobiog-
raphy that he seeks to write and Sterne is shaped by Tristram, the
persona he projects. And while they, like Yorick, are able to reflect
on the spaces they open in their attempts at self-retrieval, self-
reflexivity does not close the yawning gaps, even though it is re-
sponsible for the creative dynamism of their projects.
Representing the uniqueness of a man’s “character”—the way he
shapes the reality he lives—the hobbyhorse has no relevance to
women, who, according to Tristram, “have no character at all” (49).17
To have no hobbyhorse means to be deprived of the subjectivity that

emerges with the splitting of the self and to experience not desire
but need: in Sterne’s women, in the form of lust. To be, in this sense,
without an “other” is to be disengaged from culture and to be iden-
tified with nature: to exist as essence on the margins of language and
to be literal rather than metaphorical in speech. Without self-
consciousness, women in the Shandy world lack an awareness even
of the lack they lack: the lack that is signaled and performed by the
hobbyhorse itself.18 An imitation horse’s head mounted on a stick
that fits between its rider’s legs, the hobbyhorse enables children’s
mimicry of power. Seeking reparation for their anxiety of impotence,
the Shandy males—like “the wisest of men in all ages” (10)—gallop
childlike out into the world under the sign of this fantastic phallus.
A fetish object, the hobbyhorse disguises and discloses the fear, if
not the actuality, of castration. Identified with potency, it enables
subjectivity to perform itself symbolically, at the same time that it
reveals the inevitable impotence of that performance. To ride the
hobbyhorse is to play the Other who is powerful. It is to take on
what Lacan has called the Name of the Father and to participate,
therefore, in the patriarchal order from a position presumed domi-
nant in language.
In Tristram Shandy, Sterne explores the process through which the
primal experiences of fragmentation, differentiation, and loss come
to be experienced as castration through linguistic representation.
Specifically, he describes how the male body is castrated by the cul-
tural mind and suggests some of the ways (the hobbyhorse among
them) in which men seek compensation for that symbolic mutilation.
From the moment of conception, when the scattering of animal spir-
its wears the homunculus’s “muscular strength and virility . . . down
to a thread,” Tristram’s potency as a male is questioned. That ques-
tion becomes more pressing with his birth, for while Dr. Slop in
delivering him does not mistake his hip for his head and grasp it
with his forceps, that substitution is implicitly suggested when it
becomes clear that Tristram’s nose, small already by heredity, has
been flattened by the doctor’s intervention. The circumcision per-
formed later by a falling window sash further focuses the significant
ambiguity. Encouraging Tristram to piss out of the window, without
considering that “nothing . . . in our family . . . was well hung” (284),
Susannah proclaims the “murder” of the child and announces that
“Nothing is left . . . nothing is left—for me, but to run my country”

(284). For Walter, who perceives that Tristram “comes very hardly
by all his religious rites,” the problem that results from the catastro-
phe is rhetorical, not anatomical. The “world” will have formed its
opinion of these events, as Walter knows, and is not likely to change
it even if Tristram “is shewn publickly at the market cross” (329).19
That opinion, formed on the basis of the community’s own fears, is
sealed irrevocably by the mishap of Tristram’s naming. To compen-
sate for all of his infant’s woes, Walter intends to name his son “Tris-
megistus”: the Greek name of the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as
the inventor of writing, the creator of languages, the scribe, inter-
preter, and adviser of the gods, and the representative on earth of
Ra, the god who signifies fertility. Through the error of Susannah—
who has as little understanding of mythology as she has sensitivity
to words—the boy is named for sorrow and represents the lack that,
while inherent in language, is experienced in the body. The differ-
ence between the name that Walter wishes for his son and the name
that he is given measures the distance between the male’s idealized
and real power. Whatever the “reality”—and, in this sense, there is
for Sterne no reality outside of language—Tristram is emasculated.
Later he flees from the slit in Nannette’s petticoat, and stands im-
potent before his Jenny’s gaze, “reflecting upon what had not passed”
(395). Describing himself as one “who shall never have a finger in
the pye” (423), Tristram reflects that while a man “may be set on fire
like a candle, at either end—provided there is a sufficient wick stand-
ing out,” he himself prefers to be lit at the top rather than at the
bottom, where the flame “has the misfortune generally to put out
itself” (426). That is where Walter also chooses to be inflamed—at
the source of his theories—and Toby as well, in the games that do
not test his modesty. It is only through displacements such as these
that the Shandy men can escape the gaze of women: the Widow
Wadman who wishes to see Toby’s wound, Susannah who sees that
“all” is gone, Jenny who sees Tristram’s impotence, and even Mrs.
Shandy who sees in Walter the inept winder of the clock.
But while the Shandy males can avoid the female gaze that they
experience as castrating, they cannot evade at all the castration that
is imposed on them by language. Like Toby, “whose life was put in
jeopardy by words” (67), all find, with Tristram, that the search for
Truth is endless and that the path one follows to it is “a thorny and
bewilder’d track,—intricate are the steps! intricate are the mazes of

this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this
bewitching phantom KNOWLEDGE, will bring upon thee” (69). An
elusive object of desire, truth is always somewhere else, lost in the
endless play of words by which it is projected: a testament, in its
absence, to man’s alienation from the society in which he lives and
from the self which he inhabits. Refusing a realistic view of language
that binds the word to its object, Sterne follows Locke in connecting
words to ideas that are arbitrary and subjective. But while Locke
identifies this relativity of meaning with abuses of language that are
corrigible through careful definition, Sterne rejects the possibility
that definitions can be anything but tautological. In his world, there
is no way for individuals to move beyond the eccentricity of ide-
ational associations to communication that is based upon shared
meanings. As Walter recognizes, “the highest stretch of improvement
a single word is capable of, is a high metaphor for which . . . the idea
is generally the worse and not the better” (306). For this problem he
has a formalist solution: the deployment of auxiliary verbs “to open
new tracks of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions.” But
while his strategy enables him to produce endless variations on the
theme of the white bear (Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have
seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or
can I ever see one? [307]), it can do nothing to prevent the slide in
ordinary discourse from association to metaphor and from metaphor
to metonymy. As Sterne suggests, each man either must remain
mired, alone, in the path that his hobbyhorse has broken—risking
collision if he dares even the most harmless of diversions—or, like
Tristram, he can self-consciously exploit the excessiveness of lan-
guage in an effort to transform paralysis into creativity. To the extent
that communication is possible within the vicissitudes of language,
it is based less on shared assumptions and common definitions than
on culturally induced and reinforced obsessions.
Nowhere is the relation of personal to social signification more
graphically demonstrated and more wittily explored than in the fic-
tion’s production of the meaning of “noses.” Well might Tristram
protest: “For by the word NOSE, throughout all this long chapter of
noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word NOSE
occurs,—I declare, by that word I mean a NOSE, and nothing more
or less” (162). The fact is that, throughout the text, Sterne creates for
his reader the association of nose with penis and, as part of that
association, the identification of Shandy noses with inherited impo-
tence and lack. We are told, for example, that Tristram’s great-
grandfather was forced to provide “an unconscionable jointure” for
his wife in order to compensate for the size of his nose. While it is
“little or no nose,” according to his wife, “no more nose . . . than
there is upon the back of my hand,” according to his son, and
“shaped like an ace of clubs” in Tristram’s view, his nose was still—
as his great-grandfather himself insists—“a full inch longer than my
father’s” (163). Walter does not “conceive how the greatest family in
England could stand it out against an uninterrupted succession of
six or seven short noses,” and indeed Tristram with Toby—if not
Walter himself—signals the end of the familial line by not conceiving
at all. But the nosology of the Shandy family raises more questions
than it answers since, according to the logic of the text, the mutila-
tions that the Shandy males endure are more psychological than they
are physical: fears of inadequacy that reflect a cultural imperative.
The anxiety about less and the desire for more are all-pervasive,
as “Slawkenbergius’s Tale” reveals. The sense of lack yields images
of an idealized Nose which all men want, from which all benefit,
and which no man can possess. Diego, the story’s hero, has stopped
in Strassburg as he travels from the Promontory of Noses, which he
visits when his “dear Julia” rejects him because she has suspicions
about the adequacies of his nose. What he has gotten there is every-
body’s business and anybody’s guess. Clearly, he feels obliged to save
himself for his beloved and defends his organ valiantly against the
sight and touch of others, with a sword so massive that no scabbard
is large enough to fit it. Everywhere and nowhere, reputed to be both
on his face and in his breeches, his Nose is the subject of fantasy, the
topic of gossip, the object of women’s desires, the cause of men’s
anxiety, and, not least of all, the focus of scholarly theorizing and
debate. Among the learned, disputes about the nose’s nature and the
possibility of its existence become so heated that the Nose itself is
soon forgotten, having served “as a frigate to launch [the theorists]
into the gulph of school divinity,—and then they all sailed before
the wind” (198). “Macerated with expectations,” the Strassburgers
can do nothing but obsess about the veiled appurtenance of Diego.
The men, women, and children who leave their city to wait for his
return are “tossed to and fro . . . for three days and nights . . . with
the tempestuous fury of [their] passion.” When they finally do reen-

ter the gates of Strassburg, no more the wiser, they discover them-
selves to have been undone by curiosity, for the French, “ever upon
the catch,” have taken advantage of their absence and marched in.
“Alas! alas! cries Slawkenbergius—it is not the first—and I fear will
not be the last fortress that has been either won—or lost by Noses”
(203).
As Sterne’s anatomy of the nose is, in fact, an anatomy of the
personal and cultural meanings of the penis, his allegory of the Nose
is an allegory of the penis’s relation to the Phallus: an exploration of
the process through which the ideal concept is constructed and a
revelation of the fragility of that construction. Projected by castration
anxiety and the fear of impotence, the Phallus represents a penis
that, invincible in perpetual erection, signals both self-control and
power over others. Appropriately, Diego’s codpiece does not permit
an unobstructed view of the reputedly impressive organ that it nei-
ther fully contains nor completely hides. Veiled, it becomes, with all
of its elusive allusivity, the social and individual object of desire that
marks the lack out of which desire emerges and which it reproduces.
But Sterne, unlike Lacan, does not present the Phallus as a transcen-
dental signifier—an originating idealization that generates signifi-
cations but is not itself the effect of a prior signifying chain. On the
contrary, he demonstrates the Phallus’s embeddedness in culture,
insisting that it cannot be detached from the penis on which it de-
pends to symbolize its difference as a positive reconfiguration of the
negative term.20 Further, by subjecting the idealized organ to the laws
that govern language, Sterne brings the paternal law, which pro-
motes this idealization, into the realm of relativity and desire, em-
phasizing the vulnerability of the Symbolic order itself. Truth,
knowledge, justice—and the father—are revealed by Sterne to fall
as far short of their ideal representations as penis does from Phallus.
From the beginning of his story, what it means to Tristram to
become a man is not only to accept the erasure of his mother but,
even more importantly, to assume his father’s place. But the place of
the father, as Tristram learns, is not a place of personal power, how-
ever it might appear societally. At every crucial moment of Tristram’s
development, Walter inadvertently undermines the masculinity of
his son, turning him into a version of himself. The pitiful misadven-
tures of Tristram’s conception, of his birthing, of his naming, and of
his education are all expressions of Walter’s futile hobbyhorsical ob-

session. So, too, with Tristram’s incapacities as a writer: his inability
to narrativize his life in a coherent form. “’[T]is my father’s fault,”
he defensively explains, “and whenever my brains come to be dis-
sected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large
uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cam-
brick, running along the whole length of the web” (351). It is this
inherited irregularity that makes Tristram a writer in the fantastic
mode: one who unwillingly turns the realistic narrative inside out in
order to interrogate psychic integration, rationality, and social order.
Had his vision been elaborated in a tragic register, its perversity
would have projected disintegration and despair as appropriate re-
sponses to the entropic pull toward the vacuity of meaning that is
death. But Sterne’s register is comic, and it is through humor that
Tristram actively engages the maddening disjunctions by which the
other characters are paralyzed. Unlike the other Shandy men, he
deploys his hobbyhorse to articulate his doubleness, producing an
ironic form of autobiographical self-reflection that acknowledges
while refusing psychic fragmentation. Recognizing that everyone’s
life is farcical, he believes that “it was ordained as a scourge upon
the pride of human wisdom, that the wisest of us all should thus
outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intem-
perate act of pursuing them” (284). The comic view that he enjoys
of others is for him but a version of the pleasure he derives from the
performance of himself: a performance in which he is both audience
and actor. Proliferating roles, he achieves a fullness of self-expression
that is experienced as subjective depth. And as subjectivity is for him
performance, so reality seems to be a construction that he is easily
able to revise.21
Representing subjectivity as performance, Sterne points to a rad-
ical indeterminacy that refuses gender difference and interrogates the
misogynistic urge that largely motivates and anchors the precarious
balances of his fiction. In his exploration of that sexual indetermi-
nacy, Sterne moves his fantastic project—sporadically and ambiva-
lently—beyond the merely comic into the self-transcendent space of
the sublime. Collapsing the Phallus into the always already col-
lapsed penis, Sterne, with Tristram, surrenders all claims to a uni-
versalized and mastering masculinity.22 But at the same time that he
renounces phallicism, he embraces a form of gendered subjectivity
that seeks to obliterate the oppositions of sexual difference while

paradoxically remaining male. The indeterminacy that he struggles
to embody in his text is grounded in a place outside of the Symbolic
order, in a supplementarity that is not controlled by reason, in an
excess that is not subordinate to paternal law. It is an indeterminacy
identified by some feminists (who share his focus, but not his per-
spective) with the suppressed body of the mother, with feminine
space, therefore, and with an erotic connection that is thought to
predate the primal rupture responsible for initiating difference and
differentiation.23 Julia Kristeva conceptualizes it as the semiotic (le
semiotique): an affective dimension of human experience that disrupts
the Symbolic, mediating between it and the primal experience of
infantile mentation that Jacques Lacan calls the Real.
In Tristram Shandy, Sterne draws on that unrepresentable space
both formally and thematically. He captures affectivity in the im-
mediacy of color, shape, and sound: in black, white, mottled, and
blank pages; in visual images of assorted kinds; in deletions, aster-
isks, and underlinings; and always in the omnipresent dash. Inter-
rogating the denotative function of language, Sterne emphasizes the
connotative richness of ironic ambiguity, of multiple references, and
of jokes and puns. Refusing the illusion of public time—the time of
the fathers, which is linear and death-directed—Sterne emphasizes
the synchronicity of an interior present characterized by repetition,
simultaneity, and cyclicality: a time that is for Kristeva women’s
time.24 Like Uncle Toby’s whistling, these are expressive strategies
which suggest that “little knowledge is got by mere words” and that
to achieve wisdom of a deeper sort it is necessary, as Tristram notes,
“to go to the first springs” (479). These strategies are part of a fan-
tastic discourse that, shaped by the eccentric consciousness of the
writer and available also to transgressive forms of reading, strives
to articulate the yearnings and frustrations of desire. When it is
sounded in a tragic register, that discourse reveals pathological states
of mind that lead to psychic disintegration and the destruction of the
social self. When it is played in comic tones, as in Tristram Shandy, it
is endlessly playful in its multiplicity and denial of hierarchical dif-
ference: it is a kind of exuberant speech that works to heal the
wounds inflicted in the Symbolic. Whether comic or tragic, this dis-
cursive form rejects the complementarity of sexual and gender dif-
ferences. So, while the tragic fantastic is rooted in the culturally
carved depths of an oppositional psychosexual division, its comic

counterpart—exemplified first by Sterne and later by Lacan—seeks
to obliterate that difference altogether by returning to (or projecting)
a prior psychic state. The urge to indeterminacy, which is expressed
by this nostalgic desire for return, speaks vividly to the conflict be-
tween psychological and cultural imperatives, which is intensified
under specific historical conditions. In Sterne’s and Lacan’s strikingly
ingenuous, historically distanced, yet surprisingly similar interven-
tions, the intransigence of the misogynistic construction of modern
subjectivity is revealed with a force that is no less disquieting for all
its comic energy and exuberance.
Although Sterne and Lacan position themselves quite differently
in relation to the phallic order with which they are obsessed, both
seek to define a subjectivity that has access to a self-transcendent and
transformative world beyond the phallus. Trapped in the opposi-
tional terms of the cultural symbolic, the two men describe the un-
gendered/gendered subjectivity of their fantasies both as fundamen-
tally male and as shaped by structures of knowledge and feeling that
they identify with, but paradoxically deny to, women. The elusive
theory that Lacan formulates to mask and to exploit this paradox is
similar to the fictive strategies that Sterne deploys on behalf of the
same interests. Extending his comic fantasy into the register of the
sublime, Lacan names as jouissance that state of self-transcendent be-
ing—excessive, suprasensible, intense—which is the object of his
own heroic quest. The term is equally appropriate in suggesting the
aspiration of the Shandean hero and the nature of the Sternean text.
Associated with the sexual moment that is always in excess, jouis-
sance is the plenitude that can only be achieved outside of the cycle
of desire that belongs to a phallic economy. Doomed always to be
listening, like Mrs. Shandy, unheard, behind the door, women are
said by Lacan to possess in their linguistic exclusion a supplemen-
tary jouissance that remains as mysterious to them as it is impenetra-
ble to men.25 In this, they are like the “good old God” to whom Lacan
also refers: without substance, merely reflecting surfaces that project
the (male) self back upon itself so that in loving God or women, men
must always love themselves.26 Searching for the integrity of tran-
scendence, men must put aside the phallic function that divides one
always into two and never reconstructs unity from division. “Short
of castration,” Lacan says, “man has no chance of enjoying the body
of the woman, in other words, of making love.”27 For him, male

jouissance cannot originate in the materiality of the body to which
women are un-self-reflectively confined. It is discoverable rather in
an erotics of immateriality which is the “outsidesex” (hors-sexe) rep-
resented by men’s “love” of an idea, for example, or a poem, or a
spiritual experience. For Lacan, those who go “beyond the phallus”
are mystics who put themselves on the side of the “not-all.” Their
souls are conjured not out of the heterosexual relation but out of the
hommosexual. They speak of love, which is a form of jouissance, and
bond lovingly with other men since it is “by their courage in bearing
this intolerable relation to the supreme being, that friends come to
recognize and choose each other.”28 Finally, these poetic, self-
transcending, mystical, and male-identified souls who appropriate
the roles of the woman and the God whom they have lost are ex-
emplified in the Master’s work: “Add the Ecrits of Jacques Lacan,
which is of the same order.”29
Add also to that order the Shandean comedy of Laurence Sterne—
with an important difference. Throughout Tristram Shandy, as we
have seen, Sterne reduces women to barely perceptible presences in
his text, placing them outside of language, denying them complex
subjectivities, describing them as lustful but making them incapable
of the hors-sexe to which he, with Lacan, assigns the highest value.
Appropriating as much of women’s reproductive function as he can,
Sterne denies their capacity to create culture or to make ethical judg-
ments based on empathic connection. And while women are more
visible in his two later works than they are in Tristram Shandy, they
exist in those works only as imaginary, idealized others, fueling but
not moving beyond the regressive cycle of desire. In the maudlin
Journal to Eliza and, with fuller consciousness, in A Sentimental Jour-
ney, Sterne reveals the solipsistic nature of the Imaginary phallic
function through which the other is both projected by and wor-
shipped as the self. Rejecting women’s subject status, Sterne—like
Lacan—seeks in the homosocial love of other men and, more cen-
trally, in the narcissistic love of self, the route to erotic self-
transcendence that defines the sublime in its comic fantastic form. It
is a quest that releases him into the “love” of the idea, not as truth
but as a form of self-creation; into art, as the exploitation of linguistic
multiplicity; and, unlike Lacan, into the immediacy of prelinguistic
space. Having said “no” to the idealized Phallus, having revealed
the fallacies of the phallic order and the finitude as well as the un-
knowability of the father’s name, Sterne seeks his jouissance partially
in a form of Lacanian “castration” that belongs to the carnivalesque
order of the penis/breast: “the same order” as that which structures
the Ecrits of Jacques Lacan, despite his protests to the contrary.30
This order, which functions at social and psychic levels, is both
potentially radical and insistently conservative. For Lacan, the con-
servative impulse always dominates, binding him to linguistic mean-
ing, the Phallus and, most importantly, the self. In the momentary
resolutions of his repetitious quest, the sublime urge is drawn back
into comedy, and mystical knowledge emerges from the ethereal
body of his work. For Sterne, the balance is more heavily weighted
by ambivalence, and the liberatory gesture is made continuously
available as excess. In the ambisexual aesthetic of his text,31 in his
thematic addiction to the pure affectivity of tears, and in his celebra-
tion of sentimentality as the ground of an empathic hommosexual con-
nection that undoes differentiation, Sterne unveils the Phallus as the
penis and hints at its symbolic relation to the maternal figure. In his
appropriation of the feminine, Sterne tries to transform the negations
of cultural and psychic loss into an impossible plenitude by releasing
the entombed body of the mother into the body of the text, by as-
suming as fantasist the function of the good and nourishing breast,
and by atoning for the reinscription of otherness by struggling to
magically undo the misogynistic knot. But the carnivalesque order
to which these strategies belong, while radical in its social critique
and its articulation of desire, is bound to the dominant discourse and
is limited, therefore, in its capacity for subversion. Social roles that
are playfully inverted still retain their symbolic cultural meaning.
The psychic fantasy of the penis/breast, as Melanie Klein suggests,
is not integrative but expressive of ambivalence. And while senti-
mentality encourages the expression of humane sympathy, it can also
maintain the social and psychological status quo, reinforcing the
feeling subject’s difference by insisting upon his superior moral
stance. So, too, while empathy allows the boundary between subject
and object to be momentarily suspended, it does yield readily to the
mirroring dynamic that claims and celebrates the self in the other’s
name: a form of solipsism exhibiting itself as virtue. Finally and fun-
damentally, while the androgynous performance, the sentimental
tear, and the erotics of empathic connection are all ultimately iden-
tified in Sterne’s fiction with the exclusion of the female subject, it is
her femininity that indelibly marks the male body, which is pre-
sented both as castrated and as polymorphously perverse.
The ultimate irony is that this master of irony, like his equally
masterful successor, should install the woman’s body firmly in the
space of indeterminacy, which the fantastic sublime must then strive
to embody and achieve on the basis solely of her exclusion. The
misogynistic text, like the form of feminist critique that is its mirror
image, perpetually reenacts a displacement that becomes the inevi-
table condition of compulsive reassertion. Once the maternal body
and the primal bond are identified specifically as originary points of
loss and self-transcendence, the anxiety of indeterminacy restricts the
power of the sublime motive along with its potential for subversive
change. In Sterne’s comic vision, women are the scapegoats who
must be cast out if the male community is to be reproduced and
reinforced. But in signaling the end of the Shandy line, his “cock and
bull” story suggests, at the level of realism, the profoundly antisocial
aspect of his comedy, which can then be no comedy at all.
It is in his repeated gesture toward the sublime that Sterne seeks,
perhaps unconsciously, to halt the unraveling of his comic form. Un-
like Lacan and very like Kristeva, Sterne continually emphasizes the
significance of an erotic affectivity that, underlying and resisting lan-
guage, is central to the construction of community. And although
the community that he wishes to construct is male, the aspiration
and the impulse are not gendered, and refuse the hierarchicalizations
of social difference. They are conceptualized in the mode of the fan-
tastic as lying at the core of a narcissistic subjectivity that, in its
yearning for nondifferentiation, undermines the stereotyping func-
tion of the civilizing process.32 In its tragic form, this sublime impulse
accepts aggressivity and violence as its proper mode and looks to-
ward death and dissolution. In its comic form, it answers to eros and
responds profoundly to the promise of jouissance. Even as Sterne’s
skepticism about the purity of the empathic motive grew, his faith
in its binding albeit fleeting power increased. In this, he was able to
point beyond cultural and personal misogyny, which his text so in-
tricately maps, to a space of indeterminacy that exists within the self.
It is in that space that he imagines the generation of an ethics of
connection that would not be restricted by the social law.33 If such

an erotic connection could be rewritten in the realistic mode, it
would facilitate the transcendence of oppressions born of difference
by linking the individual to what Sterne calls, in A Sentimental Jour-
ney, “the great Sensorium of the world.”34
4
Horace Walpole and
the Nightmare of History
With the notable exception of Moll Flanders, the texts examined in

the preceding chapters are structured through the interaction of re-
alistic and fantastic narratives. Their diverse bimodal patterns reveal
the complexities of modern consciousness in the process of defini-
tion—a consciousness stamped in part by the self’s appropriative
relation to others, in part by its uncanny haunting of itself. In Rob-
inson Crusoe, Roxana, Clarissa, and Tristram Shandy, powerful subjec-
tivist narratives suggest how the ideology of individualism con-
structs an internally divided, gendered subject, which is both
oppressed by and resistant to determinant social forces. Because
these narrative fragments are neither dominant nor sustained, they
disrupt, without finally threatening, the hegemonic values of the
texts. It was to the absence of an extended, interrogatory form that
Horace Walpole responded when he wrote and published The Castle
of Otranto in 1764. He was not interested in exploring both aspects
of modern self-awareness, as Laurence Sterne was doing in Tristram
Shandy. Instead, he wanted to shape an alternative kind of fiction
that would refuse the “boring” and “insipid” conventions that he
derided in the works of his contemporaries.1 He had no difficulty in
achieving that objective. Despite its glaring primitivity, his thor-
oughly eccentric “gothic story” was an immediate, and is a contin-
uing, success.2 The genre that it initiated dominated popular fiction
for the next sixty years, anticipating Romantic, modern, and post-
modern versions of the fantastic, all of which challenged the realistic
narratives and dominant ideologies that collaborated in their con-
struction.3
Although Walpole did produce an innovative interrogatory form,
it was not—nor could it have been—separate from the narrative
mode of which it provided a critique. As extreme as Walpole’s for-
mal strategies proved to be—and as bizarre as the story was that he
109
110 Walpole and the Nightmare of History
conceptualized—both strategies and story were necessarily molded

by the literary and cultural assumptions that they questioned. In
Walpole’s gothic, as in the fantastic generally, the symptom is not
present without the shadow of its cause, and patterns of interiority
are etched by the pressures of a culture that reflects, while repro-
ducing, the self’s dis-ease. Although the fantastic text buries its re-
alistic roots in much the same way that its realistic counterpart dis-
guises its fantastic subtexts, Walpole’s anti-hero—whose boundless
egotism it explores—can be seen to wear the face of realism’s aspir-
ing, heroic individual. In his perverted masculinity and incestuous
desire, in his false autonomy and outrageous greed, he is not differ-
ent from the subject whom capitalism and the sex-gender system
have combined to form. He is, rather, its monstrous parody. I read
his story—which for Walpole is the story of the father—at the inter-
section of realistic and fantastic modes, where the self is constructed
through its relation to others.
There is also a second fantastic narrative in The Castle of Otranto
and it demands a different reading. Here the rejected realm of the
socially symbolic is transformed into a claustral intrapsychic world
where the self that takes itself as object experiences the depth of its
own isolation, alienation, and despair. An articulation of solipsistic
self-awareness, this is the story of the son, and it is buried deep inside
the father’s story. It concerns the child’s melancholic obsession with
a traumatic loss that, irremediable, can never be forgotten or
mourned. Dim figures of fantasy move through its scenarios. Ges-
turing toward Walpole—as they do toward one another—they sug-
gest that their secrets belong, at the most profound level, to the au-
thorial mind. To disinter the secrets to which the text compulsively
returns, I place Otranto’s intrapsychic narrative in conversation with
its author’s biography, his fantastic tragedy—The Mysterious Mother—
and the gothic fictions of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, psy-
choanalytic theorists whose writings this originary gothic novel
seems uncannily to anticipate. The place from which the second
reading emanates is a place at which fiction, autobiography, and
theory all converge.
Centering that which has been excluded from dominant myths of

the cultural symbolic, fantastic narratives deconstruct the boundaries
Walpole and the Nightmare of History 111
that separate legitimated elements of the hegemonic culture from

their illegitimate others (e.g., the integrated from the fragmented self,
sanity from madness, rationality from irrationality, social sameness
from difference, and defined from indeterminate meanings). The
gothic novel shares in this larger deconstructive project, mediating
between an older romance tradition, whose metaphysical and social
assumptions it cannot share, and an emergent tradition of the fan-
tastic, which is overtly psychological in perspective. From that in-
termediary location, gothic texts portray the horrifying emptiness of
a secularized world. Representing irrational impulses, they do not
claim access to a higher integrative truth but attest to meanings that
elude language and analysis. For a cosmos composed of interlocking
segments hierarchically arranged, they substitute a disjunctive uni-
verse in which secrets of the past impose themselves upon a fearful
and bewildered present. In the place of an open, permeable soul,
which anchored an earlier analogical order, they insert a form of
consciousness that is self-enclosed. Resisting the recognition of
death’s materiality, they reinvent immortality in the ghosts that stalk
their pages, and their need to project and exorcise those apparitions
reflects the deep ambivalence with which their effort is invested.
Supernatural presences in late-eighteenth-century texts reflect the
remystifying urge of a demystified world. The inhabitants of that
world sought a new form of transcendence in the intense experience
of sublimity. When Burke theorized the sublime, identifying it si-
multaneously with the perceived object, the perceptual occurrence,
the sensible body, and the perceiving mind, he signaled his assump-
tion of a paradigm brought into being by modern self-awareness. It
is a paradigm that places the self and its experience at the center of
knowledge, a place that God had occupied before. Seeking to iden-
tify with a transcendent force, which the imagination projects and
then discovers, the self dissolves the boundaries between signifier
and signified, subject and object, and external and interior realities.
In the positive moment of the sublime, the secular and alienated
individual seeks and momentarily finds, in the power of the uncon-
ditioned, a compensation for vacuity and loss. When successful, the
effort culminates in the experience that Kant described as a union
of reason and imagination, and that Freud theorized as sublimation:
the alliance of the superego and the ego.4 When sublimation fails,
the self—which is overwhelmed by the possibility of its own
appropriation—turns back upon itself, discovering that the threat-

ening vastness without mirrors a frightening absence within.5 In de-
fense against the anxiety aroused, the ideal of power is internalized
as conscience, and the painful burden of modern self-awareness is
increased.6 Terror, guilt, and melancholy mark this negative moment
of the sublime, as the torments of Crusoe, Roxana, Lovelace, and
even Tristram testify. Experienced intrapsychically, the negative sub-
lime shapes the past into fantastic narratives that concern uncon-
strained desire, the phantasmatic family, and the alienated self. Often
focused on the secret of incest, those narratives subordinate the urge
for transcendence to the lure of transgression, and place the demands
of primitive narcissism over the family’s social function.
Writing in the spirit of the negative sublime, Walpole established
a specific link between the supernatural and the psychological when
he explained in a letter to a friend that the inspiration for his fiction
was given him in a dream:
I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream,

of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an an-
cient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with
Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-
case I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and
began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say
or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add
that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics—In
short I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less
than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had
drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the
morning.7
As he recognized, the surreal dream image drew on his intense fan-

tasies about the Middle Ages and referred specifically to a staircase
at Strawberry Hill, the miniature, baroque castle he had constructed
on the skeleton of a modest structure, which became his home and
his obsession.8 As Walpole describes it, the dream that transported
him from the realities of his life moved him to a form of automatic
writing that was neither consciously nor rationally motivated. In the
creative process, he developed characters and themes that spoke to
him of matters profoundly personal in nature. In this merging of
dream, fantasy, and art, he established a model for those who would
later write in and theorize the tradition he established.
At first glance, The Castle of Otranto seems anything but personal.

Its complicated plot is the stuff of fairy tale, while the speech and
behavior of its characters seem sufficiently mannered to be parodic.
As in fairy tale, however, disturbing insights into the personal and
social forces by which the subject is constructed are encoded into the
naive conventions of the fiction. Crude motivations point beyond
themselves to transgressive desires, and a disjunctive, associational
structure suggests the illogic of fantasy and dream. Tragic in theme
and often comic in effect, the fiction suggests an unrestrained plea-
sure in the primal and forbidden, which is reminiscent of the uncen-
sored playfulness of a child. A summary of the story, while defying
all attempts at brevity, is essential to an analysis of the fiction’s un-
derlying purposes and themes. The tale begins on the fifteenth birth-
day of Conrad, the son of Manfred, prince of Otranto. It is the day
on which Conrad is to wed Isabella, and it proves also to be the day
on which he is killed, crushed by a gigantic helmet that is topped
by a “mountain of sable plumes.” Without much ado—and with no
sign of mourning—Manfred, who has always “doted” on his only
son, decides to put aside his now-sterile wife Hippolita in order to
take Isabella as his bride. His declared purpose is to ensure the con-
tinuation of his “race” through the production of other sons, thereby
evading the mysterious prophesy by which he is haunted: “That the
castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family,
whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it”
(15–16).
Theodore, a young peasant, recognizes the deadly helmet as one
that is missing from the statue of Alfonso the Good in the church of
St. Nicholas. Outraged by the boy’s claim, Manfred accuses Theodore
of necromancy and orders that the helmet be transformed into the
young man’s prison. Through the inattention of the guards, Theo-
dore escapes and is able to rescue Isabella as she flees from the lech-
erous prince. Isabella falls in love with Theodore who, in turn, falls
in love with Mathilda, the daughter whom Manfred despises be-
cause she is merely a woman. When Manfred realizes that Theodore
has helped Isabella to evade him, he condemns him to death. Father
Jerome is summoned to perform the last rites and, seeing the mark
of a bloody arrow on the boy’s arm, recognizes him as the son who,
kidnapped by corsairs at the age of five, had been taken to Algiers
with his mother, who subsequently died (81). Manfred pardons
Theodore, expecting that Jerome will reciprocate by participating in

his conspiracy against Hippolita and Isabella.
Meanwhile, amid much fanfare and bearing an enormous saber,
Frederic, marquis of Vicenza, returns from a pilgrimage he had taken
after the death in childbirth of his wife, Isabella’s mother. It is Fred-
eric’s intention to reclaim his daughter, whom Manfred had bribed
away from her guardians. As a relative of Alfonso the Good, Frederic
wants also to wrench the principality of Otranto from Manfred, who
had inherited it from his own father, the son of a chamberlain to
whom Alfonso had bequeathed his estates when he died in the Holy
Land. Although Manfred has been unsuccessful in his attempts to
strengthen his position by marrying Isabella, his hopes are rekindled
when Frederic becomes enamored of Mathilda. Those hopes are fi-
nally dashed when he inadvertently stabs and kills his daughter. The
castle walls are then thrown down, revealing the immense form of
Alfonso the Good at the center of the ruins. Ordering them all to
“Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso,” the specter ascends
to heaven in a “blaze of glory” as the clouds part and St. Nicholas
appears (108). The time has arrived for the full disclosure of secrets
and the fulfillment of prophesies. Exclaiming that “I pay the price of
usurpation for all” (109), Manfred admits that Alfonso had been poi-
soned by his grandfather, Ricardo, who had then drawn up a ficti-
tious will. For his part, Jerome reveals that on the way to the Holy
Land, Alfonso had fallen in love with and secretly married Victoria,
with whom he had a daughter who ultimately became Jerome’s wife.
Theodore therefore inherits the principality of Otranto through the
bloodline of his unnamed mother. The recognition of Theodore’s no-
bility quiets the “long-restless Prince’s shade,” which had “grown
too large to inhabit” the castle. Manfred abdicates, he and Hippolita
join neighboring convents, and Isabella marries the melancholy
Theodore, who seems terminally overwhelmed by Mathilda’s loss.
The supernatural saturates the text, but its effects, while occasion-
ally impressive, seem largely superficial and gratuitous. The enor-
mous shade of Alfonso dominates, as it is assembled piece by piece
throughout the story along with its baroque appurtenances. There
is a helmet with black plumes waving in punctuation of events, a
gigantic armored foot and leg, a huge saber, and finally an enormous
armored hand that lies “upon the uppermost bannister of the great
stairs”: the vision that had initially haunted Walpole’s dream. In ad-
dition to these fragmented, symbolic body parts, the text is filled

with the supernatural’s familiar visual and aural portents: mysteri-
ous sighs, disembodied groans, creaking door hinges, and wavering
candles. A portrait of Ricardo falls off the wall, sighing and heaving
its breast before “coming to life” as a ghost. There are the dark,
subterranean passages of a sort that decades of frightened heroines
will scurry along, and ubiquitous trapdoors that promise and even
sometimes deliver escape. Perhaps most inventively, when it appears
that Frederic will wed Mathilda and waive his claim to Otranto, three
drops of blood fall gloomily from the nose of Alfonso’s statue. Al-
though the text’s substantial labors ultimately produce the operatic
scene of Alfonso’s declaration and ascension, many of its omens (su-
pernatural and otherwise) point nowhere. So, after climbing down
from his portrait, the ghost of Ricardo disappears into a chamber of
the castle, locking the door behind him so that the pursuing Manfred
is left without a place to go. Isabella flees in terror through the lab-
yrinthine passage, comes to no harm, and easily finds an exit. Theo-
dore escapes imprisonment because the guards forget to guard him,
and rumors of Hippolita’s death prove both unfounded and irrele-
vant to the plot. The anticlimactic nature of these and other se-
quences call the fiction’s seriousness of purpose into question at the
same time that the story’s often powerful, hallucinatory quality con-
veys a contradictory sense that significant meanings may lie in less
obvious places.9
Walpole’s statements of artistic purpose do not provide the desired
clarification, since they contradict one another while contravening
the actual practice of the novelist. Walpole insists on his fidelity to
the tragic unities, for example, even though a mixture of tragic,
comic, and romantic perspectives is reflected in the fiction’s deploy-
ment of language, as well as in its representation of character and
plot.10 And although Walpole claims complete originality and imag-
inative freedom, he locates himself firmly in a Shakespearean tra-
dition upon which he draws and which he also uses to justify his
aesthetic choices. Additionally, he describes elements of style that
seem to the reader primitive and naive as aspects of a sophisticated
and self-conscious strategy. So while he intends “to blend the . . .
ancient and the modern” in his novel, he leaves “the powers of fancy
at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention” in
the creation of situation, “conduct[ing] the mortal agents in [the]
drama according to the rules of probability . . . mak[ing] them think,

speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would
do in extraordinary positions.”11 His desire to achieve a defensible
realistic effect in a fundamentally fantastic fiction is surprising
enough, but even more surprising is the identification of his success
with a bombastic, massively inconsistent anti-hero and a group of
stereotypical and one-dimensional proper ladies. Indeed, the “typi-
cal” romance that Walpole disparages in his critical comments—one
in which “an improbable event never fails to be attended by an ab-
surd dialogue”12 —is precisely the kind of romance that he manages,
at least superficially, to reproduce.
Certainly Walpole was more ambivalent about the relative value
of realistic and fantastic strategies than he confessed or might have
recognized. But whatever the reasons for that ambivalence might
have been, his preference for the fantastic was clearly governed by
the exigencies of his psychic life. His approach to history illustrates
the nature of his strong subjectivist urge. Although he was obsessed
with things medieval, his obsession was rooted not in the records of
antiquity that occupied him as a scholar, but in the political and
cultural circumstances of his time and in the emotional weather by
which he was buffeted. As the miniature gothic castle, which he con-
verted from a coachman’s cottage on the Thames, was an outra-
geously eccentric personal indulgence and an expression of the his-
torical revivalism of members of his set, his representations of the
Middle Ages—of class and gender relations, patriarchy, and the
Catholic Church—were all stamped by a nostalgia configured in a
desiring and disillusioned present. On one level, Walpole tried to
negotiate the intrapsychic conflicts of his childhood through the in-
teractions of the characters he projected. On another, he looked back
with longing—although not without ambivalence—to continuities
that were grounded in the linked hierarchical structures of a patri-
archalism lost in 1688. Inconsistent in his politics, Walpole was a
Whig who flaunted his hatred of authority. Although he kept copies
of the Magna Carta and the warrant for the execution of Charles I
beside his bed, he became a dedicated, even a fanatic royalist when
the French Revolution brought radicalism too close to home. Unlike
his father, Walpole did not accept the Enlightenment narrative that
celebrated a progressive present that had broken with a retrograde
past. In his novel, the sins of the fathers, which are visited on the
sons, are eighteenth-century crimes against property and excesses of
possessive individualism that lead to the instrumentalization and
objectification of others. Walpole’s was a conservative, Burkean view
of society as materialistic, alienated, and individualistic. It could only
redeem itself through the active recovery of traditions that it embod-
ied but experienced as lost.13 As Walpole struggled to work through
personal and social dilemmas, he invented a version of the past that
the present had surrealistically engraved. From this temporal hybrid
emerged a nightmarish narrative that was simultaneously radical
and conservative at the social level and, at the psychological level,
was a projection of his own intense fantasies.
Because The Castle of Otranto was shaped by a strong subjectivist
perspective, many of its strategies were anticipated by fantastic ele-
ments in the mixed-genre texts that have already been explored. So
Walpole’s novel might be seen to present a melodramatic version of
the comic critique of Enlightenment values found in Tristram Shandy.
Like Sterne’s fiction, it denies the transparency of language and con-
textualizes it as style, which can be manipulated because it is con-
ventional. Rejecting reason as the arbiter of artistic and social values,
Otranto—like Shandy—propounds the superiority of the imagination
and unveils the strength of obsession and desire. Although mind
supplants society as the text’s ultimate point of reference, the self is
not master in its own house, as Freud would subsequently observe
about the ego. The fragmented and conflicted psyche is held up by
Walpole as the perverse mirror image of the consistent and coherent
self; solipsism is revealed as the other side of individualism, and
madness is a frightening specter hovering at one edge of sanity. Scat-
tering the severed pieces of Alphonso’s armored body through his
text, Walpole—like Sterne and Richardson—reveals the infantile fear
of dispersal, which threatens realism’s myth of physical wholeness
and impermeability. Substituting the supernatural for the religious,
representing fathers as absent or impotent and the inheritance of
power as corrupt, Walpole questions, as does Sterne, the root as-
sumptions of a belief system that upholds patriarchal power and
authority. Exploring the nature of male subjectivity, both inad-
vertently unmask the psychological costs imposed by the social sys-
tem of gender difference. Finally, like Sterne’s ironic narrative and
Richardson’s epistolary novel, Walpole’s gothic fiction demands an

active reader who experiences the frustration of an open text and
participates in the perpetual making and unmaking of its meaning.
In its depiction of Manfred, The Castle of Otranto follows in the
fantastic tradition that was inaugurated by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe
and elaborated by Richardson in Clarissa. Like Lovelace, Manfred is
the possessive individual who is motivated by unbounded egotism
and a false belief in his own autonomy. Trapped on the desert island
of the self, he is paranoid in his relation to others, whom he attempts
to use instrumentally. Since there is no elsewhere from which he can
perceive himself, he is a narcissist, like Heinz Kohut’s: hollow rather
than self-satisfied. Like the fantastic Crusoe and Lovelace, Manfred
is a cluster of responses and a chaos of feelings. Multiple and diffuse,
he is also inconsistent. He doesn’t mourn the death of Conrad, whom
he is said to have loved dearly, for example, but seizes the event as
an opportunity to claim his son’s fiancée as the mother of his future
sons. Telling Isabella that he “hope[s] in a few years to have reason
to rejoice” at Conrad’s demise, he reassures her that “[i]nstead of a
sickly boy, you shall have a husband in the prime of his age” (22).
Typically, when he feels “shame” and “returning love” at his wife’s
“tenderness and duty,” he “curb[s] the yearnings of his heart” so that
“[t]he next transition of his soul was to [an] exquisite villainy” (34),
which makes him insist that Hippolita divorce him and pander with
Isabella on his behalf. Walpole reassures the reader that “Manfred
was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unpro-
voked. . . . [H]is temper . . . was naturally humane; and his virtues
were always ready to operate, when his passion did not obscure his
reason” (30). Since Manfred is always motivated by his passions,
however, his humanity is little in evidence, and he functions through
much of the novel at a high level of hysteria that serves to feminize
him, as Lovelace is also feminized. Without boundaries, Manfred,
like Lovelace, perceives others as aspects of himself—roles to be as-
sumed and selves to be used and then discarded. Indeed, Walpole
seems to have conceptualized his other characters from Manfred’s
perspective—and it is this that partially accounts for their apparent
primitivity. With the exception of Walpole’s anti-hero, who looms
over the text, each of the central characters is interchangeable with
others who occupy a similar relationship to Manfred’s desire: Ma-
thilda, Isabella, and Hippolita form one group; Theodore is increas-
ingly identified with Alfonso; and the stories of Frederic and Jerome
emerge as versions of one another, as they are also versions of Man-
fred’s story, which contains them.
Although The Castle of Otranto is ostensibly a political fiction that
advocates legitimate succession and the reinstatement of an older
socioeconomic order, it is essentially concerned (like all gothic nov-
els) with intrafamilial relations that determine the origins and de-
velopment of the self.14 For this reason, the succession crisis proves
to be a problem of power between father and son, with Manfred’s
dilemma a variant of Crusoe’s predicament. Driven to secure his
place as patriarch, Manfred competes with Conrad, who will inevi-
tably displace him but is also crucial to his immortality: the repro-
duction of his bloodline, his property, and his political authority.
Like Defoe, Walpole poses an imaginary resolution to the father’s
quandary. If Manfred can marry Isabella after Conrad’s death, he
will symbolically become his own son, as well as a begetter of sons
who can always be supplanted in the repetition of a deathly oedipal
fantasy that is conceptualized from the paternal position. Like Love-
lace, who wants to father Clarissa’s child, whom he also wishes to
be, Manfred seeks to consolidate the present, past, and future in him-
self. Because the patriarchal identities of father and prince have lost
divine legitimacy in Walpole’s eighteenth-century world, only futile
parodies of authority are available. Everything that Manfred does to
strengthen his position moves him further from control and deeper
into chaotic forms of competition. The gap that has opened between
men’s idealized and real power (a gap implied by Richardson and
made explicit by Sterne) is exemplified by the emptiness of Man-
fred’s shifting social identities and by his tragic destruction of the
family, which should guarantee the perpetuation of his “house.”
Manfred perceives his family to be the site and instrument of his
influence, its members valued in proportion to their advancement of
his sexual, economic, and political ambitions. Because Conrad both
blocks and facilitates his desires, he is at once threatening and pre-
cious. Because women are without significance in themselves, but
can be used biologically and materially, they are completely inter-
changeable. So, when Hippolita no longer serves his needs, Manfred
simply discards her. Because Mathilda cannot extend his bloodline,
he treats her with cruel indifference. When he recognizes that he
might be able to trade her to Frederic in exchange for Isabella and
the security of his dynastic position, his interest in her flickers. When
that plan fails, the small flame of his attention is extinguished. Al-
though he kills her accidentally, the murder has a psychic logic that
reveals the hostility with which his continual assertion of masculine
difference is invested.
The women in Walpole’s fiction emerge as proper ladies who have
been flattened, even more than proper ladies usually are, by the
weight of Manfred’s misogyny. Without agency, they are—like Mrs.
Shandy—deprived of distinguishing forms of subjectivity. Although
Theodore believes himself to have fallen in love with Mathilda, he
cannot distinguish her from Isabella; and when Manfred wants to
murder Isabella because he is unable to claim her, he kills his daugh-
ter by mistake. In the social world of Otranto, the value of women
is determined by their sexual function: as virgins, Mathilda and Is-
abella can be traded, sold and ravished; as a legitimate wife who has
passed child-bearing age, Hippolita is a useless commodity. All three
try to protect themselves from Manfred’s rages, with Hippolita and
Mathilda playing masochist to his sadist. Accepting the hierarchy
that places him at the top and herself at the bottom, Hippolita insists
that “our husbands and fathers must decide for us” (66), and deploys
willed ignorance to reinforce a safe passivity. As wife and mother,
she not only submits to male power but aligns herself with it, as Mrs.
Harlowe does. She offers herself as “the first sacrifice” to Manfred’s
avariciousness and lust, agreeing to their divorce and vowing to
withdraw to a monastery. At the same time, she collaborates with
her husband, who “is dearer to me even than my children” (21),
playing the pimp for him with Isabella as she also does, on his behalf,
for Frederic with Mathilda. Her “delicacy of conscience” is the fe-
male counterpart of Manfred’s moral evil; she turns it back upon
herself as guilt and doesn’t draw upon it as a catalyst for action. Like
Clarissa’s mother, Hippolita tries to socialize her daughter so that
she will accept her own economic and sexual oppression. More mal-
leable than Clarissa, Mathilda refuses to harbor a thought without
her mother’s permission, is the epitome of female respectability in
her interactions with Theodore, and with her dying breath begs her
murderous father’s forgiveness. Like Clarissa, she wishes to escape
patriarchal control by entering a convent, which mirrors the family’s
institutional structure but would exempt her from the exigencies of
her body. Wisely, she falls in love not with a man but with an image:
the portrait of Alfonso, which anticipates, while avoiding, the ma-

terial likeness of the prince. Of all the women in the novel, only
Isabella (like Anna Howe) dares to acknowledge and act upon her
own desire. Admitting that she “had conceived little affection” for
the feminized Conrad, she is not sorry when he is killed (16). She
gossips with Mathilda’s maid about the attractions of young men,
falls openly in love with Theodore, and persists in her flight from
Manfred, even when her actions countermand her father’s orders.
Because Walpole, like Richardson, cannot accommodate this degree
of independence, Isabella is finally folded into the respectable Ma-
thilda, whose surrogate she becomes in the melancholy marriage
with which the novel concludes.
Still, despite the clear hegemony of the gendered division of labor
in the novel’s realistic strain, the relation of private and public
spheres emerges as more complicated than it might at first appear.
The channels of intrafamilial power are revealed to run in more than
one direction, and the libidinal energy that courses through them
produces strong undercurrents of resistance. The force required to
ensure hierarchical difference reflects the potency of a fact that the
fiction cannot completely disguise: that men never reproduce them-
selves alone, but always require the mediation of women. This means
that they cannot be certain of their own paternity and that their rights
and obligations as fathers are never clear. This is the truth that is
woven into the repetitious pattern of male anxiety that shapes The
Castle of Otranto, as it also helps to shape Tristram Shandy and Clarissa.
At the most obvious level, that anxiety is revealed in the shape of
father-child relations. Aside from Manfred, whose fears produce the
lethal connection to his son and daughter that is centered in the text,
all of the paternal figures have fled the families they have founded,
and all have lived as strangers to their offspring. The narratives of
Jerome, Frederic, and Alfonso begin with conception and abandon-
ment, and end with return only when the forsaken infants (or her
descendent, in Alfonso’s case) have reached maturity, and the mother
is safely dead.
Manfred’s tragic relation to his son has a comic variant in Jerome’s
relation to Theodore. Manfred indirectly causes Conrad’s death,
bringing destruction down upon his own house with the aggressive
assertion of his illegitimate claim. More, in his wooing of Isabella he
exposes the murderous depths of his competitive motive. In a partial
mirroring of the Manfred plot, Jerome nearly causes Theodore’s

death when he “sows the seeds of jealousy” in the prince’s mind,
falsely confirming Manfred’s belief in an amorous connection be-
tween the boy and Isabella (50–51). Because Jerome is represented as
a good man rather than an anti-hero, his aggression, while acknowl-
edged, is tempered by a comic resolution. Once he has recognized
Theodore as his child, he persuades Manfred to spare the young
man’s life and establishes a filial connection to him that, rooted in
psychological debt rather than biology, is similar to the bond that
Crusoe establishes with Friday. Still, the fact that Jerome recognizes
Theodore’s birthmark and not Theodore himself suggests the extent
of the distance that has separated the two.
If the alienation of fathers from their sons is associated, through
Manfred and Jerome, with a deadly competition that erupts in the
older man when the boy achieves maturity, the relation of fathers to
their daughters is given a disturbing sexual reference. In the dy-
namic between Manfred and Frederic, on one side, with Mathilda
and Isabella on the other, the text explores a structure of desire that
is insistently—if obliquely—incestuous. The shifting perspectives of
the text cause the two women to seem interchangeable so that the
courtship of one appears to be a screen for the courtship of the other.
At the most obvious level, Isabella is constructed as Manfred’s
daughter, both a sister and a substitute for Mathilda. So the prince’s
angry assertion to Jerome that “I am [Isabella’s] parent . . . and de-
mand her” (47) earns the monk’s rejoinder that “by me thou art
warned not to pursue the incestuous design on thy contracted
daughter” (47–48). The fact that Isabella is chosen by Manfred to
supplant Hippolita, her surrogate mother, further reinforces the in-
trafamilial reference, as does the similarity between Frederic’s rela-
tion to Isabella, whom he has not seen since her birth, and his relation
to Mathilda, who incites his lust at their first meeting. Finally, the
way in which the marriage of Theodore and Isabella, which is a
marriage of cousins, repeats the pattern established by Manfred and
Hippolita, who are related “in the fourth degree,” indicates the in-
evitably asocial and endogamous nature of the gothic family (47).
The structure of desire that shapes The Castle of Otranto replicates,
in an exaggerated and simplified form, the configuration of longing
that Richardson, in Clarissa, painstakingly explores. Pornographic in
its construction of women as the objects of an aggressively control-
ling and even violent sexuality, Walpole’s novel suggests the com-
pulsory and misogynistic character of heterosexual relations under
patriarchal capitalism. Without material resources, women have few
alternatives to marriage and know—as Mathilda’s maid suggests—
“that a bad husband is better than no husband at all” (18). For men,
who have legal and economic power over women, villainy incurs no
costs. This form of erotic domination, which is rooted in the larger
inequities of the sex-gender system, extends beyond the married cou-
ple to define the libidinal structure of the bourgeois family. Situated
somewhere between Lovelace and the Harlowe males, Manfred is
the possessive individual who, seeking to appropriate others as as-
pects of his monstrously inflated self, articulates his needs through
the family he eroticizes. In him (as in the gothic generally) the urge
for the libertine sublime takes an ironic turn that makes him search
for the nihilistic energy and affective excesses of a transgressive sex-
uality at home.15 Just as the competitive father who saves his son’s
life appropriates the maternal role while affirming his patriarchal
power, so the incestuous father recuperates his tenuous relation to
his daughter while he organizes that relation safely, in terms of his
domination and her submission.
The need for recuperation that grows out of the alienation of fa-
thers from their children can be seen to motivate the text’s obsessive
return to the incest theme. The reason for that alienation is repressed
by the fiction until the last possible moment, when it becomes clear
that Theodore has inherited the principality of Otranto from the un-
named daughter of Victoria and Alfonso. It is then that the ultimate
authority of the maternal bloodline emerges as the foundational ex-
planation of the patriarch’s vulnerability and anxiety. It casts an
ironic shadow on all of Manfred’s machinations, explaining the vir-
ulence of his competition with Conrad and the intensity of his desire
for Isabella. It suggests that the father seeks to legitimate his claim
of paternity, which is never more than notional, through the arro-
gation of power in intrafamilial relations and the exhibition of social
authority. It is because he cannot prove himself to be the father of
any that Manfred wants to be the father and lover of all. To this end,
he seeks (like Jerome) to displace his son and (with Frederic) tries to
become the lover/husband of his daughter. Because he needs to con-
trol the female sexuality that can both legitimate and invalidate him,
he struggles desperately to prevent the departure of Mathilda/
Isabella from the family. Killing his daughter, he unwittingly ends

the repetitious cycle of illicit desire and enacts the destruction of his
“house.” Although his downfall leads to the restoration of the aris-
tocracy, the novel’s conclusion does little to affirm the renewed
power of an authority inherited through the male. With Manfred
withdrawn to a monastery; Alfonso, the benevolent despot, in
heaven; and Theodore, the noble hero, in a state of psychic collapse,
the fiction suggests that political authority cannot be legitimated in
a desacralized society any more than the patriarch’s supremacy
within the family can be other than a screen for the hidden power
of the mother.
This reading of The Castle of Otranto has emphasized the realistic

strain within the fantastic narrative. It tells the story of the father:
the lustful, ambitious, and also paranoid individual, whose misog-
yny reflects the culture’s anxiety about the mother’s reproductive
power. It is only a partial reading, since the father’s story veils a
crucial second narrative: the narrative of the son who has been raised
in the family shaped collaboratively by possessive individualism and
the modern sex-gender system. Constructed through the strategies
of fantasy and dream, the son’s story tells of estrangement from an
aggressive and competitive father and of separation from a mother
who, in her difference, is both desired and feared. At the deepest
level, the son’s is a story of feelings that cannot be articulated in
language and longings that society cannot contain. Fundamentally,
it is a story of melancholic loss.
In its representation of pervasive melancholia, Walpole’s narrative
of the son speaks most provocatively to the relation of interpsychic
to intrapsychic events: the transformation of the social individual
into the psychological subject and of the realistic into the fantastic
mode. In its metaphors and symbolic structures, that narrative pre-
figures and is illuminated by Abraham and Torok’s speculations
about the connection of desire to traumatic deprivation.16 Like Wal-
pole, Abraham and Torok employ gothic metaphors to describe
states of affectivity that language cannot capture. They seek to name
the unnameable secrets that block signification, and they read
through ambiguous symptoms to identify disorders of individuals,
collectivities, and cultures. Like Walpole, they write compelling fic-
tions of multiple and “encrypted” selves and create ghost stories of

“phantoms” that haunt families across generations and through his-
tory. Developing a fantastic discourse that preserves the mysteries
that it struggles to investigate, Abraham and Torok implicitly sug-
gest how the process of subjectification is related to narrative form.
In developing their far-reaching and multilayered conception of
melancholia, Abraham and Torok respond to the contradictions that
emerge from a comparative reading of Freud’s “Mourning and Mel-
ancholia” with The Ego and the Id. In the earlier essay, Freud clearly
distinguishes the normal, conscious process of mourning from the
unconscious and pathological process of melancholia. He contends
that in mourning, the ego detaches its libidinal energies from the
love object it has lost so that, by redirecting those energies, it is able
to love again. In melancholia, the ego cannot transfer desire to an-
other, but identifies with the abandoned or abandoning object that—
in a mimicry of primary narcissism—it becomes. In this way, the love
object, which is introjected as a permanent structure of identity, is
rescued from annihilation, and the subject does not have to confront
its feelings of bereavement.17 In The Ego and the Id, melancholia—
which has been defined as pathological in the first essay—is rede-
fined as normal. Here Freud argues that because it is the sole process
through which the ego can survive the deprivation of its object
choices, introjection is a fundamental strategy in the construction of
the self.18
Abraham and Torok mediate between Freud’s earlier and later
positions. They differentiate sharply between mourning and mel-
ancholia, as Freud had done initially, but they reassign to incorpo-
ration many of the functions that he had assigned to introjection. At
the same time, they identify the strategies belonging to both pro-
cesses as central to subjectification. In their view, introjection enables
the ego’s continuous process of self-fashioning by advancing psychic
growth, creativity, and symbolization. Its role is to transform “in-
stinctual promptings into desires and fantasies of desire, making
them fit to receive a name and the right to exist and to unfold in the
objectal sphere.”19 For Abraham and Torok, it is introjection that fa-
cilitates mourning while incorporation blocks the introjective process
and produces melancholia in its place. Essentially conservative and
narcissistic, incorporation is considered to be not a process but a
“specific kind of fantasy,” which strives to preserve the psychic
status quo by “transform[ing] the world rather than inflict[ing] in-

jury on the subject.”20 The individual who enacts this fantastic form
of “preservative repression” internalizes or “swallows” the love ob-
ject, whom she or he is then doomed to “become.”21
Rooted in infancy, introjection and incorporation mark and are
marked by the vicissitudes associated with the earliest experiences
of differentiation and primal loss. The model of introjection is estab-
lished when the infant learns “to fill the emptiness of its mouth with
words,” which symbolize and transcend the absence of the mother’s
body—an act of naming that inaugurates the entry of the child into
society.22 When introjection is incomplete, however, or when depri-
vation is too traumatic to be acknowledged, language is refused and
the empty space, which is the condition of speech and signification,
becomes the tomb in which the lost object is encrypted. Thereafter,
whenever the self is plunged into a state of “inexpressible mourn-
ing,” it resorts to this same “magical” but dangerous resolution.
Rewriting Freud’s theory of melancholic introjection as a theory
of incorporation, Abraham and Torok revise the psychic topography
that Freud had mapped. As Freud describes it, the unconscious
“complex” of melancholia “behaves like an open wound drawing to
itself cathected energy on all sides . . . and draining the ego until it
is utterly depleted.”23 Appropriating Freud’s powerful metaphor,
Abraham and Torok find this to be “precisely . . . the wound the mel-
ancholic attempts to hide, wall in, and encrypt”; but they place both
the wound and its “counter-investments” not in the unconscious but
in the preconscious-conscious system. There it is isolated from the
rest of the psyche, “especially from the memory of what had been
torn from it.”24 Through this activity of “inclusion” or “preservative
repression,” a “supplemental topography” is formed: a cyst created
that protects while signaling the secret of the haunted subject.
Abraham and Torok’s theory of incorporation has significant im-
plications for their own broader theorization of fantasy and for a
larger theory of the melancholic text. Although in an early essay
Torok argues that fantasies irrupt into consciousness as symptoms
that seek expression through the introjective process, the fantasy of
incorporation—which is both conscious and not conscious, articu-
lated and unspeakable—has to be narrativized in quite a different
way.25 Indeed, it might be said that fantasies which stimulate adap-
tive introjection are represented in realism’s narrative mode and gen-
res, while the melancholic fantasy is encrypted into the enigmatic

genres of the fantastic. The melancholic strain of the fantastic text
functions to reproduce the structure and strategy of preservative re-
pression, revealing the mysteries of illegitimate burial in coded
terms. In The Castle of Otranto, the fantastic narrative contains just
such an encrypted text: the story of the son, which is entombed
within the father’s story.
In his preface to the first edition of his fiction, Walpole writes:
“Though the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors
imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is
founded on truth. The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle”
(5). The “truth” of his invention is the dream that he identifies as the
fiction’s origin, and the “real castle” is both his flamboyant home on
the Thames and the psychic crypt that holds his secret. As W. S.
Lewis has observed, by presenting himself as a melancholic dreamer,
Walpole suggests that Theodore and Manfred represent diverse as-
pects of himself.26 In this way, he denies the prince his autonomy as
a character and recasts him as an intrapsychic projection. To the ex-
tent that he does conceptualize Manfred as the father played by the
son, Walpole exposes as his own desire Manfred’s wish to be both
father and son and identifies a central strategy of the fantastic. By
constructing a narrative that functions like a hall of mirrors, reflect-
ing him back to himself in multiple, distorted, and elusive shapes,
Walpole initiates a fantastic novelistic tradition that explores a di-
vided subjectivity connected mysteriously, but unmistakably, to the
unconscious of its author.27
Because Walpole reveals himself to be the ghost that haunts his
text, he makes us want to pierce his shadowy presence, reading
through the fantasist to the fantasy in order to identify the desires
by which his various stage settings are configured. Although Wal-
pole was a prodigious writer, the mass of his work does not betray
the mysteries of his psychic life. Conceiving himself to be a chroni-
cler of his time, he translated personal into social history in memoirs,
histories, notebooks, essays, and thousands of letters, all of which
were narrated in the realistic mode.28 For evidence of the catalytic
traumas that shaped his gothic vision, one must look to accounts of
Walpole’s life and to The Mysterious Mother, his fantastic blank verse
tragedy.
One learns from the biographies, for example, that Horace’s birth
was surrounded by rumors of illegitimacy.29 His powerful and fa-

mous father, Robert Walpole, was a notorious womanizer who was
alienated from his wife long before her youngest son was born. He
lived publicly with his mistress, Maria Skerritt, during the boy’s
childhood and adolescence and married her six months after Lady
Walpole’s death. Because Lady Walpole’s “occasional gallantries”
were well-known, and Sir Robert was generally observed to pay very
little attention to his son, Horace’s physical and temperamental re-
semblance to Carr Lord Hervey, his mother’s friend, was often noted,
and Hervey was named by many as the boy’s real father.30
Whatever the facts and rumors about Horace’s legitimacy might
have been, and whatever the boy’s response was to them, it does
seem that Sir Robert existed as a distant if tantalizing figure for his
son. W. S. Lewis speculates that Horace had profoundly ambivalent
feelings for this charismatic, forceful, and ruthless man who, indif-
ferent to him, also scorned the mother to whom he was devoted.31
In Manfred, at the level of realism, Horace seems to have sketched
a scathing, almost parodic portrait of the prime minister: lustful,
cruel, and incapable of domestic loyalty in his private life; intem-
perate, dismissive of tradition, and abusive of his own authority and
power in the public world. Although Horace ultimately defended
his father against those who forced him from office, the life that he
himself chose to live was shaped by its divergences from the life of
Robert Walpole. An aesthete rather than a politician, and a writer
rather than an activist, Horace held a seat in Parliament for twenty-
seven years, but he neither sought nor attained office, never initiated
legislation, and spoke publicly only half a dozen times.32 He prided
himself on working behind the scenes (often on behalf of his cousin,
Henry Conway), but because he—like Manfred—was insecure and
emotionally excessive, he never won the confidence of his col-
leagues.33 Even Conway, who benefited substantially from Walpole’s
support, did nothing to repay his cousin’s favors when, in 1765, he
became secretary of state and leader of the House of Commons, an
omission that injured Walpole painfully.34
At the time that Walpole dreamed of his ancient castle, he was in
the midst of a political squabble that concerned his cousin. The
events reverberated with echoes of his father’s defeat and, possibly,
with reminders of his own impotence before it. Having voted in
Parliament against the policy of the Court party, Conway had been
dismissed from the king’s bedchamber and his regiment’s command.

Enraged, Walpole wrote an indignant reply to a pamphlet in which
his cousin had been attacked. He also quarreled bitterly with his
neighbor, Thomas Pitt, the man who had been Robert Walpole’s chief
antagonist and who was his triumphant heir.35 The pain of the past
was etched into the turmoil of the present moment, and the dream
that irrupted just after he concluded Conway’s defense presented
him a coded version of the original trauma. “[G]lad to think of any-
thing rather than politics,” Walpole rewrote the social conflicts in
which he was embroiled as the intrafamilial and therefore intrapsy-
chic events that provided them their deepest meanings. Specifically
identified with Theodore and Manfred, Horace was clearly also Con-
rad, the fragile son who, never legitimated by his father, was crushed
beneath the accouterments of the patriarch’s power and his own feel-
ings of inadequacy. That is the perspective from which the fantastic
narrative seems to have been conceptualized and the mind from
which a variety of other personae are projected.
If Horace narrativized his ambivalent relation to Sir Robert in The
Castle of Otranto, it was in The Mysterious Mother that he revealed the
complexly erotic nature of his connection to Lady Walpole. Weak
and delicate as a child, and substantially younger than his siblings,
Walpole had been his mother’s constant and adored companion. His
deep love for her clearly dominated his psychic life.36 They shared
an appreciation of art and a taste for the ridiculous. She died when
he was twenty, and his mourning was so protracted that his friends
feared that he would not survive it.37 He claimed that he was paying
an emotional debt to her by maintaining a close association with
Conway, to whom he twice offered a substantial portion of his for-
tune and on whose behalf he tirelessly worked.38 The most libidinally
invested relationships that he had outside the family reproduced the
structure of his relationship with his mother. He never married and,
despite the prevalence of what one of his biographers has called “the
queer feminine element” in his personality, there are no indisputable
signs of explicitly homosexual behavior.39 Rather, it was his associ-
ation with women much older than himself that was remarked by
his contemporaries and emphasized in writings about him.40 The
most important of those intimacies was the one he conducted with
Madame Du Deffand, whom he met in 1865 during a trip to France
that followed the debacle with Conway. Walpole was forty-eight and
she was sixty-nine. Fascinated by the stories she told of the Regency
elite to which she had belonged, he frequently visited her well-
known salon, commencing an odd but important relationship that
lasted for more than fourteen years. Although it is her emotional
neediness that has been emphasized in the writings about him, it is
evident that their friendship satisfied some crucial need in him as
well.41 They corresponded weekly until her death and, despite his
gout, he made five difficult journeys to Paris to see her. Here again,
his feelings are a matter of speculation since few of the 800 letters
written by each of them remain. Apparently embarrassed by the
relationship, Walpole uncharacteristically asked her to destroy all the
letters he had written to her (only seven survive), while he destroyed
most that she had written to him. Notably, it was within a year of
the time that they met that he began to write The Mysterious Mother,
a daring and powerful play that takes mother-son incest as its theme.
Walpole did not write his five-act, blank verse tragedy with the
inspired ease with which he had written The Castle of Otranto. He
began it on Christmas Day in 1766 and finished it fifteen months
later, after many stops and starts. He printed only fifty copies, most
of which he kept for himself, a few of which he circulated among
close friends. When he finally published it after thirteen years, it was
with great reluctance and only to avoid the publication of a pirated
version. In his preface to the 1781 edition, he says that he is “sensible
that the subject is disgusting, and by no means compensated by the
execution,” and he adds: “All the favour the Author solicits or ex-
pects, is, to be believed how unwillingly he has submitted to its
appearance: he cannot be more blam’d than he blames himself for
having undertaken so disagreeable a story, and for having hazarded
the publicity by letting it out of his own hands.”42 Because of the
subject, he never expected the play to be performed and, indeed,
there is no record that it has been, either in England or in the United
States.43 In general, those of his contemporaries who read it found it
shocking, although Byron (not surprisingly) admired and praised it
as a “tragedy of the highest order.”44 If the text itself does not speak
adequately to the nature of its author’s concerns, one has only to
consider the fact that when Walpole arranged his works for post-
humous publication, he decided to print his celebratory “Epitaph on
Lady Walpole” following the play.45
The plot of The Mysterious Mother was suggested to Walpole by a
report he had heard in childhood about a woman whose guilty con-

science had driven her to an interview with Archbishop Tillotson.
According to this account, she had taken the place of her maid in a
planned assignation with her son and had given birth to a daughter
with whom, in ignorance, her son had fallen in love and whom ul-
timately he married.46 Setting his play in the Middle Ages, Walpole
begins with the secret return from exile of Edmund, the Countess of
Narbonne’s son. Ostensibly banished by his mother for impiously
having sex with her maid, Beatrice, on the night of his father’s death,
Edmund—who is described as his “father’s very image” (I, 2, 160)—
courts Adeliza who, unbeknownst to him, is both his daughter and
his sister. As the “melancholy” Countess, who can neither confess
nor forget her secret sin, reveals to Edmund at the very end of the
play:
Grief, disappointment, opportunity,

Rais’d such a tumult in my maddening blood,
I took the damsel’s place; and while thy arms
Twin’d, to thy thinking, round another’s waist,
Hear, hell, and tremble!—thou did’st clasp thy mother! (V, 6, 247)
Motivated by what she calls her “disappointed passions,” the Count-

ess had substituted herself for Beatrice when her husband returned
as a corpse from an eighteen-month absence. Born after Edmund’s
banishment, Adeliza has been raised by the Duchess as her orphaned
ward, and she is now encouraged by her mother to marry Florian,
Edmund’s friend, who will take her away from the city. The Duchess
wants to protect her daughter from Benedict, the monk who suspects
her secret and resents the fact that she is a “thinking heretic” who
resists his efforts to control her (IV, 1, 212). Plotting to destroy the
Countess, the monk urges and executes the marriage of Adeliza and
Edmund on the sixteenth anniversary of Edmund’s father’s death.
The “House of Narbonne” perishes through the Countess’s suicide;
the supposed death of Edmund, who goes off to war; and the retreat
of Adeliza to a convent.
In The Mysterious Mother, as in The Castle of Otranto, Walpole re-
veals his own family secrets that, previously unnamed, return to
demand signification when external events threaten his psychic bal-
ance. Those secrets saturate the narratives with incestuous longing
and melancholic regret. Transcending differences among characters,
they direct the reader’s attention to Walpole and to his projection of

himself as the son in fantasies about parents, with whom he also
identifies.47 Playing both Theodore and Conrad in The Castle of
Otranto, Walpole is the object of Manfred’s murderous, competitive
ambition and, as we have seen, the lustful father. In the tragic drama,
he is similarly the son literally called upon to replace the absent
father sexually, and he is the transgressively desiring mother. Fur-
ther, since he does identify with the mother in that drama, he must
identify also with Adeliza, who substitutes for and veils her as the
object of Edmund’s desire. Reading back, then, from the multiple
identifications of The Mysterious Mother to those of The Castle of
Otranto, one can speculate that since Manfred’s craving for Isabella
displaces his mourning for Conrad, Isabella and her double, Ma-
thilda, stand in for Walpole as versions of the fragile, feminized son.
All are indeed experienced by the reader as aspects of the authorial
consciousness, which is then centered in the fiction, at the same time
that each is called upon to play a specific role within the complexly
plotted scenario. As the characters merge with one another, and au-
thorial identifications multiply and change, the distinctions among
characters—and between them and the authorial mind—are decon-
structed and erased. Patterns of meaning come in and out of focus,
demanding articulation while refusing exclusivity. This is the nature
of the fantastic narrative.
Shaped by the unconscious, but given conscious form, these
meanings have a quality that Freud theorizes as “uncanny”: “that
class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to
us.”48 In the irrational mind, which Freud identifies as the source of
the strange and familiar effect, that which has been banished to the
unconscious returns to consciousness. Spawned by traumas that oc-
curred early in the developmental history of the individual and the
social group, shadowy feelings associated with partially exhumed
memories reflect fears of the self’s fragility, the primal chaos of un-
differentiation and dependence, and transgressive desire and sexual
otherness. Drawing in part on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman,”
Freud describes the uncanny effect of strategies that the self evolves
in order to cope with its own anxieties and ambivalence. All of these
appear in Walpole’s novel, and some are found in the verse tragedy
as well: the projection by the son of an imaginary father, for example,
and the splitting of that father into good and bad personae; the son’s
homoerotic projection of himself as a daughter whose relation to the

father is both loving and passive; the self’s fantasized divisions, mul-
tiplications, and projections of itself as defenses against psychic frag-
mentation, alienation, and extinction; the invention of the supernat-
ural as a reflection of the wishful fear that death will not be final
after all; the fantasy of the body shattered into pieces as the retro-
spective reproduction of a primal, infantile experience; and the pos-
tulation that the body of the mother is the foundational uncanny
object, at once desired, lost, and feared.49
Intended to expose anxieties associated with preoedipal and oed-
ipal traumas that are routinely inflicted by the bourgeois family,
Freud’s developmental narrative is relevant to Walpole’s fictions,
which seem powerfully to prefigure it. Still, the emphases (even,
perhaps, the obsessions) of Walpole’s texts are more narrow than
those that shape Freud’s theoretical essay. In Walpole’s world, as in
the world that Abraham and Torok fabricate, the uncanny effect is
always linked to melancholia. From their fantastic perspectives, the
three describe reality as the burial ground of secrets formed as a
result of traumatic loss: a spectral graveyard in which corpses, like
memory, have a way of surfacing. In this context, men and women
are, like Walpole’s Duchess, perpetual mourners who live in a past
that cannot be laid to rest. Traces of the catastrophes that have be-
fallen them emerge from the depths to subvert the process of “self-
fashioning,” which is the driving force of psychic life.
In The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, characters and
plot unfold through an elaboration of those phenomena that Abra-
ham and Torok describe as obstacles to the introjective process: in-
corporation and preservative repression, the burial of family secrets,
and the experience of traumatic loss. Placing his narratives in a pres-
ent saturated with an unmourned but never forgotten past, Walpole
gives a melancholic structure to his uncanny fictions. The presence
of the supernatural; the splitting, multiplication, and projection of
the self; and the irruption of transgressive desire all seem to be re-
sponses to irretrievable deprivation. They reveal the ways in which
incorporation shapes the child’s experience of parents who are for-
feited in the internalizing processes of his development and lost
again (although not with finality) in death. Further, although the
transgenerational phantoms that haunt these texts are social as well
as personal, the collective secrets that they have to tell are presented
always as individual traumas. (It is a blind spot of gothic fiction as

it is of psychoanalytic theory.) So the mystery that the specter of
Alfonso represents can be interpreted at several levels. Most obvi-
ously, it concerns an illegitimate succession that was enabled by his
murder. At the historical level, his is the story of the shameful reg-
icide that haunted eighteenth-century England with its twinned
themes of parricide and class rebellion. Considered biographically,
it is the story of the upstart Robert Walpole, who stood against tra-
ditional values and an ensconced aristocratic order. Psychologically,
it is the story of the illegitimacy of the son, the painful secret that
Horace inherited from and saw buried with his father. It represents
paternal alienation through a filter of filial desire and rage. Woven
together, the narrative threads create the fiction’s melancholic affect,
focusing the traumatic loss of social and personal possibilities in the
ghost of a prince who is described nostalgically as “adorned with
every virtue; the father of his people! the delight of mankind” (91).
The inextricable connection of loss and incestuous desire that suf-
fuses Walpole’s fictions produces the deepest if most elusive mean-
ings of the texts. In both The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious
Mother, the death of a loved one is immediately followed by a trans-
gressive form of sexual desire. So after Conrad has been crushed into
“bleeding mangled remains,” Manfred is concerned neither for the
“disfigured corpse” of his son nor for the “unhappy princesses his
wife and daughter.” Instead, the first words that he speaks—“Take
care of the Lady Isabella” (127)—betray his lust for his almost-
daughter, Conrad’s fiancée. Similarly, the death of the Count un-
leashes the Countess’s desire for her son (whom she mistakes, upon
his return, for the “phantom” of her husband) and Edmund’s desire
for Beatrice, who is a substitute for his mother. Walpole’s seemingly
odd conjunction of heightened sexual desire with loss anticipates
Torok’s theorization of the “illness of mourning.” In the gothic fiction
that she constructs, an individual experiences this strange malaise
when a substantial libidinal investment in an object is doomed to
inadequate introjection by premature bereavement. Because the sub-
ject needs to sustain an unrealistic hope that its desires will be ful-
filled at some point in the future, the ego preserves the object’s
imago, “substituting fantasy for the real thing; magic and instanta-
neous incorporation for the introjective process.”50 Although the hal-
lucinatory, even orgasmic fulfillment that is experienced with this
sudden act of incorporation is immediately condemned and re-

pressed, the ego continues to preserve its wish “as an ‘exquisite
corpse’ lying somewhere inside it; [it] looks for this exquisite corpse
continually in the hope of one day reviving it.”51
While traces of this illness of mourning can be identified with
Manfred, the Duchess, and Edmund, as we have seen, it is Theodore
who seems most nearly to exemplify Torok’s theory, as her theory
helps to explain a necrophilic tendency in fantastic fiction that begins
with Walpole and reaches its apogee with Poe. Seeking to “make
[Mathilda] mine in death,” Theodore “threaten[s] destruction to all
who attempt to remove him from [the corpse],” as he “print[s] a
thousand kisses on her clay-cold hands” (107–8). Because “he was
persuaded that he could know no happiness but in the society of one
with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken
possession of his soul” (110), Theodore marries Isabella. The vaguely
incestuous marriage to his cousin serves as a substitute for the mar-
riage to the dead Mathilda, which he had previously sought. And
although Isabella enables him to remain fixated on the encrypted,
exquisite corpse, he also becomes that lost object in his ultimate de-
sexualization and passivity. He is represented as being without de-
sire for Isabella because she is not an other, but the same. As the
feminized, melancholic prince, whose paralysis is sexual and social
as well as psychological, he reveals the despair that lies at the very
heart of Walpole’s project.
In the palimpsest of Theodore’s story, still another level of mean-
ing can be detected. Immediately after Mathilda’s death the castle
walls are “thrown down with a mighty force,” and Alfonso appears
in order to provide an account of Theodore’s birth. Here another of
Abraham and Torok’s metaphors seems apt. Melancholia does not
appear, they observe, as long as “the crypt” that protects the re-
pressed memory holds fast. Memory erupts “when the walls are
shaken, often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object,
which had buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the
crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt,
showing the concealed object of love in its own guise.”52 As in the
reading of the father’s story, the unmourned mother is revealed to
be the secret love object in the novel, but in the fantastic narrative it
is the death of Mathilda that releases her from her tomb. In his desire
to be united with his beloved’s corpse, the feminized Theodore
assumes the persona of the nameless woman for whom Mathilda is

a substitute. Motivating the fiction from a place outside of language,
that woman is the mother who has been encrypted in the authorial
unconscious, a place beneath the dream/fantasy from which The Cas-
tle of Otranto explicitly emerged. In the context of this reading, it is
Harry Conway’s defection and loss that shook the sepulcher in which
Walpole’s own exquisite corpse was buried. As the probable object
of Walpole’s homoerotic love, the faithless Conway was, at the more
conscious level of fantasy, a substitute for Walpole’s father, whom
Horace conceptualized ambivalently as Manfred. But sharing the
bloodline of Horace’s mother—the bloodline that determines iden-
tity in the novel—Conway is, at a still deeper level, a surrogate for
Lady Walpole, the unnamed maternal figure to whom the son owes
a psychological debt that he will never be able to repay. At a later
stage of Walpole’s life, it is Madame Du Deffand who shakes the
walls of the crypt in which the mysterious mother is buried. And
while the concealed love object is shown “in its own guise” in both
of Walpole’s fictions (more explicitly in his drama than in his novel),
the deep reference of the fantasy is protected by the narrative struc-
ture. The son is only secondarily represented as loving and losing,
after all; it is the parents who are the tragic protagonists. As Abra-
ham and Torok explain, “The ‘shadow of the object’ strays endlessly
about the crypt until it is finally reincarnated in the person of the
subject.”53 It is he who “lends his own flesh to the phantom object
of love.”54 The subject fantasizes the imaginary suffering of the one
who is incarcerated within himself, but it is “a fantasy that only
serves to mask the real suffering, this one unavowed, caused by a
wound the subject does not know how to heal.”55 Manfred desires
Isabella and suffers for the deaths of Conrad and Mathilda, while the
Duchess endures the guilt and pain of her incestuous love for and
sacrifice of Edmund. Representing his loss as theirs, the son perpet-
ually buries his dead at the same time that he perpetually disinters
them.
In his preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole
interprets his narrative of the negative sublime as a superegoic story.
The “moral” of his regressive psychological fiction is “that the sins
of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation”
(5). This is also his conception of The Mysterious Mother, with Adeliza
suffering for the guilt of the Duchess. In Walpole’s life, the “sins”
that he had attributed to fictive parental figures are enacted in his

own relation to a young woman who seems to have functioned in
his fantasy as mother-daughter-wife. At the age of seventy, ten years
before his death, Walpole met and—in the words of one of his bi-
ographers—“bec[a]me the helpless victim of a love which he could
neither deflect nor overcome.”56 Mary Berry, the object of that love,
was twenty-five, and she refers to Walpole in her correspondence as
her “second father.”57 Visiting with her every day for the remainder
of his life, he formed a relationship that seems to have been haunted
by the phantom that had animated his fictions.
It appears, then, that while Walpole’s writing allowed him to ex-
plore his melancholia, it did not enable him to transcend it. Because
the need to master produces the compulsion to repeat, fantastic fic-
tions tend to resist the resolution that they also crave. The specters
that they summon are tethered to corpses of memory that, never
more than partially exhumed, are also never finally buried. Con-
scious and unconscious, familiar and strange, they testify to the im-
measurable and tragic power of loss. So, as Abraham and Torok de-
scribe it: “Sometimes in the dead of the night, when libidinal
fulfillments have their way, the ghost of the crypt comes back to
haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible
signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to un-
expected sensations.”58 The fantastic mode is the mode of nightmare:
its narratives awaken the fearful dreamer to consciousness, but the
script is doomed to be ceaselessly replayed.
Conclusion
The Relation of Fiction and Theory
It might be said that I have used my theory of the bimodal narrative

to interpret eighteenth-century fictions and their traditions retro-
spectively, conceptualizing the past to conform to and anticipate a
version of the present. To some extent, this seems to me inevitable.
It is, after all, the way in which we read ourselves, revising memory
as current patterns of experience provide access to conscious and
unconscious material that has been inaccessible before.1 Texts written
in the past achieve importance for us because we find them eloquent
in the present moment. Their resonance is cultural as well as per-
sonal: a sign of collective and individual inheritance. The subject
does seem familiar to us in these early novels, as does the narrative
structure through which its doubled form of consciousness is artic-
ulated. We recognize both, as we recognize the trauma of gender
imposition, which these texts simultaneously disclose and struggle
to conceal.
The subject that emerges from these chapters is one that is pain-
fully divided. Clinging to an illusion of autonomy, it is estranged
from others, whom it seeks to dominate and control. Plagued by an
obsessive self-awareness—and beset by guilt and shame—it is alien-
ated also from itself. In its developmental process, it is thwarted
inevitably by a sex-gender system that allows expression of some
identifications while suppressing others. When it is represented in
the realist mode, it labors to achieve a normative identity, perform-
ing—as if it were autonomous—roles that the society has scripted.
Experiencing ideological contradictions as signs of personal rather
than systemic failure, it struggles for self-mastery and psychic
wholeness: disguises that social accommodation wears. Although
the story of the realist subject is ostensibly about fulfillment, it is
motivated by denial. When that story is written in the fantastic mode,
the veil of ideology is pierced. Psychic pain and developmental
139
140 Conclusion
deformations are exposed, and the traumas of individuation and

gender acquisition are laid bare.
The dominance of realist narratives in the early, experimental
novel suggests that the eighteenth century was more concerned with
social transformations that were taking place than it was with subtle
shifts in forms of consciousness that we can now identify. As con-
sciousness itself became an object of intense scrutiny, however, and
as conventions of the novel started to cohere, the two modes were
increasingly differentiated, although they continued to be mutually
constitutive. The depth model of consciousness (which could already
be detected in Roxana) was presupposed by the great realist novelists
of the nineteenth century and provided the formal and thematic fo-
cus of Romantic texts.2 The Romantic self was essentially the self that
Freud inherited. It was the self that he interpreted for modernism
and is the one that psychoanalytic theorists have continued to dis-
sect. In the preceding chapters, it is the self I have assumed.
The continuity that aligns the subject of the eighteenth-century
novel with the subject of psychoanalytic theory makes each effective
in considering the other. Beginning with Freud, psychoanalytic the-
ory invented a language to describe the deeply alienated self, which
the bimodal novel represents perceptively but without full con-
sciousness. The insights that fictions offer with sensuous immediacy,
psychoanalytic theory has helped to integrate, order, and refine.
Freud mapped interior space, gave names to intrapsychic functions,
and tracked the negotiations of an embattled self between its own
lawless impulses and its disciplining conscience. Although he un-
derstood the self he studied to be partially hidden and disguised, he
recognized its channels of communication in the symbolic codes of
dreams, reveries, and works of the imagination. For this reason, he
could chart the mysterious domain from which fantastic narratives
draw their substance, and he could relate it to the superegoic realm,
which determines the contours of realistic texts. Freud also told a
developmental story about the molding and deformation of the
child’s desire in the crucible of the bourgeois family. That story can
be detected in the doubled narratives of bimodal fictions, where its
importance is signaled by repetition and where the threat of its
power is acknowledged through realistic disguise and fantastic hy-
perbole.
Although Freud illuminated the shadowy landscape of the un-
Conclusion 141
conscious mind, his specific blind spots produced their own distor-
tions and omissions. Taking the male subject as his model and de-
scribing a psychological dynamic that was predominantly
intrapsychic, he overlooked aspects of the sex-gender system that
were crucial for his theory, as they were crucial also to the novel.
The issues which Freud overlooked, and upon which many eigh-
teenth-century fictions focus, were precisely the issues with which
feminist psychoanalytic theorists have been most concerned. Study-
ing the transformation of the natural order of biological difference
into social structures of gender inequity and domination, these the-
orists have continued the revolution that Freud initiated, but they
have dramatically changed its direction.3 They have identified the
divergences of female from male development as pivotal, and they
have argued for the inextricable connection of the intrapsychic and
the intersubjective. In Freud’s own theoretical emphases, they have
found examples of personal and cultural bias; in his oversights, they
have read signs of individual and collective repression.
One of the most striking of these oversights concerns the mother.
Throughout his career, Freud ignored the preoedipal phase of child-
hood development and focused on the oedipal triangle, over which
the father looms. When he ultimately acknowledged the significance
of that early moment (which he did only in the case of girls), he
compared it to an ancient civilization, too deeply buried to be ex-
humed.4 In contrast, object-relations theory (which has attracted fem-
inists with its relational focus) insists on the decisiveness of the
preoedipal stage for male as well as female children and gives to the
mother a critical formative function.5 Identifying her as the first ob-
ject in the infant’s psychosocial world, object-relations theorists cen-
ter her in the primal struggle for separation and individuation. Con-
ceptualizing her as a bridge from intrapsychic to intersubjective
experience, they represent her as the motivating impulse of the trans-
formational process through which the child discovers and creates
itself.6 In the United States, psychoanalytically inclined feminists
who accept the object-relations perspective understand that the link-
ing of psychic power to social impotence has made the mother ex-
tremely problematic for her children. At the deepest level, the primal
maternal figure inspires desire and fear, promising wholeness and
integration while also threatening engulfment. She survives in bod-
ily memory as a powerful, if inchoate, core of affectivity, but she is
142 Conclusion
demeaned and devalued in culture. Late-twentieth-century psycho-

analytic theorists have explicitly investigated the legacy of ambiva-
lence that she bequeaths, and we can see that ambivalence reflected
in eighteenth-century fiction. In Roxana, for example, Defoe unknow-
ingly exposed contradictions that separate the mother from the thriv-
ing individualist. In Clarissa, Richardson articulated an early version
of the claustral modern family in which the mother is psychologi-
cally omnipotent but socially despised, while in Tristram Shandy and
The Castle of Otranto, the excluded maternal body produces the mel-
ancholic text. In the twentieth century, theories of abjection, the
semiotic, the uncanny, and jouissance continued to enact—even as
they analyzed—the individual’s desire to retrieve the intense affec-
tivity that is identified with the frightening maternal presence.
Feminist psychoanalytic theorists have examined the culture’s
ambivalent obsession with the mother as a crucial symptom of the
illness that the modern sex-gender system creates. They have shown
how that system polarizes identification and object choice, prohib-
iting identification with the other who is different, while proscribing
desire for the other whom one is like.7 Because prohibited identifi-
cations are as powerful as prohibited desires, the sexual order pro-
duces a tragic gender melancholia and an equally tragic gender
complementarity. In the eighteenth-century novels I examine, the
obsessive erasure of Mrs. Shandy and the nightmare figure of Mrs.
Sinclair expose misogyny’s melancholic aspect. At the same time, the
poignancy of Tristram’s narrative transvestism and the intensity of
Lovelace’s fantasies of gender mutation show how fear and rejection
of the other can lead to its incorporation and perpetual acting out.
In Clarissa, this same suspicion of difference is expressed through the
production of polarized gender categories that block the possibility
of mutual recognition.8 As Lovelace and Clarissa search desperately
and unproductively for the reflection of themselves in one another’s
eyes, they encounter the conundrum of complementary heterosex-
uality. Because they are not able to identify with the other whom
they desire, they can experience mutuality only where desire is
banned. They long for empathic connection, which depends upon
the recognition of likeness in difference, but from their categorically
opposed positions they are never able to achieve it.
In the context of feminist theory, the pornographic imagination—
which is displayed in many eighteenth-century texts—can be seen
Conclusion 143
to perform the work of gender melancholia. Its central function is to

create fantasies of omnipotence that deny primal loss and psychic
deprivation. In its scenarios, the self refuses recognition to others,
melancholically reproducing the struggle of differentiation, which it
also seeks to avoid. So, Lovelace’s desire for Clarissa is inseparable
from his urge to appropriate her otherness. If he were successful in
his efforts, he would effectively destroy her. Failing, he believes him-
self to be destroyed. His inability to resolve the vacillation between
desire and rage results in the compulsive repetition of his assault. In
Richardson’s novel—as in Walpole’s—the pornographic fantasy
shows itself to be a sadistic hallucination: cruelly violative and
crudely unreal. Although it may be fundamentally infantile and nar-
cissistic, it is dangerously enacted in adult relations of erotic domi-
nation.9 Lovelace and Manfred relentlessly pursue the emotional and
social logic of their positions. Their goal is psychic appropriation.
Their strategy is rape. Their hidden motive is retaliation against the
maternal figure that haunts their fantasies.
Because of the modern sex-gender system’s economy of desire and
identification, these eighteenth-century novels inevitably make mu-
tual recognition in heterosexual relationships seem impossible to
achieve. To the extent that empathic connection can take place at all,
it does so in eroticized same-sex friendships. The romantic idyll of
Friday and Crusoe, the intimacy of Amy and Roxana, the homoso-
ciality of the Shandy males, and the yearning companionship of
Clarissa and Anna Howe offer the possibility of affiliation and reci-
procity. That the first two should be enabled and disguised by class
inequity, and that the last should be controlled by the limitations of
epistolary communication, suggests the power of the prohibition
against homosocial intimacy. That power prevents the centering of
intense homosocial relationships in realistic narratives and saturates
with paranoia the predominantly fantastic novels that do extensively
explore them.10 In these fictions, the gesture toward mutuality is
finally utopian: a promise that palliates the anguish of melan-
cholia without awakening the consciousness that is essential to
mourning.
Tristram Shandy is a notable exception among the novels I examine
and, for this reason, it serves as a valuable test case. Its account of
the male subject’s response to primal loss and sexual difference is
not merely expansive and complex. As it is incorporated into Sterne’s
144 Conclusion
comic vision, it is also marvelously subversive. The novels of Rich-

ardson, Defoe, and Walpole expose the connection of melancholia to
the denial and incorporation of the maternal, and they show how
the failure of recognition, which that denial creates, makes other
forms of recognition impossible. Sterne begins where they do, but
in his novel the paralysis of melancholia is converted into creative
forms of play. Although the conversion is partial and fleeting, it al-
lows for moments of intersubjective reciprocity among men.
In Tristram Shandy the mother is banished from the story of the
son, but while the son rejects her, he usurps many of her defining
qualities for his own imaginative purposes. Swallowing her, in Abra-
ham and Torok’s sense, Tristram becomes her. Becoming her, he con-
structs the text in her image. In Tristram, as in his fiction, gender
melancholia yields to a gender indeterminacy that resists the bound-
aries and hierarchies that systems of difference establish. At times
appropriated and at times appropriating, oscillating between the as-
sertion of himself and the recognition of others, Tristram struggles
tenaciously for empathic connection. Although his imagination is
salacious, it is not pornographic. Drawing on sensations of the preoe-
dipal moment and the polymorphously perverse body, it reinvents
a maternal world that is partially outside of language. This is a space
of symbolic play and intersubjective relation, where the desire for
recognition reveals itself to be at the core of narcissistic subjectivity.
In this place, the Shandy males share versions of the precious auratic
gaze. It is the fully empathic gaze that Clarissa and Lovelace long
for but cannot find in one another. That its origin should be the
mother who is rejected and scorned speaks to the limited awareness
of the fiction, which intuits more than it consciously comprehends.
Sterne’s novel shows us that through the innovations of hobby-
horsical play, through the embrace of gender indeterminacy, and
through the empathic gaze that resonates with the profound inti-
macy of the moment before splitting, the self saves itself from tragic
isolation: the fate that the illusion of autonomy imposes. At every
level, intentionally and unintentionally, Tristram Shandy exposes the
falsity and danger of the commitment to autonomy. Explicitly, it
shows how Tristram has been shaped and marked by the paternal
figures with whom he identifies and whom he loves. When he at-
tempts to explore himself, he finds their images engraved where he
had thought to find his own. Setting out to tell his own story, it is
Conclusion 145
their stories that he is doomed to tell.11 Implicitly, through Tristram’s

usurpation of the maternal mind and body, the text also reveals the
indissolubility and power of the primal bond, which underlies all
other connections. The story of that bond cannot be told, because
having no place in consciousness, it cannot be represented in lan-
guage. Instead, it speaks through the creative energy that enables
Tristram to convert sadness to laughter as he claims his individual-
ity.
Substituting eccentricity for autonomy as an organizing principle
of character, Tristram Shandy constructs a subject that is emphatically
social but always unique: contradictory, ambivalent but also, in some
sense, coherent. Although gendered, that subject is feminine as well
as masculine. Even though it is constrained within a system of com-
pulsory heterosexuality, its desires are undeniably homosocial. Re-
jecting a fixed boundary between itself and others, it insists on the
possibility of empathic connection. Committed to psychic struggle,
it conceives relationships that can be, however fitfully, generous and
humane. In these ways, this subject is remarkably similar to one that
feminist psychoanalytic theorists have conceptualized and projected
in a utopian spirit12 —but there is a crucial difference.
Despite Tristram Shandy’s wonderful liberatory impulses, it re-
mains a deeply misogynistic and heterophobic text. Despite its com-
mitment to self-consciousness and its efforts of psychic reparation, it
remains also profoundly melancholic. In its misogyny and melan-
cholia, Tristram Shandy is more like than unlike the other eighteenth-
century fictions that this study has explored. And although the con-
fluence of its realistic and fantastic narratives does reflect a more
complex vision of the relation between social and psychological
forces than theirs, it is the gap between the text’s extraordinary self-
awareness and its persistent disavowal that signals the intransigence
of deprivations that it cannot verbalize. Ultimately, there is not more
comprehension of institutionalized gender arrangements in the wise
playfulness of Sterne’s fiction than there is in the insouciant denials
of Robinson Crusoe, the conceptual contradictions of Roxana, the por-
nographic fantasies of Clarissa, or the overwrought melodrama of
The Castle of Otranto. All of these bimodal novels are doubly dark
because the secrets of subjectivity and sexuality that their narratives
protect remain unspoken and unrecognized. Pain is palpable in the
texts, but its causes are unclear.
146 Conclusion
Over the last twenty years, feminist theorists have provided con-
cepts for understanding and a language for naming what is—from
a fantastic perspective—the catastrophe that has so largely shaped
our fictions and influenced our lives. At once natural and unnatural,
pervasive and invisible, the disaster they describe did not take place
in a single discernible moment but emerged slowly, across three cen-
turies, creating an incalculable number of victims without producing
witnesses. The novel emerged to manage the effects of the trauma of
gender. Its bimodal narratives stunningly revealed the misfortunes
that men and women have suffered, but these same narratives also
concealed them from consciousness. Melancholia grows out of a pa-
ralysis of memory, which is marked by the abandonment of words.
Mourning begins with recollection and the return of speech. To read
these fictions through the lens of feminist theory is to remember
what they gestured toward and disavowed. We cannot cure them of
their melancholia, of course, but understanding the causes of their
incurable sadness, we can begin to know and heal our own.
But I do not wish to end this book with a simple privileging of
theoretical analysis over fictional representation. To read today’s the-
oretical texts in relation to the richest of our fictions is to grasp the
ways in which this first form of knowledge, while crucially insight-
ful, is also inevitably schematic and, in some sensuous, experiential
sense, thin. It is understandable, in other words, why theory—in-
cluding the feminist theory that I so highly value—needs fiction to
complete it. Fictions perform their experiences of multiplicity, ambi-
guity, and contradiction in ways that enable identification. They bind
us with the threads of their desire, their rage, their joy, their aliena-
tion, and their despair. They establish a circuit that connects us,
through our minds and our senses, to the expressive perplexity of
their authors. They clear a transitional space for creative collabora-
tion and empathic recognition. Through the structures of their nar-
ratives, they teach us about the relation of psychic resistance to social
accommodation. They remind us of the place outside that is the place
within. It is the place in which difference originates and in which it
is, however briefly, overcome. To read these eighteenth-century nov-
els from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective is to understand
that men and women have struggled within and against the modern
sex-gender system for three hundred years. They have struggled for
more capacious identities and for fuller expressions of their need and
Conclusion 147
ability to love. They have undertaken this struggle without being

able to name what precisely they are fighting for and what specifi-
cally they are fighting against. Enlightened by their doubled narra-
tives, and by the theory that these narratives prefigure, we join the
hopeful if interminable effort to transform melancholia to mourning
and then to convert mourning to social and psychological change.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Of course, it is Ian Watt who, in The Rise of the Novel, provided the
most influential and provocative form of the argument that links the formal
specificities of early fictions to middle-class values of individualism, ration-
alism, and empiricism. Naming Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding as repre-
sentatives of the governing tradition, Watt also established the core of an
eighteenth-century canon that represented the novel as a single categorical
genre. (In “The Importance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,” Daniel R.
Schwartz describes the reception of Watt’s book.) While more recent books
about the development of the English novel have had different emphases,
they have not challenged Watt’s fundamental thesis. I note specifically John
Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions and Re-
sisting Novels; and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–
1740.
2. Obviously, many critics have come to recognize the importance of the
sex-gender system as it is reflected in the novel’s themes and treatment of
character, and many feminists have participated in the recuperation and
examination of women’s fictions. (Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Jane
Spencer, and Janet Todd have been most important in reassessing the status
of eighteenth-century romances and their female authors. Ballaster’s book
Seductive Forms: Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 is particularly notable; it
complicates the structure of women’s romances and attempts to bring female
and male traditions of the novel into conversation.) Only Nancy Armstrong
has defined her project in terms similar to mine, however. In Desire and
Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Armstrong indicates her in-
tention to provide a feminist analysis of the ways in which the English novel
managed the relations of gender as well as class. She defines the novel as a
modern discourse of gendered subjectivity that makes its appearance in sev-
enteenth-century conduct books and then shapes and is shaped by what she
categorizes as domestic fiction: the genre begins with Pamela and includes
all novels with female protagonists and an emphasis on sexuality and the
marriage plot. In fact, Armstrong’s concerns are neither predominantly fem-
inist nor psychological, as her emphasis on subjectivity would lead us ini-
tially to believe. She wishes to demonstrate that the novel sought to disen-
tangle sexual relations from the language of political power in order to mask
socioeconomic interests by representing them as psychological and by iden-
149
150 Notes to pages 1–2
tifying that psychological discourse with women. Hypothesizing the textual

restructuring by men of women’s sexuality and subjectivity, she subjects
sexual to class relations, as do McKeon and Watt, and a textualized female
subjectivity to a male materiality conceptualized in oppositional and hier-
archized terms. Despite her allegiance to Foucault, she reads the history of
the novel positioned, albeit uneasily, with the formal realists: positioned,
that is, within the masculinist and materialist discourse that she wishes to
interrogate. I examine Armstrong’s argument at greater length in an essay,
“The Anxieties of Indeterminacy: Towards a Feminist Theory of the Novel.”
3. The reader will note that I have used the term “fantastic” instead of
the terms “romance” and “gothic,” which have also been employed to char-
acterize eighteenth-century texts in this tradition. My choice of terms derives
from my conceptualization of narrative modes and literary genres. As I the-
orize it, a narrative mode defines and connects texts across historical periods
through its articulation of linked epistemological, ideological, and psycho-
logical perspectives, and through its employment of specific formal strate-
gies. A narrative mode is elaborated through historically specific genres,
which are themselves governed by particular formal and thematic conven-
tions. In the modern period, the mentality of capitalism found direct ex-
pression in realist genres, while the fantastic (which that same mentality
produced) interrogated the normative concepts and psychological con-
straints that realism represented. So, although the novel was shaped by the
contestation of realism’s bourgeois values with the earlier aristocratic values
of romance, the fantastic absorbed and altered romance impulses that sur-
vived capitalism’s social transformations. The eighteenth-century novel
charted this modal evolution, as my analysis of Robinson Crusoe will suggest.
In early modern fictions, romance often coexists with realism (this is true of
Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, for example) and both are sometimes accom-
panied by incipient strains of the fantastic (Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple
Story provides a late-eighteenth-century example of such a trimodal collab-
oration). In the gothic novel, which is the first of the fully formed fantastic
genres, romance elements are given a psychological as well as a supernatural
reference. It is precisely this psychological emphasis that defines nineteenth-
and twentieth-century fantastic genres, as it also distinguishes more frag-
mentary fantastic narratives found in eighteenth-century fictions.
4. Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha is generally cited as the representative
statement about patriarchalism. Written in the 1630s or ’40s, it was published
in 1680 and refuted by Locke in his Two Treatises of Government, published
in 1690. Significantly, Filmer was a committed royalist who wanted to refute
the claims of popular rights and popular sovereignty that were made by
parliamentarians against the king in the 1640s. He argued on behalf of the
king’s unlimited power to rule England by insisting that all government
derives not from consent but from a father’s natural and unlimited authority
over his family. Because a father’s power was unlimited, Filmer concludes,
the power of kings must be acknowledged to be unlimited. Locke argued
against Filmer that the customary interactions of the family were quite dif-
Notes to pages 2–3 151
ferent from the contractual relations of the state. By defining women in terms
of their roles as wives and mothers, Locke restricted the rights and respon-
sibilities of contractual relations to men.
5. In an important essay that traces the shift from patriarchalism to mod-
ern patriarchy, Michael McKeon argues that class and gender reverse their
functions in the eighteenth century, with each appearing to undertake the
work that had previously been performed by the other. Gender is associated
with biological essence, he points out, while class is seen as socially variable
and historically contingent (“Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of
Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” 303). McKeon also argues that
“the emergence of modern patriarchy is coextensive with the emergence of
gender difference, which is therefore historically specific to the modern era”
(300).
6. In her classic book Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century,
Alice Clark observes that while wives of emergent capitalists became idle,
wives of skilled laborers lost their economic independence and became un-
paid domestic servants, and wives of wage earners were driven into sweat-
shops. The lives of poorer women became lives of ceaseless labor, exploited
as they were at work, paid lower wages than men, and responsible for do-
mestic work at home. More recent books qualify and moderate Clark’s more
general claims, emphasizing the different kinds and rates of change that took
place in England at this time, depending upon class status and geographical
location. Still, while the historical details of the account have been modified
and nuanced, its basic outline remains intact. For example, see Susan Amus-
sen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England; Susan
Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England,
1500–1660; Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-
Century England; and Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s
Lives in Georgian England.
7. In The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain,
G. J. Barker-Benfield maps the debate that took place around the gendering
of sensibility in eighteenth-century England. On one side, the subordination
of women was rationalized on the basis of women’s finer sensibility, which
was thought to derive from a more delicate nervous system and which was
associated with moral and imaginative power, and physical and mental fra-
gility. Alternatively, sensibility was seen as fundamental to the reformation
of men’s manners: a process intended to bridge the growing gap between
male and female, making men similar to women in those qualities upon
which moral behavior and affective relationships were thought to depend.
At the heart of the reform movement, however, was the contradiction be-
tween masculinity and sensibility: the fear that “sensible” men were also
effeminate. In the nineteenth century, essentialism ultimately triumphed
over reform and sensibility became a largely feminine attribute.
8. In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas La-
queur argues that “sex as we know it was invented in the eighteenth cen-
tury.” In his view, the rethinking of the body was intrinsic to and not the
result of evangelical religion, Enlightenment political theory, and the inven-

tion of new public spaces (149). Laqueur’s influential argument runs counter
to Edmund Leites’s earlier contention that changes in attitudes about the
strength and nature of women’s sexuality followed changes in attitudes con-
cerning women’s stronger moral character: attitudes that, in his judgment,
“freed men from the demand for moral constancy and the threat of moral
failure” (Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, 121).
9. See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as
Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.
10. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud.
11. See Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire
in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives.
12. See Randolph Trumbach, “Sex, Gender, and Social Identity in Modern
Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London.”
13. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias analyzes changes in attitudes
and manners that begin to be perceived in the sixteenth century. He maps
the social and psychological transformations that accompanied “the civiliz-
ing process” through which the lives of human beings were increasingly
divided between intimate and public spheres, between permissible and pro-
hibited behaviors. Examining the ways in which increasing social prohibi-
tions come to be internalized as self-control, he also explores the construc-
tion, in this period, of a self divided against itself—the self that Freud would
ultimately study.
14. In “The Unconscious,” Freud writes, “By the medium of conscious-
ness each one of us becomes aware only of his own states of mind: that
another man possesses consciousness is a conclusion drawn by analogy from
the utterances and actions we perceive him to make, and it is drawn in order
that this behavior of his may become intelligible to us” (101–2). In the same
essay, he describes the unconscious as a “second consciousness”—“a con-
sciousness of which its own possessor knows nothing” (103).
15. In The Unconscious before Freud, Lancelot Law Whyte argues that in
the seventeenth century, the individual’s experience of “self-consciousness”
was isolated for the first time and treated not as a moment of “self-
elimination, but as a primary concept or value.” He contends that by 1700,
when the incipient movements of individualism, liberalism, democracy, ra-
tionalism, and scientific skepticism take self-consciousness for granted, the
existence of the unconscious begins to be inferred from immediate conscious
experience. Elias also attributes this perception of interior fragmentation to
the civilizing process:
The pronounced division of the “ego” or consciousness characteristic of man

in our phase of civilization, which finds expression in such terms as “superego”
and “unconscious,” corresponds to the specific split in the behavior which
civilized society demands of its members. It matches the degree of regulation
and restraint imposed upon the expression of drives and impulses. Tendencies
in this direction may develop in any form of human society, even in those which
we call “primitive.” But the strength attained in societies such as ours by this
differentiation and the form in which it appears are reflections of a particular
historical development, the results of a civilizing process. (Civilizing Process,
190–91)
16. This specular self is theorized by Jacques Lacan in “The Mirror Stage
as Formative of the I.” I will be arguing throughout the following chapters
that this experience of specularity is at the heart of the fantastic tradition.
17. Although I focus on male writers in this book, it does seem important
to note here that eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century realistic and fan-
tastic fictions that are female-authored generally have female protagonists
(Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, of course, a notable exception). While male-
authored realistic fictions also commonly have female protagonists, male-
authored fantastic narratives ordinarily center on male characters. I would
speculate that in the case of realistic narratives, the gendered division of
labor made it difficult, as well as unseemly, for women to describe the psy-
chological lives of men, while female subjectivity provided male writers,
who were less constrained, with the opportunity to explore a wider affective
range in their fiction. In the case of predominantly fantastic fictions, it would
have been all the more inappropriate for female writers to represent male
desire (one recalls the opprobrium directed at Emily and Charlotte Brontë
for their inventions of Heathcliff and Rochester, for example). While male
writers obviously felt no such prohibition about depicting female desire
(with which they were acknowledged to be familiar), the form of the fan-
tastic authorized a more quasi-autobiographical form of writing (as I discuss
at some length in my chapter on Walpole), which made male authors more
likely to center male protagonists.
18. Ann Radcliffe’s novels The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian are the
classic female gothic fictions. It is particularly interesting to compare The
Italian with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, which it attempts to rewrite. The
comparison makes clear the extent to which Radcliffe felt it necessary to
represent obliquely the male and female desires that Lewis is able to openly
explore.
19. In her book In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic,
Michelle A. Masse traces the construction of female masochism in the female
gothic and in psychoanalytic theory. It is her view that these texts show the
ways in which women in Western culture act as both victims and accom-
plices who incorporate social expectations and ultimately hurt others as they
have been hurt (5).
20. In an essay that ingeniously unravels the complexities of The Mysteries
of Udolpho, Claudia L. Johnson points out that in the novel, “every household
conceals the dead body of its mistress” (“The Sex of Suffering: The Mysteries
of Udolpho,” 112).
21. It is interesting to compare Ann Radcliffe’s fictions The Mysteries of
Udolpho and The Italian with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette. While
Radcliffe’s complexly ambivalent novels are stamped by the wish fulfillment

of the romance tradition, to which I allude here, Brontë provides a critique
of romantic resolutions of female gothic in Rochester’s maiming and in M.
Paul’s death. M. Paul is a compelling mixture of the feminized gothic hero
and the sadistic anti-hero: a nurturant feminized male and a forbidding
father figure.
22. The anti-hero is analyzed at some length in my study of The Castle of
Otranto in chapter 4.
23. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, “The Gothic novel crystallized for English au-
diences the terms of a dialectic between male homosexuality and homopho-
bia, in which homophobia appeared thematically in paranoid plots” (92).
Her specific reference is to a late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
subgroup of the gothic novel, which includes William Godwin’s Caleb Wil-
liams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sin-
ner, and Charles Maturin’s Melmouth the Wanderer.
24. In his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a genre and analyzes it in terms of
the hesitation experienced by a person who is familiar with the laws of
nature when he or she encounters a supernatural event. The feeling of hes-
itation that is experienced can be resolved at the level of the uncanny (the
supernatural explained) or the marvelous (the supernatural accepted), but
in the case of the pure fantastic—as in Henry James’s “The Turn of the
Screw”—it is not resolved at all. Texts that induce this last form of hesitation
are, for Todorov, genuinely subversive because they offer a sense of the trans-
gression of boundaries, a shocking experience of limits. I follow Rosemary
Jackson, rather than Todorov, in defining the fantastic not as a genre but,
like realism, as a literary mode productive of a range of genres that them-
selves produce, regulate, and structure desire. With Jackson, I explore the
psychoanalytic implications of the fantastic; but unlike her, I read fantastic
and realistic genres of fiction and theory reciprocally in order to explore the
processes through which gendered subjectivities are both constructed and
deconstructed. None of those who have written on the fantastic—in addition
to Todorov and Jackson, I would cite David Punter, William Patrick Day,
Franco Moretti, and, most recently, Eugenia DeLaMotte, Michelle Masse,
and Anne Williams—have studied the interactions of these two modes with
their respective genres. In her chapter “Fantastic Realism” in Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion, Jackson moves in this direction, examining fantastic
elements in nineteenth-century realistic novels.
25. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White observe that “whilst the ‘free’ dem-
ocratic individual appeared to be contentless, a point of judgment and ra-
tional evaluation which was purely formal and perspectival, in fact it was
constituted through and by the clamour of particular voices to which it tried
to be universally superior. It is on this account that the very blandness and
transparency of bourgeois reason is in fact nothing other than the critical
negation of a social ‘colourfulness’ of a heterogeneous diversity of specific
contents, upon which it is, nonetheless, completely dependent” (The Politics

and Poetics of Transgression, 199). Stallybrass and White extend and link Bakh-
tin’s analysis of the carnivalesque and Elias’s account of the civilizing pro-
cess.
26. I would include in a list of early gothic texts, for example, Horace
Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (discussed at length in chapter 4), Matthew
Lewis’s The Monk, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mys-
teries of Udolpho and The Italian. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sheridan Le-
fanu’s Carmilla, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Sto-
ker’s Dracula, and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray would all represent
the more psychologically developed, predominantly fantastic fiction of the
later nineteenth century. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and many novels by Charles Dickens and
Wilkie Collins would stand as examples of fantastic realism, a form in which
neither mode is primary. Finally, to see the shift in the work of specific
authors from Victorian realism to modernist subjectivism, one has only to
compare D. H. Lawrence’s early Sons and Lovers with Women in Love, Thomas
Hardy’s Return of the Native with Jude the Obscure, and Virginia Woolf’s Voy-
age Out with The Waves.
27. One can see how this opposition functions, for example, in Desire and
Domestic Fiction, where Armstrong, perceiving interiority to be a mere “strat-
egy” of social discourse, appropriates the novel of female interiority for one
that is shaped by socioeconomic interests. In this way, she erases the psy-
chological determinants of subjectivity and sociality.
28. In the introductory chapter to Literature and Psychoanalysis, Shoshana
Felman, the collection’s editor, argues for the interdependent relation of the
literary critic and the psychoanalyst, and of the literary text and the analy-
sand. “In much the same way as literature falls within the realm of psycho-
analysis (with its competence and its knowledge), psychoanalysis itself falls
in the realm of literature, and its specific logic and rhetoric” (27). As the
critic interprets and establishes a transferential relation with literary texts,
the analyst establishes an interpretive and transferential relation with the
analysand. Summarizing the privileged relation that literature and psycho-
analysis share, Felman argues that “[f]rom the very beginning, literature has
been for psychoanalysis not only a contiguous field of external verification
in which to test its hypotheses and to confirm its findings, but also the con-
stitutive texture of its conceptual framework, of its theoretical body. . . . Since
literature and psychoanalysis are different from each other, but at the same
time, they are also ‘enfolded within’ each other, since they are, as it were,
at the same time outside and inside each other, we might say that they com-
promise, each in its turn, the interiority of the other” (9). I share Felman’s
view of the relation between literature and psychoanalysis, and that view
guides my critical strategy.
29. I do not attempt to use psychoanalytic theory symmetrically in the
chapters that follow, although all of my readings are psychoanalytically in-
formed. The nature of my theoretical interventions varies from chapter to
chapter, as I try to respond to the interpretive requirements of the texts. Like

Felman, I consider the boundary between fiction and psychoanalysis to be
permeable, and I readily cross it, in the interpretive interests of both dis-
courses.
30. While the narrative schema I propose is applicable to women’s nar-
ratives, the historical development of modes and genres is different in fe-
male-authored texts, as are the specificities of their interaction. I plan to
continue this project by studying eighteenth-century novels written by
women, as well as male- and female-authored novels of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Essays that I have already published on the novels of
Dickens and on Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be seen as part of this larger
effort. Of course, I also hope that others will be interested in pursuing lines
of inquiry similar to those that I set out in the following chapters.
CHAPTER 1. DANIEL DEFOE AND

THE GENDERED SUBJECT OF INDIVIDUALISM
1. See Joel Reed, “Nationalism and Geoculture in Defoe’s History of Writ-

ing.”
2. James Foster sees Defoe as “a traditionalist who is losing contact with
his tradition and who must improvise in order to accommodate his faith to
his Mandevillian fascination with the hubristic energy of commercialism”
(“Robinson Crusoe and the Uses of the Imagination,” 179).
3. For an elaboration of this argument, see particularly Richard Braver-
man, “Crusoe’s Legacy,” and Michael Seidel, Robinson Crusoe, Island Myths,
and the Novel.
4. Moll Flanders is also shaped as spiritual autobiography, but the reli-
gious impulse seems more vestigial in that novel than it does in Robinson
Crusoe. Because Moll reads her life in spiritual terms very rarely and only
when she is in serious trouble, that tendency in her appears to be regressive.
This third modal form seems all but absent from Roxana.
5. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe of York, 3. All subsequent references are to this
edition, which will hereafter be cited in the text.
6. This sequence marks a development essential to the early economies
of English and French islands. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe
and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797, 185.
7. Foster makes a persuasive case for the double narration in his essay
focusing on the importance of changing conceptualizations of the imagi-
nation, “Robinson Crusoe and the Uses of the Imagination.”
8. Walter Benjamin discusses the way in which the “messianic time” of
allegory is superseded by what he calls “homogeneous empty time”: time
with a presentness that is marked by calendar and clock (Illuminations, 261).
Benedict Anderson analyzes the ways in which this shift in the conception
of time is essential to the development of the mentality that enabled the
“imagined political communities” of nations. He argues that the novel was
a device for presenting simultaneity in homogeneous empty time (Imagined
Communities, 24–26). My argument is that Robinson Crusoe reflects just such

a shift.
9. Crusoe’s claim that he stops keeping his journal when he runs out of
ink (69, 133) is apparently meant to disguise Defoe’s change of narrative
strategy, which emerges from the shift in perspective that I have described.
10. In this context, it is significant to note that for many years Crusoe’s
parrot is the sole “other” with whom he actively communicates and, trained
as it is to call his name, it reflects Crusoe back to himself without affirming
its own difference. On the one occasion when Crusoe does not recognize its
voice, the momentary experience of its otherness threatens to overwhelm
him.
11. The encounter of Crusoe and Friday is a paradigmatic scene of co-
lonial discourse, as Hulme has indicated in Colonial Encounters. There,
Hulme defines colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically-based
practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colo-
nial relationships” and further explains: “Underlying the idea of colonial
discourse is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of
the non-European world were produced for Europe through a discourse that
imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and
analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the
discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative
literature, personal memoir and so on” (2). He adds, “The Caribbean is par-
ticularly important in this discourse because of the encounter there between
Europe and America, between civilization and savagery, and because it has
been seen as the site of cannibalism: ‘the mark of unregenerate savagery’ ”
(3).
12. In The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eu-
rocentric History, J. M. Blaut defines “diffusionism” as the colonizer’s model
of the world, which projects both a permanent geographical center and a
permanent periphery: a progressive and innovative Inside that is Europe,
and a lagging and imitative Outside that is Africa, Asia, and America. Blaut
argues that while diffusionism assumes Europe to have been more advanced
and progressive both prior to and after 1492, it was Europe’s geographical
location that gave it primacy in the process of colonization before 1492. Its
geographical location was also responsible for its success in the colonial
period after 1492, which led to the selective modernization and development
of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
13. Psychoanalytic theorists have analyzed the construction of racial
identities in terms similar to those implied by Defoe’s representation of Cru-
soe and Friday’s relationship. For example, Franz Fanon insists upon the
connection between psychic development and cultural psychosis and
grounds the “massive psychoexistential complex” of racism in the “subjec-
tive insecurity” of separation anxiety and the radical experience of fragmen-
tation (Black Skin, White Masks, 55). Citing Lacan, Fanon argues that the white
man is threatened by the black man with the destructuration of his bodily
image, while the black man rejects the black Imaginary for a white ego ideal
and is doomed to seek from his white Other the fundamental recognition
that is inevitably withheld (161). Homi Bhabha changes the site of othering
in his extension of Fanon’s Lacanian argument, but he does not disrupt the
mirroring dynamic (“The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and
the Discourse of Colonialism,” 148–72). Insisting upon the ways in which
stereotypical relations are based, for both the colonizer and the colonized,
on an alienation within identity, he emphasizes not the relation of self and
other, but the otherness of the self. The native subject, whom the colonizer
defines as both harmlessly primitive and terrifyingly savage, serves in his
judgment as a fetish object, which allows the assertion and disavowal of
difference that threatens psychic wholeness. Both Fanon and Bhabha posit a
racial dynamic that is universal and inevitable in its developmental ground-
ing, while I try to make its historical context visible through my reading of
its articulation in Robinson Crusoe. I discuss these issues in the context of an
analysis of gender as well as race relations in “Redeeming History: Toni
Morrison’s Beloved.”
14. The substitution is made explicit when Friday chooses to accompany
Crusoe to England instead of returning to his “nation” with his biological
father.
15. Braverman argues in “Crusoe’s Legacy” that in Robinson Crusoe, De-
foe justifies the position that is taken by Locke and enacted in the legal
settlement of 1688: that the son could not be deprived by the political father
of the political sovereignty he has as a result of his inalienable rights and
his possession of property. In Braverman’s judgment, the novel shows how
Crusoe creates and reproduces his political will through property gained
independently of the father—through the accumulation of grain, which pro-
vides the foundation of natural sovereignty.
16. Anderson points out that the concept of the nation as sovereign
emerged in an age when the Enlightenment and revolution were destroying
the legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm (Imag-
ined Communities, 6). In his judgment, the idea of nation became possible
when three ideas lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds: that “a particular
script-language offers privileged access to ontological truth precisely be-
cause it was an inseparable part of that truth”; that society was organized
around huge centers, with monarchs who were distinguishable from other
humans and who ruled through divine dispensation; and, finally, that cos-
mology and history were indistinguishable, with the origins of men and the
world seen as identical (36).
17. This is the dilemma that Freud, writing from the perspective of the
son, represents ahistorically as the Oedipus complex.
18. Christopher Flint points out that Defoe uses the conjugal family to
establish normative models by which his characters differentiate themselves,
and that he reinscribes—in the process—the domestic ideal which his char-
acters flee. He argues, as I do, that Defoe’s urge to define his characters
required family background, at the same time that his desire to fantasize
about the unbounded potential of the individual demanded the suppression
of familial discourse (“Orphaning the Family: The Role of Kinship in Rob-

inson Crusoe,” 382).
19. In “Matriarchal Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders,” Lois
Chabor approaches Moll Flanders from a Marxist, feminist perspective, ex-
amining the ways in which the novel reveals the problematic situation of
women under capitalism. In a more recent Marxist essay, “Monstrous Gen-
eration: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana,” Ann Lou-
ise Kibbie explores ways in which biological reproduction is bound up with
the increase of capital in the two Defoe fictions that take women as their
protagonists.
20. Juliet Mitchell argues that “In economically advanced societies,
though the kinship exchange system still operates in a residual way, other
forms of economic exchange—i.e. commodity exchange—dominate and
class, not kinship structures prevail. It would seem that it is against a back-
ground of the remoteness of a kinship system that the ideology of the biolog-
ical family comes into its own” (Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 378). Mitchell
points out that while kinship relations were preserved among the aristoc-
racy, the cult of the bourgeois family, which developed within the middle
classes, was imposed upon the working classes in order to ensure the re-
production of the workforce through a higher birth and survival rate (379).
21. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 51. All subsequent references are to this edition,
which will hereafter be cited in the text.
22. Moll Flanders provides a particular insight into the relation of the
consciousness of individualism to this incest anxiety. In chapter 4, I examine
the intrapsychic expression of this same anxiety.
23. Mitchell observes that if the family were not to be preserved in in-
dustrial society, the incest prohibition—with the compulsory exchange of
women—would be unnecessary. “Under capitalism, the mass of mankind,
propertyless and working socially together en masse for the first time in the
history of civilization would be unlikely, were it not for the preservation of the
family, to come into proximity with their kin and if they did, it wouldn’t
matter” (Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 380).
24. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse coins the phrase “repressive de-
sublimation,” which seems appropriately to characterize the process that
Defoe describes in both Moll Flanders and Roxana.
I propose in this book the notion of a “non-repressive sublimation”: the sexual

impulses, without losing their erotic energy, transcend their immediate object
and eroticize normally non- and anti-erotic relationships between the individ-
uals and between them and their environment. Conversely, one can speak of
“repressive de-sublimation”: release of sexuality in modes and forms which
reduce and weaken erotic energy. In this process too, sexuality spreads into
formerly tabooed dimensions and relations. However, instead of recreating
these dimensions and relations in the images of the Pleasure Principle, the
opposite tendency asserts itself: The Reality Principle extends its hold over
Eros. The most telling illustration is provided by the methodical introduction
of sexiness into business, politics, propaganda, etc. To the degree to which
sexuality obtains a definite sales value or becomes a token of prestige and of
playing according to the rules of the game, it is itself transformed into an

instrument of social cohesion. Emphasis of this familiar trend may illuminate
the depth of the gap which separates even the possibilities of liberation from
the established state of affairs. (ix–x)
Of course, in Moll Flanders we see the early formation of “the state of

affairs” that Marcuse perceives as fully developed.
25. In “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lu-
kács writes: “Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully de-
veloped—a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a
commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws
of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer
article” (87).
26. Again, to quote Lukács on the nature of the process of reification:
“The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis
is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus
acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational
and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the
relation between people” (“Reification,” 83). Lukács argues what Defoe
seems to demonstrate: that the commodity structure penetrates all aspects
of society and re-creates society in its own image. It effects the constitution
of subjectivity, making the acquisition of value the primary aim of an ego
that mediates between an external reality, which is composed of exploitable
and quantifiable objects, and an internal reality, which must itself be instru-
mentalized in order to be productive. In the reifying process, wants are
reencoded as needs, affectivity is crushed by rationality, and sexual desire
is made to seek a material aim. Disengaged from the larger community,
individuals define self-preservation as their primary goal, and they attempt
to achieve it through their appropriation of nature and their unrelenting
competition with others. Paradoxically, they also endeavor to preserve them-
selves through efforts of self-discipline and renunciation that “freeze the
subject,” as John Brenkman has pointed out, “in a self-domination that ideo-
logically, and in practice, appears as freedom, self-sufficiency, and auton-
omy” (Culture and Domination, 182). The process of reification is especially
difficult for women to sustain because it so deeply undermines normative
roles that are fundamentally self-defining.
27. Defoe, Roxana, 40. All subsequent references are to this edition, which
will hereafter be cited in the text.
28. Most recent feminist critics have seen Roxana’s views (and therefore
Defoe’s) as protofeminist, while other critics have interpreted Roxana’s fem-
inist argument as proof of Defoe’s condemnation of his protagonist. Robyn
Wiegman points out an interesting irony of Roxana’s position: as she tries
to escape slave status, she solidifies her bondage to the patriarchal system
through the masquerade of femininity that is implied by the commodifica-
tion of her body (“Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe
and Roxana,” 38).
29. Particularly interesting in this context are the discussions of Roxana’s
relation to Amy in Leo Braudy, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Auto-
biography”; David Durant, “Roxana’s Fictions,” 167–68; Gary Hentzi,
“Holes in the Heart: Moll Flanders, Roxana, and ‘Agreeable Crime’ ”; and,
most persuasively, Terry Castle, “Amy, Who Knew My Disease: A Psycho-
sexual Pattern in Defoe’s Roxana.”
30. One thinks, for example, of Richardson’s Clarissa, with the split con-
sciousness of Clarissa and Mrs. Sinclair (discussed later in the chapter), and
of the madwoman in Jane Eyre’s attic. The strategy of the double, introduced
here by Defoe, pervades Romantic and Victorian literature, typifying the
work of such diverse writers as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charles
Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
31. Braudy (“Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography”), Hentzi
(“Holes in the Heart”), and Foster (“Robinson Crusoe and the Uses of the
Imagination,” 179) comment interestingly on the postmodern nature of De-
foe’s protagonists.
32. Raymond Williams distinguishes structures of feeling from ideology,
finding in them “meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt”
and “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone: specifically ele-
ments of consciousness and relationship” (Marxism and Literature, 132). Al-
though the psychological resonance of this concept seems obvious, Williams
himself never acknowledges or pursues it. In his essay “Forms of English
Fiction in 1848,” Williams discusses the ways in which dominant, residual,
and emergent institutions and practices are discernible in the literary text.
33. In support, or at least in explanation, of my method, I quote Walter
Benjamin: “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection
between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that
very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through
events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who
takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like
the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era
has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of
the present as ‘the time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of
Messianic time” (Illuminations, 263).
34. In The Analysis of the Self, Kohut describes his theory as a revision of
Freud’s; but six years later, in The Restoration of the Self, he reduces Freudian
theory to a simple theory of drives and represents his break with Freud as
decisive.
35. Lacan and Lacanians have attacked American object-relations theory
for its own entrapment in narcissistic fictions of the autonomous self, which
are generated by the mirror stage.
36. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, xv.
37. In Kohut’s theory, the term “prepsychological” takes the place of “re-
pression,” and regressive experiences that are not conscious can be brought
readily into consciousness.
38. The grandiose personality emerges at the end of the seventeenth
century with the tradition of the libertine, who seeks the freedom of the
asocial, unconditioned, and, in this sense, the sublime experience. He is elab-
orated (as I argue in later chapters) in Richardson’s Lovelace and in the
gothic hero, beginning with Walpole’s Manfred and Matthew Lewis’s Am-
brosio. In the nineteenth century, the tradition is broadened to include the
Romantic hero—Heathcliff and Rochester, for example—and even resonates
in such a late Victorian figure as George Eliot’s Grandcourt. In Kohut’s nar-
cissistic individual, who can also be located in this historical lineage, the
sublime experience, which seeks the impossible object of desire, takes the
form of unconditioned, archaic merging.
39. Kohut lays out the analyst’s role in this way in The Analysis of the Self,
and then develops it extensively in The Restoration of the Self.
40. Kohut’s good analyst effectively takes the place of the bad mother,
repairing the narcissistic injuries that she has inflicted on the child by being
inadequately empathic. Although Kohut sees empathy as central to the ther-
apeutic process, he bases it in the empirical and analytic skills of the scientist
and divorces it mainly from intuition and imaginative projection (e.g., The
Analysis of the Self, 165, 175, 176, 191, 197). Further, although Kohut defines
the empathic process as interactive, it is clear from his writings that it de-
pends for its success upon the analyst’s conceptualization and manipulation
of materials presented by a directed patient.
41. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, 3.
42. In The Restoration of the Self, Kohut argues, contradictorily, that the
self-psychologist needs to blur self-other boundaries in the interests of
achieving greater objectivity. He explains that Freud’s theories, as opposed
to his own, are not adequate to examine “phenomena that require for their
observation and explanation a more broad-based scientific objectivity than
that of the nineteenth-century scientist—an objectivity that includes the in-
trospective-empathic observation and theoretical conceptualization of the
participating self” (68).
43. Kohut is remarkably unconcerned about the extent to which his pa-
tient needs to become the therapist’s “other” in order to be “cured.” In his
judgment, the therapist is readily able to control the countertransference
through a “subtlety of understanding” (The Analysis of the Self, 176). Of
course, the projection of readers onto fictive characters is similar to the coun-
tertransference of analysts, and it is an aspect of the fantastic mirroring
dynamic.
44. Although I see Kohut as extreme in this regard, I will try to show
how Freud and Lacan allow social assumptions to appropriate their radical
insights—particularly in their treatments of gender difference.
CHAPTER 2. CLARISSA AND

THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
1. The odd contradictions that emerge from Watt’s reading of Clarissa in

The Rise of the Novel reflect the inadequacy of his model to account for the
fundamental relation that exists between the realistic and fantastic dimen-
sions of the fiction. For example, without acknowledging the discrepancies,
Watt represents Clarissa both as pathological and as the unwitting and in-
nocent victim of a pathological culture, as ontologically unfettered and as
hopelessly bound. He describes her as perversely playing masochist to Love-
lace’s sadist (unconsciously courting sexual violation as well as death [232]),
at the same time that he affirms her as “the heroic representation of all that
is free and positive in the new individualism” (222). And although he rec-
ognizes that issues of sexuality are absolutely central to the text, he observes
that Clarissa’s “triumph is one in which her sex is irrelevant and looks for-
ward to the new and inward ethical sanction which an individualistic society
requires” (225). Finally, because Watt does not wish to align a novel said to
articulate “the highest moral and literary standards of its day” (219) with
the “degraded” sensationalist, minor fictions of the time, he elides the formal
differences that distinguish Clarissa from Pamela, and names both novels as
realistic even though he identifies in Richardson’s “sado-masochistic” text
the theme of the persecuted maiden that both Sade and the Romantic tra-
dition inherit (231).
2. See Terry Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richard-
son’s Clarissa; William Warner, Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpreta-
tion; and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class
Struggle in Samuel Richardson.
3. Edmund Leites believes that the sexual division of labor that allowed
women, with their purity and absence of animality, to take over the respon-
sibility of moral constancy and enabled men to claim the power of often
aggressive sexual initiation was mutually and equally beneficial to both par-
ties (The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, 121). In Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, Linda Williams rejects the idea that this
dynamic denotes a simple, complicitous balance of power in contemporary
society. Examining sadomasochistic pornography in which women pretend
to be coerced into sex by the phallic dominator, Williams points out that
although the woman who plays at being the good girl in order to get the
bad girl’s pleasure does defeat the system that condemns women for acting
out their desire, she cannot ultimately defeat the power of the phallus (209).
I argue that despite itself, Clarissa suggests just such a conclusion.
4. In Reading Clarissa, Warner provides both a useful summary of the
revisions that Richardson made in response to the interpretations of contem-
porary readers and an overview of subsequent contestations over the novel’s
meanings.
5. The two first significant deconstructive readings of Clarissa placed the
novel in its own historical and literary context: John Preston, in a chapter of
The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Leo
Braudy, in “Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa.” The books that War-
ner, Eagleton, and Castle wrote on the novel themselves became part of a dis-
course within academic feminism about gendered reading and writing. So, for
example, Warner—who thanks Frances Ferguson in his acknowledgments
“for helping me to see the meaning of my harshness and injustice to Clar-

issa” (xiii)—is viewed by both Eagleton and Castle as unabashedly belong-
ing to the rapist’s party. Eagleton describes himself as feminist in his ap-
proach, but Elaine Showalter characterizes his as a “phallic feminism” that
“seems like another raid on the resources of the feminine in order to mod-
ernize male dominance” (“Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the
Woman of the Year,” 146).
6. Not psychoanalytically oriented but wanting a concept that suggested
the interaction of the social and the personal or affective, Raymond Williams
defined structures of feeling as “meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt[,] . . . characteristic elements of consciousness and relation-
ships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought:
practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating con-
tinuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with
specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension” (Marxism and
Literature, 132). In a similar vein, Franz Fanon insists on the connection be-
tween psychic development and cultural psychosis when he writes of the
“massive psychoexistential complex” of racism that is grounded in the “sub-
jective insecurity of separation anxiety and the radical experience of frag-
mentation (Black Skin, White Masks, 55). In Difference and Pathology, Sander
Gilman also gives pathological attitudes toward difference a developmental
root. He argues that the deep structure of the stereotype originates in the
individuation process when the child projects a good and a bad self in order
to reflect its own sense of control or lack of control over the external world.
These crude mental representations “perpetuate a needed sense of the dif-
ference between the ‘self’ and the ‘object,’ which becomes the ‘other.’ ” The
complexity of the stereotype derives from the social context in which it is
elaborated (18).
7. Although I am describing the pornographic imagination here as vio-
lent and sadistic, I mean to suggest not that pornography inevitably takes
this form in the realistic mode, but rather that this was the dominant form
of the pornographic narrative at this specific historical moment. The por-
nographic imagination changes as the narrative modes of realism and the
fantastic change, all in response to shifting social norms. Our own recon-
ceptualizations of pornographic genres—and, indeed, changes in pornog-
raphy itself—are an obvious part of this dynamic.
8. Although the prosecution and repression of books for obscenity began
in England in the seventeenth century, the term “pornography” does not
appear until 1857. Michael Ganner argues for the overlapping constitutive
histories of the genres of pornography and gothic beginning with the pub-
lic’s response to Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk at the end of the eighteenth
century (see “Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic”).
9. In his classic essay in Puritanism and Revolution, “Clarissa Harlowe and
Her Times,” Christopher Hill details the ways in which Richardson’s pre-
sentation of the relationships within the Harlowe family is faithful to his-
torical circumstances. Exploring the inherent contradiction between the Pu-
ritan belief in the integrity of the individual and the male-centered ideology
of possessive individualism, Hill observes that “respect for Clarissa’s integ-
rity led [Richardson] to push the Puritan code forward to the point at which
its flaw was completely revealed, at which it broke down as a standard of
conduct for this world” (388).
10. Richardson, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, 48. All subsequent
references are to this edition, which will hereafter be cited in the text.
11. Of course, these are the same alternatives that Freud defines for
women who are to be seen by his society as respectable.
12. In his essay on Clarissa, Leo Braudy analyzed the polarization of Clar-
issa’s and Lovelace’s values in terms of Richardson’s frequent use of the terms
“impenetrable” and “penetrability”: “Poles of penetration and impenetra-
bility express Richardson’s main theme—the efforts of individuals to dis-
cover and define themselves by their efforts to penetrate, control and even
destroy others, while remaining unreachable themselves” (“Penetration and
Impenetrability in Clarissa,” 6).
13. It is interesting to note that while Leslie Fiedler (in Love and Death in
the American Novel, 62) and Mario Praz (in The Romantic Agony, 97–109) both
identified Clarissa as the foundational gothic text, they did so by centering
Clarissa as the masochistic gothic heroine. This is the same argument that
Michelle A. Masse has much more recently made in her study In the Name
of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. My argument is that Lovelace’s
narrative is conceptualized predominantly in the fantastic mode while Clar-
issa is represented primarily in the mode of realism.
14. The paradoxical struggle of the self to achieve both independence and
recognition was conceptualized in its fantastic form by Hegel in Phenome-
nology of Spirit. Here, the self that struggles to know itself as a separate and
autonomous entity needs to be affirmed through the recognition of an other
whom it must also negate if its own integrity is to be maintained. The con-
flictual dynamic resists mutuality and moves toward domination and what
Hegel describes as the master-slave relation. This solipsistic project of self-
consciousness is elaborated as a developmental process in psychoanalytic
theory with its emphasis on intrapsychic rather than intersubjective devel-
opment; on issues of separation, individuation, and autonomy; and on the
self that poses as omnipotent in order to defend against its fears of power-
lessness. Whether theoretical narratives of this sort refer to the child’s diffi-
cult disentanglement from the mother, or to the endless repetition of the
self-alienation of the mirror-stage; whether they are couched in the language
of introjection and projection, or in one of appropriation and accommoda-
tion, they all emphasize the necessary precariousness of boundaries that
separate inside from outside and self from other, and they all address the
inevitable slippage of balanced connectedness into the imbalances of the
power relation. While various psychoanalytic accounts of this dynamic have
presented themselves as gender-neutral, Jessica Benjamin has provided a
rereading of the Hegelian dialectic through a feminist extension of object-
relations theory. She first developed her reinterpretation of the master-slave
relation in “The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination,”

and then significantly elaborated on her theory of erotic domination in The
Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, a book
that has been important to the conceptualization of my argument in this
chapter.
15. In In the Name of Love, Masse contends that the gothic woman inevi-
tably plays masochist to the male sadist. Building her argument from a close
reading of “A Child Is Being Beaten” and other of Freud’s essays, she pro-
vides the most detailed reading to date of gothic fiction in this context. While
extremely useful, her argument does inadvertently suggest the limitations
that a strict Freudian interpretation of this dynamic imposes on the texts
and the society that it is used to read. For one thing, Masse tends to collapse
social and fictive “realities”; for another, her definition of female masochism
necessarily cuts quite different texts to fit the same pattern. And finally,
through my reading of Lovelace, I want to disagree with Masse’s strict iden-
tification of masochism with femininity and of sadism with masculinity.
16. My discussion of the deep structure of gender complementarity that
is suggested by Clarissa in its realist narrative is similar in its broadest out-
lines to the structure that Jessica Benjamin describes in The Bonds of Love. It
is the differences in male and female patterns of differentiation that, in Ben-
jamin’s judgment, associate sadism with masculinity and masochism with
femininity, producing relationships of erotic domination. In her narrative,
male individuality is produced in a context of “false differentiation” that
results from the boy’s rejection of the mother and his subsequent perception
of the other as object rather than subject. This complements the girl’s inability
to accept her own agency—a result of her father’s disidentification from her
in the rapprochement stage, which replays his disidentification from his own
mother—and her subsequent willingness to offer recognition without ex-
pecting it in return (78). Benjamin observes, “As long as the father stands
for subjectivity and desire at the level of culture, woman’s desire will always
have to contend with his monopoly and the devaluation of femininity it
implies” (123).
17. Throughout this analysis of Lovelace, I am dependent on Jessica Ben-
jamin’s discussion of aggression, fantasy, and sexuality in “Sympathy for the
Devil: Notes on Sexuality and Aggression, with Special Reference to Por-
nography” in Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual
Difference (175–211).
18. In The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, Randolph Trumbach discusses the
ways in which child-rearing practices of this period created a division be-
tween boys and girls that had far-reaching implications for adult heterosex-
ual relations. “The extent to which any man could associate closely with
women and children was severely limited by the means by which masculine
identity was forged. For separation from, and denigration of, women and
children were crucial to the formation of a boy’s gender identity in childhood
and to the development of heterosexual behavior and the internalization of
the homosexual taboo in adolescence” (238). He indicates that the competi-
tion of public schools “no doubt produced men of independent self-

assurance but . . . men of impoverished hearts” (259). Finally, he argues that
“independence and aggression, rather than tenderness and attachment were
the bases on which men built their identities as males and through which
they channelled their sexual behavior” (282–83).
19. In 1910, in “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men,” Freud
commented on the result of this form of socialization: “A restriction has thus
been laid upon the object-choice. The sensual feeling that has remained ac-
tive seeks only objects evoking no reminder of the incestuous persons for-
bidden to it; the impression made by someone who seems deserving of high
estimation leads, not to a sensual excitation, but to feelings of tenderness
which remain erotically ineffectual. . . . Where such men love they have no
desire and where they desire they cannot love” (62).
20. In Hard Core, Linda Williams writes about film pornography that has
traditionally offered a myth of sexual pleasure from the perspective of men
who have the power to exploit and objectify the sexuality of women (22).
She suggests that hard-core films seek to overcome the invisibility of the site
of women’s pleasure by identifying the involuntary paroxysm of female
orgasm as the “thing” itself, reading it as the sign both of sexual pleasure
and of sexual difference. At the same time, she argues, this effort of identi-
fication can be seen as a way of asserting the fundamental sameness of male
and female pleasure in the progression to climax (49–50). In “The Blind Spot
of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” Luce Irigaray writes: “like the scientific,
gynecological speculum, this camera probes the hidden secrets of the female
body and female pleasure, and like the mirror-speculum, it ends up staring
at its own reflection, frustrated in the ‘nothing to see’ of women” (54).
21. Linda Williams observes, “Pornography as a genre wants to be about
sex. On close inspection, however, it always proves to be more about gender”
(Hard Core, 267). Later she explains that pornography is not just one thing
but “sexual fantasy, genre, culture, and erotic visibility all operating to-
gether” (270).
22. James Grantham Turner has written about this multifaceted aspect of
the libertine tradition in “The Libertine Sublime: Love and Death in Resto-
ration England” and “Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism,” as has
Peter Hughes, in “War within Doors: Erotic Heroism and the Implosion of
Texts.” I also found useful Richard S. Randall’s discussion of the infantile
nature of the pornographic imagination in Freedom and Taboo: Pornography
and the Politics of a Self Divided. In her essay “Don Juan or Loving to Be Able
To,” in Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva observes, “Indeed, nothing is ever said
about Don Juan’s mother, and one may surmise that the absolute of the
beauty that excites him continually is finally none but SHE: primal, inacces-
sible, prohibited” (201).
23. Jessica Benjamin writes: “Like the oedipal symbolization of the
mother as either a lost paradise or a dangerous siren, the denial of her sexual
organs makes her always either more or less than human” (Bonds of Love,
166–67).
24. Judith Wilt, in “He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about

Lovelace and Clarissa,” was the first to analyze the centrality of Mrs. Sinclair
in this scene. Although she suggests the way in which Mrs. Sinclair works
as a “double” for Lovelace, she does not explore the maternal resonance of
that relationship.
25. In “The Dread of Woman: Observations on a Specific Difference in
the Dread Felt by Men and Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex,”
Karen Horney observes: “In sexual life itself we see how the simple craving
of love which drives men to women is often overshadowed by their over-
whelming inner compulsion to prove their manhood again and again to
themselves and others. A man of this type in its more extreme form has
therefore one interest only: to conquer” (359).
26. In Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze
explores the roles of the male sadist and the male masochist. Seeing them
as separate, he describes the male sadist as seeking the repudiation of the
mother, from whom he wishes to differentiate himself, and acceptance by
the father and the phallic law. The male masochist, on the other hand, seeks
fusion with the mother and subversion of the phallic law (109–10). In her
discussion of Deleuze, Linda Williams disagrees that these are separate roles,
either in practice or in fantasy. Instead, she suggests, sexual identity is an
oscillation between male and female subject positions, held simultaneously.
According to her argument, male and female subjects experience identifi-
catory relations with both the father and the mother, and those gender-
inflected forms of desire interrelate in one individual in both the sadist’s
control and the masochist’s abandon (Hard Core, 215). It seems to me that
without full consciousness, Richardson projects Lovelace’s character in this
bisexual mode, encouraging an unusual degree of oscillation between male
and female positions in the reader’s identification with him. It is this that so
frustrated Richardson in his attempts to make Lovelace an unsympathetic
villain, particularly to his large, even predominantly female audience.
27. Jessica Benjamin observes that “In breaking the identification with
and dependency on mother, the boy is in danger of losing his capacity for
mutual recognition altogether. The emotional attunement and bodily har-
mony that characterized his infantile exchange with mother now threaten
his identity. He is, of course, able cognitively to accept the principle that the
other is separate, but without the experience of empathy and shared feeling
that can unite separate subjectivities. Instead the other, especially the female
other, is related to as object. When this relationship with the other as object
is generalized, rationality substitutes for affective exchange with the other”
(Bonds of Love, 76). It is my contention that the novel maps Lovelace’s effort
to retain this connection at the same time that he continually undercuts it
with his efforts at an erotic domination that marks the intensification of male
anxiety and defensiveness against the mother. With Clarissa’s withdrawal—
with his destruction of the possibility of mutuality—there is no longer an
object for his sadism, as there is no longer hope for his affective life.
28. In The Ego and the Id, Freud explores the way in which the superego,
becoming “super-moral,” “become[s] as cruel as only the id can be” (56),

when it turns against the ego. Under certain circumstances of melancholia,
“[w]hat is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture
of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego
into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change
round into mania” (54–55).
29. In Masochism in Sex and Society, Theodor Reich observes that an ex-
ternal audience is “a structural necessity” if the exhibitionism of the Chris-
tian martyr is to be satisfied (197). He also suggests that the identification of
the masochistic martyr with the suffering Christ implies “an utter negation
of all phallic values” (198). While this would appear to be true of the male
martyr, the dephallicizing gesture seems to be more ambiguous in the case
of the female. Although Clarissa might be said to be androgynous in her
identification with Christ, she is, as the bride of Christ and the Father’s
daughter, clearly marked as secondary in the divine hierarchy.
30. In his important book The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure
and Psychology of Transcendence, Thomas Weiskel observes that “In the history
of literary consciousness, the sublime revives as God withdraws from an
immediate participation in the experience of men. The secondary or prob-
lematic sublime is pervaded by the nostalgia and the uncertainty of minds
involuntarily secular—minds whose primary experience is shaped by their
knowledge and perception of secondary causes” (3–4). Noting that “the sub-
lime was an antidote to the boredom that increased so astonishingly in the
eighteenth century,” Weiskel adds: “Boredom masks uneasiness, and intense
boredom exhibits the signs of the most basic of modern anxieties, the anxiety
of nothingness, or absence. In its more energetic renditions, the sublime is
a kind of homeopathic therapy, a cure of uneasiness by means of the
stronger, more concentrated—but momentary—anxiety involved in aston-
ishment and terror” (18).
CHAPTER 3. (W)HOLES AND NOSES
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Literature and Psy-

chology: A Journal of Psychoanalytic and Cultural Criticism 41.3 (1995): 44–79.
1. Again, Ian Watt’s view is significant, since it has been extremely influ-
ential. Watt did not want to group Tristram Shandy with the “degraded sen-
timental or gothic fictions” of its day, but was firm in his belief that despite
his marginality, Sterne was a master of realism, uniquely capable of recon-
ciling Richardson’s “realism of presentation” with Fielding’s “realism of as-
sessment.” Watt insisted that if Sterne had applied his skills “to the usual
purposes of the novel, [he] would probably have been the supreme figure
among eighteenth-century novelists.” Because he “turned his irony against
many of the narrative methods which the new genre had so lately devel-
oped,” however, he produced only a parody of the novel, excluding himself
from the great tradition while becoming a chance precursor of modern-
ism through his subversive treatment of time (The Rise of the Novel, 291–92).
Following Watt, Michael McKeon finds Sterne irrelevant to the dialectical

construction of the realistic novel that originates, in his judgment, with Rich-
ardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. McKeon refers to Tristram
Shandy only once in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, when he
observes, with interesting ambiguity: “The implications of the formal break-
through of the 1740s are pursued with such feverish intensity over the next
two decades that after Tristram Shandy . . . the young genre settles down to
a more deliberate and studious recapitulation of the same ground, this time
for the next two centuries” (410).
2. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin importantly links the fan-
tastic narrative to the tradition of Menippean satire that extends backward
to the Socratic dialogue. That tradition achieves a kind of apogee with the
dominance of the carnivalesque tradition in the Renaissance and, although
it loses its communal base in the seventeenth century, it goes on to become
a dominant influence on the novel: on Swift and Fielding in the eighteenth
century and then on such writers as Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. But
although he mentions the connection of Menippean satire to Sterne, Bakhtin
does not explore the relation further (156–59).
3. The Castle of Otranto was published in 1764; Tristram Shandy was pub-
lished over the years 1759 to 1767.
4. In the first chapter of The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne—my
book about Tristram Shandy—I examine the ways in which the novel pro-
vides a critique of Locke’s epistemology.
5. For Jurgen Klein (“Laurence Sterne’s Novel of Consciousness”), Sterne
marks a turning point in the English novel from a subject/object opposition
to a subjectivist epistemology that connects “selves,” “identities,” and
“world construction.” According to Klein, “Our contemporary definition of
‘identity’ in philosophy and sociology cannot attain Sterne’s intellectual
level” (1544).
6. Writing of the primal fantasies that Freud described, J. Laplanche and
J. B. Pontalis observe:
If we consider the themes which can be recognized in primal phantasies (pri-

mal scene, castration, seduction), the striking thing is that they have one trait
in common: they are all related to the origins. Like collective myths, they claim
to provide a representation of and a “solution” to whatever constitutes a major
enigma for the child. Whatever appears to the subject as a reality of such a
type as to require an explanation or “theory,” these phantasies dramatise into
the primal moment or original point of departure of a history. In the “primal
scene,” it is the origin of the subject that is represented; in seduction phantasies,
it is the origin or emergence of sexuality; in castration phantasies, the origin
of the distinction between the sexes. (“Primal Phantasies,” 332)
7. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 4. All subsequent references are to this edition,

which will hereafter be cited in the text.
8. It is fascinating that John Paul Hunter (“Clocks, Calendars, and Names:
The Troubles of Tristram and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty”) and Richard
Macksey (“ ‘Alas, Poor Yorick’: Sterne Thoughts”) assiduously pursue this
issue of Tristram’s conception and premature birth by trying to figure out

who Tristram’s “real” father might have been, without seeing the gender
implications of the problem that Sterne sets. Only Calvin Thomas (“Tristram
Shandy’s Consent to Incompleteness: Discourse, Disavowal, Disruption”), in
his fine Lacanian reading of the novel, understands that the question is as
unimportant for Sterne as it is for Lacan. While Thomas recognizes that it
is the main project of the Shandy males to deny the place of women in
procreation, and therefore in the production of the male subject, he sharply
distinguishes Sterne as a protofeminist from the misogynistic Tristram. In
this, his position is diametrically opposed to that of Ruth Perry (“Words for
Sex: The Verbal-Sexual Continuum in Tristram Shandy”), who provides an
early and preliminary feminist Lacanian reading of the novel (see note 11).
While I agree with Thomas that Sterne represents the Shandy males as mi-
sogynistic, I don’t agree that Sterne’s own views are completely different
from those he represents. Rather, I find Sterne himself participating in and
therefore justifying—at conscious and unconscious levels, both formally and
thematically—positions that he also attempts to soften through irony and
humor.
9. Sterne humorously supports the hint of Tristram’s illegitimacy by
having a bend sinister—“this vile mark of illegitimacy”—drawn across the
coat of arms on his coach, instead of the respectable bend dexter (237).
10. The homunculus theory, which had some adherents in the seven-
teenth century, was as outdated at the time that Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy
as was Robert Filmer’s theory of patriarchalism, to which Walter also sub-
scribes. Although Sterne’s use of the theory obviously serves a comic pur-
pose in this context, and is used to support Sterne’s view of Walter’s misog-
yny, it is also consonant with the gender anxiety that saturates the text on
unconscious as well as on conscious levels.
11. In their feminist readings of the text, Leigh A. Ehlers (“Mrs. Shandy’s
‘Lint and Basilicon’: The Importance of Women in Tristram Shandy”) and
Ruth Faurot (“Mrs. Shandy Observed”) have attempted to save Sterne from
accusations of misogyny by reading Mrs. Shandy as a strong presence and
a viable alternative to the Shandy males. Clearly, I do not find their argu-
ments persuasive. Perry (“Words for Sex”) and Thomas (“Tristram Shandy’s
Consent to Incompleteness”) also place the question of Sterne’s attitude to-
ward gender in the context of his being or not being a misogynist. For Perry,
the answer is yes—for Thomas, no. Perry emphasizes the fact that all the
women in Tristram Shandy are characterized by their desire for the phallus;
Thomas reads Sterne as comprehending the way in which men displace their
anxiety onto women and, for this reason, distinguishes him sharply from
Tristram. I argue that Sterne participates, with Lacan and Freud, in the dis-
placement of anxiety that he is able also to describe with real acuteness.
12. In “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” Luce Irigaray writes
eloquently of the way in which castration fear and the oedipal myth conceal
the severance of the umbilical cord, and “[a] hole in the texture of language
corresponds to the forgetting of the scar of the navel” (41).
13. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud distinguishes between the

conscious process of mourning, in which the libido is slowly detached from
the lost love object until the ego is free and uninhibited, and the unconscious
process of melancholia, which marks not the withdrawal of libido but rather
an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. In “A Poetics of Psy-
choanalysis: The Lost Object—Me,” Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok de-
velop Freud’s theory of melancholia, describing an “encryptment” of the lost
object that ultimately supplants the subject and “carries the ego as its mask”
(5). Finally, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva describes
melancholia as “an archaic expression of an unsymbolizeable, unnameable,
narcissistic wound, so precocious that no outside agent can be used as ref-
erent” (12). I discuss melancholia at length in chapter 4 on Walpole.
14. It is interesting to consider the way in which Freud writes a “Ster-
nean” version of the rapprochement period—a version without women—
even as he attempts to understand the full gender complexity of this moment
of psychic development. In The Ego and the Id, he suggests that behind the
ego-ideal “there lies hidden an individual’s first and most important iden-
tification with the father in his own personal pre-history.” He then adds:
“Perhaps it would be better to say ‘with the parents’; for before a child has
arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of
a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother.”
But he swerves again as he adds: “In order to simplify my presentation I
shall discuss only identification with the father” (31). This, of course, is what
he goes on to do, and the mother, like Tristram’s mother, is erased again.
15. In The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the relation of the ego to the id
with a similar metaphor: “like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check
the superior strength of the horse. . . . Often a rider, if he is not to be parted
from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same
way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it
were its own” (19). One can also define the hobbyhorsical function as one
that mediates between Lacan’s Symbolic and his Imaginary.
16. In Tristram Shandy, Wolfgang Iser interestingly develops his discus-
sion of the hobbyhorse in terms of game theory, referring both to Richard
Lanham’s early study, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure, and to Roger
Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games. Here I draw on the work of D. W. Winnicott,
who explores the centrality of transitional phenomena in helping the infant
to accomplish the primary process of individuation and the adult to continue
the endless project of mediation between interior and exterior realities. “This
intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to
inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s
experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that
belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative
scientific work” (Playing and Reality, 14). As Winnicott points out, the illusion
that represents the compromise of this transitional state “becomes the hall-
mark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity
of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their

own” (13). This is, of course, the problem posed by the hobbyhorse.
17. The exception in his family, according to Tristram, is his great-aunt
Dinah, “who, about sixty years ago, was married and got with child by the
coachman” (49). Thumbing her nose at class difference and rejecting a central
mandate of gender difference by following the urgings of her own desire,
Dinah stands as a kind of phallic woman in the text.
18. The Lacanian resonance is made all the more appropriate by Mack-
sey’s report both of Lacan’s own statement that “Tristram Shandy est le roman
le plus analytique de la litterature universelle” and of his appreciation “of
the peculiar way in which all of the ‘characters’ in the novel constitute them-
selves as ‘modes of discourse’ and the equally peculiar way in which the
novel constitutes itself around a notorious ‘lack’ ” (“ ‘Alas, Poor Yorick,’ ”
1007). Neither Macksey nor other Lacanian critics of Sterne have noted or
discussed the specifically phallic nature of the hobbyhorse.
19. Interestingly, Lacan seems to share the opinion of the “world” in
viewing circumcision as a form of castration: “Feminine sexuality appears
as the effort of a jouissance wrapped in its own contiguity (for which all
circumcision might represent the symbolic rupture) to be realized in the envy
of desire, which castration releases in the male by giving him its signifier in
the phallus” (“Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” 97).
20. My reading of Lacan (through Sterne) is similar to the feminist read-
ings of the phallus-penis relation in Jane Gallop’s “Beyond the Phallus” and
Judith Butler’s “Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” In “The
Lacanian Phallus,” Kaja Silverman offers the most impressively detailed
feminist critique of Lacan’s position, explaining that whether the phallus
functions in its idealized Imaginary capacity, holding out the possibility of
a jubilant méconnaisance to the male subject, or in its veiled symbolic func-
tion, signifying what every subject has surrendered to language, it is de-
pendent upon the erect penis. “As should be evident by now, there is a good
deal of slippage in Lacan not only between the phallus and the penis, but
between the phallus in its symbolic capacity and the phallus in its imaginary
capacity. The erect penis seems to represent both, in the one case as that
which no fully constituted subject can any longer ‘be,’ and which is conse-
quently ‘veiled’ or lacking, and in the other as that which only the male
subject can ‘have’ ” (97). I hope it will be obvious from this and subsequent
sections of my argument that while I wish to make explicit the connection
between a Sternian perspective of Lacanian theory and some feminist read-
ings of the same material, I am not suggesting that Sterne is himself a pro-
tofeminist. I am interested in deconstructing the differences between theory
and fiction, as well as strict definitions of the meaning of gendered writing
and reading.
21. Freud’s observation in “Humour,” that narcissism triumphs in hu-
mor, is relevant here: “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocation
of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected
by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas
are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” He also points out: “In
humour, the super-ego repudiates reality and serves an illusion. Its liberat-
ing gesture means ‘Look! Here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It
is nothing but a game for children . . . just worth making a jest about’ ” (162,
160).
22. In this Sterne is clearly to be distinguished from Lacan. As Gallop
suggests, in “Beyond the Phallus,” “The Lacanians’ desire clearly to separate
phallus from penis, to control the meaning of the signifier phallus, is precisely
symptomatic of their desire to have the phallus, that is, their desire to be at
the center of language, at its origin. And their inability to control the mean-
ing of the word phallus is evidence of what Lacan calls symbolic castration”
(127).
23. A dominant aspect of Julia Kristeva’s project has been to define, con-
ceptualize, and foreground preoedipal and prelinguistic space. For example,
in “Revolution in Poetic Language,” she deploys her concepts of the mater-
nal chora, the semiotic, and the thetic to explore the ways in which language
resists intelligibility and signification in a dynamic interaction of symbolic
and presymbolic stages. In “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” Iri-
garay explores the ways in which we can connect, through the nonmeanings
of prosody, rhythm, and polyvalency, to the meaning of what she calls “the
Thing”: the lost body of the mother whom we have killed in order to annul
a debt that allows no reciprocity.
24. Julia Kristeva, “Woman’s Time.”
25. “What gives some likelihood to what I am arguing, that is, that the
woman knows nothing of this jouissance, is that ever since we’ve been beg-
ging them—last time I mentioned women analysts—begging them on our
knees to try to tell us about it, well, not a word! We’ve never managed to
get anything out of them” (Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman,”
146).
26. Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman,” 142.
28. Lacan, “A Love Letter,” 155.
30. Interestingly, Lacan condemns Melanie Klein’s description of the
child’s fantasy of the penis/breast as “monstrous” and vehemently rejects
her attribution of the power of the phallus to the maternal body, scornfully
referring, for example, to her “persistent failure to acknowledge that the
Oedipal fantasies which she locates in the maternal body originate from the
reality presupposed by the Name of the Father” (“Guiding Remarks for a
Congress,” 90). At the same time, as Silverman points out, Lacan suggests
in “Four Fundamental Concepts” that the phallus may not always be the
primary or even the earliest signifier of desire; and in “Seminaire X,” he
confers foundational status upon the breast as a part object also suggesting
the primal significance of the gaze and the voice, both experienced initially
within the maternal domain ( “The Lacanian Phallus,” 112–13).
31. Dennis W. Allen (“Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy”) argues

that Sterne invaginates his text, but it will be clear that in my view the text,
like its author, is ambisexual and complexly gendered.
32. Hans Loewald writes, “The more we understand about primitive
mentality—which constitutes a deeper layer of advanced mentality—the
harder it becomes to escape the idea that its implicit sense of and quest for
irrational nondifferentiation of subject and object contains a truth of its own,
granted that this other truth fits badly with our relational view and quest
for objectivity” (“The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” 772).
33. Julia Kristeva suggests a “reformulation of the moral imperative . . .
lead[ing] to an ethics which would not be one of repression,” in the context
of the narcissistic subject whom she calls “the-subject-in-process”: “The sub-
ject-in-process is always in a state of contesting the law, either with the force
of violence, of aggressivity, of the death-drive, or with the other side of this
force: pleasure and jouissance” (“An Interview with Julia Kristeva,” 8).
34. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 117.
CHAPTER 4. HORACE WALPOLE

AND THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY
1. According to W. S. Lewis, Walpole, who saw his century as wanting

only cold reason, was “bored” with the “insipidity” of Richardson and the
coarseness of both Fielding and Smollett (Horace Walpole, 161). In The Life of
Horace Walpole, Stephen Gwynn, another of Walpole’s biographers, observes
that “Walpole valued Shakespeare, recognized the greatness of his friend,
Thomas Gray, and considered Pope to have set the standard of his time. All
the rest of what was greatest in the literature of his age, he either ridiculed
or tolerated. Fielding pleased him; but he condescended to Fielding much
as he condescended to Garrick; Sterne he chose to despise” (145). For Wal-
pole, Gwynn adds, “the natural” had been exhausted—and none was guilt-
ier of the crime than Richardson, whose writing he found “insupportable”
(192).
2. Because Walpole feared the critical response to his fiction, he pub-
lished its first edition anonymously, presenting himself in its preface as the
translator of an Italian text that—“discovered in the library of an ancient
catholic family in the north of England” and printed in Naples in 1529—
described events that happened in Italy between 1095 and 1243 (The Castle
of Otranto, 3). All subsequent references to the novel are to this edition, which
will hereafter be cited in the text. It is worth noting that by now, Walpole’s
fiction has passed through more than 115 printings.
3. The publication of Charles Maturin’s Melmouth the Wanderer in 1820 is
generally seen as marking the end of the gothic tradition. Issues of classifi-
cation have been much complicated by the use of the term “gothic” by var-
ious critics to include not simply this late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century genre, with its significant use of the supernatural, but all fictions
and even films that share a predominantly psychological and subjectivist
focus. Among the more influential of these critics are William Patrick Day,
In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy; Eugenia C. De-
Lamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic;
Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel; Michelle A. Masse, In the Name
of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic; David Punter, The Literature of
Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day; and Anne
Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Throughout this book—as else-
where in my writing—I follow Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy: The Literature of
Subversion) in defining the gothic as a historically shaped genre within the
fantastic mode: a mode that is narrated through a range of genres that pro-
duce, regulate, and structure desire.
4. Sublimation is a process “postulated by Freud to account for human
activities which have no apparent connection with sexuality but which are
assumed to be motivated by the force of the sexual instinct. The main types
of activity described by Freud as sublimated are artistic creation and intel-
lectual inquiry. The instinct is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted
towards a new, non-sexual aim and in so far as its objects are socially valued
ones” ( J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Sublimation,” 431).
5. In his book The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology
of Transcendence, Thomas Weiskel points out that in addition to centering the
senses (which motivated the natural sublime), Locke detached the soul from
the hierarchy of relations in which it had been installed and effectively emp-
tied it out. “The soul is a vacancy, whose extent is discovered as it is filled.
Inner space, the infinitude of the Romantic mind, is born as a massive and
more or less unconscious emptiness, an absence” (15).
6. Weiskel writes compellingly of the ways in which the negative sublime
is characterized by obsessional neurosis and melancholia as responses to
guilt. He observes that “The sublime appears as a remedy for the languid
melancholy, the vague boredom that increased so astonishingly during the
eighteenth century; it transformed this state into the firmer, more morally
sanctioned melancholy of the gloomy egoist. Consequently, the sublime of
terror may be characterized as an episode in melancholy. In terms of the history
of sensibility, this suggests that the prestige and attractiveness of the sublime
is a direct function of the prevalence or predisposition to melancholy” (The
Romantic Sublime, 97).
7. Walpole to the Reverend William Cole, March 9, 1765. Quoted by W. S.
Lewis in his introduction to the Oxford edition of The Castle of Otranto, ix.
8. Walpole, who was an antiquarian, purchased Strawberry Hill in 1747
and made it the center of his life. After he reconstructed it with pinnacles
and battlements, galleries and cloisters, he stuffed it full of precious objects
he had collected; and he continued, over many years, to improve its grounds.
He wanted to create an illusion of barbarism and gloom, while enjoying
“modern refinements in luxury” (Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, Horace
Walpole: A Biography, 156). Although Strawberry Hill clearly served as the
inspiration for Manfred’s castle in the novel, Ketton-Cremer points out that
Trinity College at Cambridge—which Walpole had visited the year before
he wrote his fiction—supplied the great hall, the courtyard, and “some other
things” (217).
9. In “The Unguarded Prison: Reception Theory, Structural Marxism,
and the History of the Gothic Novel,” David H. Richter argues that the
phenomenon of “the unguarded door”—the ways in which unfreedom turns
inexplicably into freedom in gothic texts—suggests that the prisons were
unreal in the first place: they are “prisons of the mind from which one finds
oneself freed when one no longer feels oneself bound” (12). This argument
seems to apply extremely well to the fictions of Ann Radcliffe, where re-
peated anticlimaxes are used to emphasize the psychological nature of the
heroine’s susceptibility to the supernatural, and where her changing re-
sponses to the supernatural suggest her development from excessive sensi-
bility to rational good sense. The argument seems less compelling here,
where there is no sustained development of the protagonist and no move-
ment from ignorance to self-knowledge.
10. Walpole, “Preface to the First Edition,” 4.
11. Walpole, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 7–8.
12. Walpole, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 8.
13. In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour usefully analyzes the
ways in which the term “gothic” was used in the eighteenth century both
to demonize feudal tyranny and to idealize it as a golden age of liberty. She
argues that Robert Walpole inhabited the first position, identifying with the
middle-class forces of enlightened progress, while his son identified with
Burke and the latter position, seeing the British tradition of freedom as lost
in 1066 through the invasion by Britain of France, and then regained through
the Magna Carta and the Revolution of 1688. For Burke, and also for Wal-
pole, England’s Revolution provided an evolutionary model of organic
change in which older traditions and systems of relations could be redis-
covered and reproduced (13).
14. Certainly it is possible to read in the political theme of the novel
Walpole’s concern with the succession crisis that dominated Restoration pol-
itics and to see in his novel’s resolution a characteristic ambivalence toward
the principles of dynastic inheritance and patriarchalism, which the Hano-
verian Settlement of 1689 called radically into question.
15. Peter Hughes discusses the ways in which the “erotic heroism” of
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pushes the sexual and amorous
“beyond itself into the language of power, of masters and victims, of self-
consciousness that turns into the sacrifice and even the destruction of the
self” (“Wars within Doors: Erotic Heroism and the Implosion of Texts,” 403).
James Grantham Turner examines the development in the Restoration of a
discourse that linked erotic love to the sublime. In what he calls the “libertine
sublime,” sexuality is heroized and associated with quasi-religious pleasure,
emotional and physical excess, amoral individualism, and creative genius
(“The Libertine Sublime: Love and Death in Restoration England”). I would
define the libertine sublime as a form of the negative sublime, which char-
acterizes the fantastic mode.
16. My references in this chapter are to the essays by Nicolas Abraham

and Maria Torok that are collected in The Shell and the Kernel. Throughout
this chapter, I refer to Abraham and Torok as collaborative theorists at the
same time that, in the footnotes and occasionally in the text, I specify the
author of individual essays. While possibly confusing, this approach seems
to me to be responsive to the larger intention of their work.
17. Freud points out that in the case of melancholic introjection, where
the initial attachment of self to other was ambivalent, the anger that was
once directed at the object is turned back against the self, and the ego is
punished by the judging superego. The result can be sadistic self-destruction
that, calling on the “primal animosity” of the ego, can even lead to suicide
(“Mourning and Melancholia,” 163).
18. Reflecting on his discussion of introjection in “Mourning and Mel-
ancholia,” Freud writes: “Since then we have come to understand that this
kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the
ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is
called its ‘character.’ ” He adds: “It may be that this identification is the sole
condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process,
especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it
makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of
abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-
choices” (The Ego and the Id, 23, 24). In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in
Subjection, Judith Butler draws on Freud’s reassessment of the role of intro-
jection in The Ego and the Id and on Abraham and Torok’s revision of Freud’s
theory of melancholia in order to develop her own influential theory of the
melancholic structure of gender identity (57–72).
19. Maria Torok, “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Ex-
quisite Corpse,” 113.
20. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: In-
trojection versus Incorporation,” 125.
21. Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 125–26.
22. Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 127.
23. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 163.
25. In “Fantasy: An Attempt to Define Its Structure and Operations,”
Maria Torok writes against such theorists of unconscious fantasy as Freud,
Melanie Klein, and Susan Isaacs who, she believes, strip fantasy of its spec-
ificity and operational value by identifying it with “the whole expanse of
mental life.” Torok suggests that the production of fantasy is an essentially
conscious process in which the ego, feeling itself to be in an imaginative
realm, recognizes itself as the site of such strange and incomprehensible
phenomena as conscious feelings of intrusion, imagination, and misfit,
which are distinguishable from other related experiences (27). When the ego
senses a break in the continuity of its activities, according to Torok, it ex-
periences the momentary shifting of intrapsychic levels as an imaginary
“misfitting” that forces it to encounter a “lower” version of itself (30). The
fantasy that then irrupts into consciousness is a symptom in its own right:
“The representation of a problem seeking expression” (29). That irruption
in turn enables the psychic process of introjection through which the ego
mediates between interior and exterior worlds, assimilating experience
through imagination, play, intellection, language art, and fantasy, all of
which have equal access to the unconscious.
26. Lewis, introduction, x.
27. I am thinking here, for example, of Frankenstein’s monster, who has
often been read by critics as a projection of Mary Shelley herself; of Lucy
Snowe, in Villette, who tells her story initially as that of Paulina Home, but
whose narrative incorporates many elements of Brontë’s own biography; and
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who are not only doubles but also projections
of Mr. Utterson, the narrator, who can be seen as a version of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s father.
28. Walpole viewed his letters as the centerpiece of his chronicle. Ketton-
Cremer indicates that he chose his principal correspondents with great care
so that they would be precisely positioned in relation to his interests, and
he appointed their substitutes when they died. All were expected to return
his letters to him for editing, annotation, and, often, alteration, and these he
organized into an extensive social history (Horace Walpole, 127, 131–32).
29. Of Walpole’s biographers, Lewis is the most dismissive of the rumors,
observing both that “[i]f the Walpoles had any doubts about Horace’s pater-
nity they were very charitable about it” and that “[s]o far as we know,”
Horace did not know the gossip about his birth (Horace Walpole, 12). While
Ketton-Cremer is also dubious, Gwynn accepts the opinion expressed by
Lady Mary Wortley Montague in her journals that contemporary opinion
“did not doubt” Horace’s illegitimacy and, on the basis of similarities of
appearance and temperament, believed Hervey to have been his father.
Gwynn quotes an observation attributed to Lady Mary that “mankind was
divided into men, women, and Herveys,” suggesting that it was in part on
the basis of his effeminacy that Horace was thought to have been Hervey’s
son (The Life of Horace Walpole, 16).
30. Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole, 29.
31. Lewis describes a dynamic between Horace and Sir Robert that
seemed to change during the time immediately before and after Sir Robert
lost his office. Ultimately, Robert left Horace a handsome fortune, and Hor-
ace became “a violent champion of his father, heaping abuse upon Sir Rob-
ert’s enemies, extolling his virtues, and making his faults attractive” (Horace
Walpole, 20). Still Lewis believes that “beneath this outward loyalty lay quite
different emotions” (20), which he characterizes as a continuing “latent hos-
tility “ on the part of the son (24).
32. Lewis, Horace Walpole, 72.
34. Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole, 248–49.
36. Gwynn reports that after his mother’s death, Horace wrote to his
friend Charles Lyttleton: “You have often been witness to my happiness and
by that may partly figure what I feel for losing so fond a mother. If my loss
consisted solely in being deprived of one that loved me so much, it would
feel lighter to me than it now does, for I doated on her” (Life of Horace Walpole,
27).
38. The first time that Walpole offered Conway money was in 1744, when
he hoped to enable his cousin to marry; the second was in 1764, when Con-
way lost his court position. In 1744, Walpole wrote to Conway, as Ketton-
Cremer reports, “If I ever felt much for anything (which I know may be
questioned), it was certainly for my mother. I look on you as my nearest
relation by her, and I think I can never do enough to show my gratitude and
affection to her” (Horace Walpole, 103).
39. Ketton-Cremer writes of Walpole: “He could be petty and malicious.
He had a queer feminine element which occasionally rose to the surface in
the form of violent jealousy or spite. He gossiped with old ladies for days
on end; he was fond of china and goldfish and little dogs; he committed
every architectural absurdity in the building and adornment of his house;
he once stuck sweet-peas in his hair and sang to a roomful of dowagers at
their card-tables” (Horace Walpole, 21). Ketton-Cremer believes that Walpole
was “a natural celibate” (52). Gwynn says that he is unable to throw any
light on Walpole’s sexual history, but does not see him as “a man of strong
passion” (Life of Horace Walpole, 83). Lewis explicitly brushes off the possi-
bility that Walpole was a homosexual, discounting some remarks in the cor-
respondence that others have read differently: “a handful of letters written
in extravagant high spirits in the manner of the time are not proof of it, and
none has come to light” (Horace Walpole, 36). More recently, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has written of Walpole, Beckford, and Matthew Lewis as in some
significant sense having been homosexual, “Beckford notoriously, Lewis
probably, Walpole iffily.” She adds that despite the fact that Walpole’s life
was “staggeringly well-documented, we cannot tell how far he was homo-
sexual, because of the close protective coloration given by the aristocratic
milieu” (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 92–93).
In “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century,” George
Haggerty picks up on Sedgwick’s argument and looks specifically to Wal-
pole’s letters to Lord Lincoln and Harry Conway (the letters discounted by
Lewis) for evidence of Walpole’s homosexuality (344).
40. All three of Walpole’s biographers describe Walpole’s penchant for
close friendships with much older women. During the four years (1753–77)
that Walpole contributed to the periodical The World, he wrote a paper in
which he argued—ironically but not insignificantly—that old women were
the most satisfactory objects for love (Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole, 168).
41. Gwynn reports, for example, that Walpole wrote to his friend George
Montaque that Madame Du Deffand was “the best and sincerest of friends,
who loves me as much as my mother did” (Life of Horace Walpole, 223).
42. Walpole, “Preface to the 1781 Edition,” in The Mysterious Mother,
265. All references to the play are to this edition, which is cited parentheti-
cally in the text.
43. In his postscript to The Mysterious Mother, Walpole writes that the
subject of his play is “more truly horrid than even that of Oedipus,” and
observes: “From the time that I first undertook the foregoing scenes, I never
flattered myself that they would be appropriate to appear on the stage. The
subject is so horrid, that I thought it would shock, rather than give satisfac-
tion to an audience. Still I found it so truly tragic in the essential springs of
terror and pity, that I could not resist the impulse of adapting it to the scene,
though it could never be practicable to produce it there” (253–54).
46. Walpole, postscript to The Mysterious Mother, 254.
47. Lewis suggests the ways in which Walpole was deeply divided
within and between his relationships with his mother and father, and the
extent to which he was the ambivalent product of his parents’ contradictory
influences: “Horace had Sir Robert’s powers of persuasion, shrewdness, am-
bition, gift of friendship, and passion for collecting. Lady Walpole reinforced
her son’s love of the arts and heightened his taste for the ridiculous. Both
contributed to his inner uncertainties: his mother by her possessiveness and
hatred of his father; Sir Robert by his initial aloofness, by the rejection of
Horace’s mother, and by his power. From childhood, Horace was pulled
back and forth between love and hatred, fear and confidence, desire for
money and contempt for it, pride and humility, idealism and disillusion-
ment, his flair for friendship and his dislike of people at too close quarters”
(Horace Walpole, 188).
48. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 369–70. The uncanny can be seen as Freud’s
conceptualization of the sublime, another version of which is Julia Kristeva’s
theory of abjection.
49. Near the conclusion of his essay “The Uncanny”—after having fol-
lowed an extremely circuitous route that seems to suggest the process of his
own struggle with the uncanny—Freud writes: “It often happens that male
patients declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female
genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former
heim (home) of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once
upon a time and in the beginning” (398–99). He adds, “the unheimlich is
what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the token of
repression” (399). To the extent that Freud identifies the mother’s body as
the primal uncanny object, “The Uncanny” can be read as an essay on mel-
ancholia.
50. Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 117.
51. Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 118.
53. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “The Lost Object—Me: Notes on
Endocryptic Identification,” 141. Of course, in “Mourning and Melancholia,”
Freud observes that in the case of melancholia, the libido is not withdrawn
from the lost love object and transferred to a new one; rather, the ego iden-
tifies with the abandoned object (159).
55. Abraham and Torok, “The Lost Object—Me,” 142.
CONCLUSION
1. I am drawing here on the concept of “nachtraglichkeit,” which J. La-

planche and J. B. Pontalis define as “A term frequently used by Freud in
connection with his view of psychical temporality and causality: experi-
ences, impressions and memory traces may be revised at a later date to fit
in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of devel-
opment. They may in that event be endowed not only with a new meaning
but also with psychical effectiveness” (“Deferred Action; Deferred,” 111).
Although Freud used this concept in relation to traumatic events, I am using
it to suggest that the interpretation of texts is always to some extent an act
of “nachtraglichkeit.”
2. For example, there are strong fantastic elements in Dickens’s novels,
which are often associated with his criminal men and fallen women. These
fantastic subtexts reveal the profound resentments and thwarted desires that
the social system produces but cannot reconcile. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
is a striking composite text that provides insight into the shared structure
of personal, cultural, and textual melancholia, while Mary Shelley’s Frank-
enstein is an exemplary Romantic fiction in which interpsychic relations are
appropriated and transformed for the intrapsychic dynamic.
3. Of course, it was with the publication of Dorothy Dinnerstein’s Mer-
maid and the Minotaur in 1976 and Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Moth-
ering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender in 1978 that the feminist psy-
choanalytic project was inaugurated. The list of theorists who have
contributed to this project is too long—and the relations among them too
complicated—to detail here. In the writing of this book, I have found the
work of three people particularly important. For me Mary Jacobus estab-
lished a model of feminist psychoanalytic theory and criticism with Reading
Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism and First Things: The Maternal Imaginary
in Literature, Art, Psychoanalysis. Jessica Benjamin’s work has been exception-
ally influential and I refer to it often in these pages. With so many other
feminists, I am also much indebted to Judith Butler. In relation to this chap-
ter, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection has been especially helpful.
4. In a well-known passage in his essay “Female Sexuality,” which was
published in 1931, Freud writes: “Everything connected with this first
mother-attachment has in analysis seemed to me so elusive, lost in a past so
dim and shadowy, so hard to resuscitate, that it seemed as if it had under-
gone some specially inexorable repression” (195).
5. As J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis point out in “Object-Relation(ship),”

although the term “object-relationship” does occur occasionally in Freud’s
writing, the idea plays no part in Freud’s conceptual scheme (278). Feminist
object-relations theorists belong to the larger psychoanalytic movement that
has become dominant in the United States and England since the 1930s.
Although there are many variations among object-relations theories, all insist
that the individual should not be considered in isolation, but should be ex-
amined in its interactions with others. In other words, the subject constitutes
its own world of objects and those objects, in turn, shape the subject’s actions.
6. In The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Unknown,
Christopher Bollas argues that the infant experiences the mother not as an
object but as “a process of transformation.” Because this early experience of
transformation endures into adult life, the subject is moved to seek objects
which will have a similar potential for self-transformation (14). One’s life
can therefore be seen as a quest for a symbolic equivalent for the first trans-
formative object. According to Bollas, that equivalent can be found in art, in
nature, in a love relationship, in prized possessions, and in adventures of
various sorts.
7. In Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination
and Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference,
Jessica Benjamin emphasizes the significant loss experienced by male and
female children as a result of the imposed denial of cross-gender identifi-
cations. In “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” in The Psychic Life
of Power, Judith Butler emphasizes the ways in which the ritualized prohi-
bition of homosexual love—and, indeed, all rigid forms of gender and sexual
identification—creates personal and cultural melancholia: “What ensues is
a culture of gender melancholy in which masculinity and femininity emerge
as the traces of an ungrieved and ungrievable love” (140).
8. In “Sympathy for the Devil: Notes on Sexuality and Aggression, with
Special Reference to Pornography” (the final chapter of Like Subjects, Love
Objects, 175–211), Jessica Benjamin suggests that the fear of difference in
heterosexual relations can lead either to repudiation or to complementarity,
both of which can be seen as defenses against the struggle for recognition.
I find the former represented in fantastic narratives, the latter in realist nar-
ratives. Later in this chapter I examine the third possibility that Benjamin
discusses—an intersubjectivity that allows for mutual recognition. In ex-
plaining the historical subordination of women, Benjamin argues that the
heterosexual oedipal structure, which is central to gender organization and
development, is “the paradigmatic expression of splitting: the subject si-
multaneously denies the other’s subjectivity and makes her, instead, into the
object that embodies the split-off parts of the self” (Like Subjects, Love Objects,
18). It is the oedipal disruption of the male child’s identification with the
mother that establishes the complementary gender structure. Benjamin also
argues, however, that identificatory tendencies may be—and often are—
maintained alongside object love. The complementarity that then results
is of a different sort, and produces different attitudes toward oppositional
differences (73). The gender indeterminacy that I locate in fantastic texts is

grounded in this “overinclusive” position.
9. Jessica Benjamin first theorized relations of erotic domination in 1980
in “The Bonds of Love: Erotic Domination and Rational Violence.” She ex-
tended her analysis in Bonds of Love and Like Subject, Love Objects. In “Sym-
pathy for the Devil,” she added a provocative discussion of aggression, vi-
olence, and pornography.
10. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epis-
temology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines such paranoid,
homosocial, fantastic texts and theorizes the social and psychological dy-
namics that produce them.
11. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes, “The ego comes into being
on the condition of the ‘trace’ of the other, who is, at that moment of emer-
gence, already at a distance. To accept the autonomy of the ego is to forget
that trace, and to accept that trace is to embark upon a process of mourning
that can never be complete, for no final severance could take place without
dissolving the ego” (196).
12. For example, the relational possibility that Sterne conceptualizes for
his male characters has a great deal in common with the one that Jessica
Benjamin aligns with the “overinclusive position” available to men and
women. In Like Subjects, Love Objects, she writes: “Each love object embodies
multiple possibilities of sameness and difference, of masculinity and femi-
ninity, and love relationships may serve a multitude of functions. In each
relationship the axis of similarity and complementarity is aligned somewhat
differently with the axis of gender” (128). Comparing an erotic to a porno-
graphic sexuality, she explains: “But what makes sexuality erotic is the sur-
vival of the other throughout the exercise of power, which in turn makes
the expression of power part of symbolic play” (206). In Straight Male Mod-
ern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis, John Brenkman also conceptualizes
such a subject, as do Julian Henriques and the other authors of Changing the
Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity. All are concerned to
define a psychoanalytic theory that is responsive to social and political in-
fluences.
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Index
Abjection, 10, 142, 181n48 temporality, 156n8; and Tristram

Abraham, Nicolas, 13, 110, 124–26, 133, Shandy, 101
135, 136, 137, 144, 172n13, Allen, Dennis W., 175n31
178nn16, 18 Ambisexuality, 94, 106, 175n31
Absurd, comic, 88 Anderson, Benedict, 156n8, 158n16
Affectivity: and Clarissa, 83; and con- Androgyny, 79, 84, 106, 169n29
nectedness, 37; and domestic sphere, Anti-hero, 8–9, 110, 118, 154n21,
30; and erotics, 107; and family, 20, 154n22
33; and fantastic narrative, 10; and Anxiety: and The Castle of Otranto, 121,
femininity, 34; and gothic literature, 123, 124; and castration, 97, 101; and
8; and individualism, 5, 7, 8, 83; and Clarissa, 11, 63, 121, 168n27; and dif-
individuality, 37; and language, 10, ference, 96; and family, 36, 133; and
124; and maternal relations, 74, incest, 38, 159n22; and masculinity,
141, 142; and Moll Flanders, 20, 35, 121, 168n27; and maternal relations,
37, 40; and rationality, 160n26; 124, 141; and Moll Flanders, 36, 38;
and Robinson Crusoe, 22, 30, 33, 37; and paternal relations, 121; and Rob-
and Roxana, 20, 35, 37, 48; and struc- inson Crusoe, 26–27, 30, 32, 34, 36;
ture of feeling, 52, 59, 161n32, 164n6; and Roxana, 36; and sexuality, 11, 63;
and the sublime, 10; and Tristram and sublime, 112, 169n30; and Tris-
Shandy, 103, 106; and women, 20, 51, tram Shandy, 90, 91, 96, 97, 100, 101,
74 107, 121, 171nn10, 11
Alienation: and capitalism, 30, 42, 53; Appropriation: and The Castle of
and The Castle of Otranto, 110, 122, Otranto, 123, 143; and Clarissa, 71, 76–
123, 134; and Clarissa, 11, 84; and co- 77, 84, 143; and Moll Flanders, 42; and
lonialism, 158n13; and commodifica- otherness, 109; and pornographic
tion, 39; and fantastic narrative, 10, imagination, 60; and reproductive re-
53; and Moll Flanders, 36, 39, 42, 44, lations, 91; and Robinson Crusoe, 31,
47; and object-relations theory, 55; 33, 34; and Tristram Shandy, 91, 94,
and paternal relations, 122, 123, 134; 105, 106, 144; of women’s roles by
and psychoanalysis, 140; and repro- men, 33, 91, 93–94, 105, 123
ductive relations, 42, 90, 91; and Rob- Aristocracy: and The Castle of Otranto,
inson Crusoe, 24, 26–27, 30, 34; and 124, 134; and Clarissa, 61, 62
Roxana, 36, 44, 47; and self, 10, 26, Armstrong, Nancy, 57, 149–50n2,
47, 53, 112, 140, 165n14; and self- 155n27
awareness, 139; and sublime, 111, Authorship, and gender, 153n17,
112; and tragedy, 53; and Tristram 156n30
Shandy, 89, 91 Autobiography, spiritual, 22, 24–25
Allegory: and Clarissa, 82, 84; and fan- Autonomy: and bourgeoisie, 54; and
tastic narrative, 22; and paternal rela- The Castle of Otranto, 110, 118, 127;
tions, 32; and picaresque, 25; and Pu- and Clarissa, 13, 62, 67, 71, 72, 81, 82,
ritanism, 22; and realist narrative, 22, 83, 118; and ego, 184n11; and fantas-
25, 26, 32, 82; and regression, 82; and tic narrative, 7, 19; and femininity,
religion, 19, 32, 82, 83, 84; and Robin- 48, 72, 82; and identity, 59; and ide-
son Crusoe, 19, 22, 24–26, 32; and self, ology, 36–37; and individualism, 4,
25, 84; and sentimentality, 84; and 17, 25, 36–37; and individuality, 31;
195
196 Index
Autonomy (continued ) Butler, Judith, 173n20, 178n18, 182n3,

and interiority, 26; and masculinity, 183n7, 184n11
21, 28, 34, 59; and Moll Flanders, 36– Byron, George Gordon, 130
37, 38, 51; and psychoanalysis,
165n14; and realist narrative, 6, 19, Caillois, Roger, 172n16
25, 54; and repression, 21; and Robin- Capitalism: and alienation, 30, 42, 53;
son Crusoe, 19, 21, 22–23, 25–29, 31, and The Castle of Otranto, 110, 123;
32, 34, 35, 37; and Roxana, 36–37, 44, and Clarissa, 60; and Defoe’s life, 17;
47, 48, 49; and self, 26, 71, 83, 144, and difference, 60; and family, 36, 38,
161n35, 165n14; and subjectivity, 139; 159n23; and fantastic narrative, 7,
and Tristram Shandy, 144, 145; and 150n3; and femininity, 43; and gen-
women, 20, 35–36 der, 1, 2; and ideology, 28, 32, 59;
and incest, 159n23; and individual-
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 155n25, 170n2 ism, 4, 17, 19, 28, 31, 35, 39, 54, 59;
Ballaster, Ros, 149n2 and materialism, 8; and Moll Flan-
Barker-Benfield, G. J., 151n7 ders, 35, 38, 42–43, 159n19; and nov-
Beckett, Samuel, 88 elistic form, 1; and object-relations
Beckford, William, 180n39 theory, 53; and patriarchy, 7, 38, 60,
Benjamin, Jessica, 13, 165–68nn, 182n3, 123; and pornographic imagination,
183–84nn 59; and realist narrative, 53, 150n3;
Benjamin, Walter, 156n8, 161n33 and reproductive relations, 42,
Bhaba, Homi, 158n13 159n19; and Robinson Crusoe, 20, 28,
Bimodality, 1, 21, 55, 58, 60, 109, 139, 30–32, 34; and Roxana, 20, 35, 159n19;
140, 145, 146 and self, 31, 53; and sex-gender sys-
Blaut, J. M., 157n2 tem, 1–2, 110; and sexuality, 60; and
Body: and Clarissa, 67, 81, 82, 83; and subjectivity, 52; and women, 35, 42,
commodification, 39, 44, 82, 160n28; 159n19
and fantastic narrative, 60; and gen- Carnivalesque, 106, 155n25, 170n2
der, 60; and Lacanian theory, 104–5, Carroll, Lewis, 88
174n30; and masculinity, 97, 107; and The Castle of Otranto (Walpole): and al-
maternal relations, 34, 92, 103, 106, ienation, 110, 122, 123, 134; and anxi-
107, 126, 133, 142, 174nn, 181n49; ety, 121, 123, 124; and appropriation,
and pornographic imagination, 60; 123, 143; and aristocracy, 124, 134;
and reproductive relations, 20, 36, 42; and autonomy, 110, 118, 127; and bi-
and Robinson Crusoe, 34; and Roxana, modality, 145; and capitalism, 110,
47, 160n28; and Tristram Shandy, 94, 123; and comedy, 113, 115, 117, 121,
97, 106, 107, 144; ungendered, 60; 122; and death, 134, 135; and desire,
and women, 3, 35, 36, 42, 47, 60, 110, 113, 122, 124, 133, 134; and dif-
107 ference, 11, 117, 121, 124; and divid-
Bollas, Christopher, 183n6 edness, 127; and domination, 123;
Boundary: and Clarissa, 71, 73; and fan- and dream, 112, 113, 114, 127, 136;
tastic narrative, 10, 110–11; and real- and egotism, 110, 118; and erotics,
ist narrative, 10; and self, 71, 73, 94, 123; and family, 11, 119, 120, 121,
165n14; and Tristram Shandy, 94, 144, 122, 123–24; and fantastic narrative,
145 11, 109–10, 116, 117, 118, 124, 127,
Bourgeoisie: and autonomy, 54; and 135; and gender, 11, 117, 145; and
Clarissa, 62; and family, 62, 123, 133, gothic literature, 13, 87, 109–10, 118,
140, 159n20; and Moll Flanders, 43; 119, 155n26; and heterosexuality, 123;
and Pamela, 58 and hierarchy, 121; and homoeroti-
Braudy, Leo, 165n12 cism, 136; and hysteria, 118; and
Braverman, Richard, 158n15 identity, 119; and imagination, 117;
Brenkman, John, 160n26, 184n12 and incest, 110, 122, 123, 134, 135;
Brontë, Charlotte, 153–54nn, 155n26, and incorporation, 133; and individu-
161n30, 179n27, 182n2 alism, 117, 118, 123, 124; and instru-
Brontë, Emily, 88, 153n17, 155n26 mentalization, 117, 118; and interac-
Burke, Edmund, 111, 177n13 tion of narrative modes, 11, 110, 115–
Index 197
16, 117, 124; and interiority, 110; and 44; and psychoanalytic theory, 140,
introjection, 133; and irony, 123; and 141; and Roxana, 20, 44, 47, 49–50
language, 117, 124; and libertinism, Chodorow, Nancy, 182n3
123; and loss, 11, 13, 110, 124, 134; Clarissa (Richardson): and affectivity, 83;
and marriage, 121, 123, 135; and and alienation, 11, 84; and allegory,
masculinity, 110, 117; and maso- 82, 84; and androgyny, 79, 83, 169n29;
chism, 120; and maternal relations, and anxiety, 11, 63, 121, 168n27; and
120, 123, 124, 135–36, 142, 143, 144; appropriation, 71, 76–77, 84, 143; and
and melancholia, 11, 110, 124, 127, aristocracy, 61, 62; and autonomy,
133, 134, 135, 144; and melodrama, 13, 62, 67, 71, 72, 81, 82, 83, 118; and
117, 145; and misogyny, 120, 123, 124; bimodality, 58, 60, 145; and bisexual-
and mourning, 110, 113, 118; and ity, 79; and body, 67, 81, 82, 83; and
narcissism, 118; and nihilism, 123; boundary, 71, 73; and bourgeoisie, 62;
and objectification, 117; and oedipal and capitalism, 60; and castration, 78,
struggle, 119; and paranoia, 118, 124; 79; and colonialism, 82; and comedy,
and parody, 110, 113; and paternal 65; and commodification, 62, 82; and
relations, 110, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123– connectedness, 71, 72, 79, 80, 142;
24, 127, 134; and patriarchy, 117, 119, and contradiction, 62, 68, 71, 76, 83,
120, 123–24; and perversity, 110, 117; 164–65n9; and deconstruction, 163n5;
and political relations, 119, 124, and dependency, 67; and desire, 62,
177n14; and pornography, 122–23, 66, 70, 71, 74, 122, 142, 143; and dif-
143; and possessiveness, 117, 118, ference, 60, 66, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78,
123, 124; and power, 117, 119, 121, 84–85, 142; and disintegration, 81, 83;
123–24; and preservative repression, and dividedness, 70, 80, 85, 109; and
133; and private sphere, 121; and domination, 13, 65, 66, 68, 75, 168n27;
property, 119; and psychological rela- and doubleness, 161n30, 168n24; and
tions, 117–19, 122–24, 127, 132, 133– dream, 78, 79; and economic rela-
36; and public sphere, 121; publica- tions, 61–63; and erasure, 71, 84; and
tion of, 170n3, 175n2; and rape, 143; erotics, 13, 65–66, 68, 72, 75, 79, 85,
and reader response, 118; and realist 143, 168n27; and family, 61–64, 67,
narrative, 11, 110, 116, 124; and rec- 68, 69, 70, 72, 83, 142; and fantastic
ognition, 144; and regression, 136; narrative, 11, 57, 60, 61, 70, 71, 75,
and reproductive relations, 121, 124; 77, 78, 82, 84, 85, 118, 163n1, 165n13;
and sadism, 120; and self, 110, 117, and femininity, 62, 70, 72, 74, 79, 81,
118, 119, 123, 133; and self- 82, 85; and feminism, 13, 163–64n5;
awareness, 110; and sex-gender sys- and fetishism, 76, 78; and gender, 11,
tem, 110, 123, 124; and sexuality, 11, 13, 60, 61, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80,
120, 122–23, 134, 135, 145; and social 83, 84, 109, 142, 145, 166n16; and
class, 134; and solipsism, 110, 117; gothic literature, 81, 165n13; and het-
and subjectivity, 117, 120, 127, 145; erosexuality, 60, 65, 73, 142; and
and the sublime, 123, 136; and the homosociality, 143; and identifica-
supernatural, 112, 114–15, 117, 133; tion, 72, 78, 79, 85, 142, 169n29; and
and tragedy, 113, 115, 121; and the identity, 67, 71; and ideology, 62, 69,
uncanny, 133; and Walpole’s life, 83, 109; and impotence, 75, 79, 85;
110, 116–17, 127, 129, 136, 177n13, and individualism, 69, 83, 109, 118,
177n14; and women, 119–21 163n1; and integration, 84; and inter-
Castle, Terry, 69, 163–64n5 action of narrative modes, 11, 59, 60,
Castration: and anxiety, 97; and Clar- 61, 70, 82, 84, 85; and libertinism, 59,
issa, 78, 79; and Lacanian theory, 13, 61, 69, 75, 162n38; and love, 73, 79;
104, 106, 173n19, 174n22; and lan- and marriage, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69,
guage, 97, 98, 174n22; and maternal 73; and martyrdom, 81, 82, 83,
relations, 78, 92, 93; and Tristram 169n29; and masculinity, 60, 62, 66,
Shandy, 13, 92, 93, 97, 98, 106, 107 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 85; and maso-
Chabor, Lois, 159n19 chism, 66, 72, 80, 83, 163n1, 165n13;
Children: and gender identity, 166– and mastery, 73; and materialism, 62,
67n18; and Moll Flanders, 20, 37, 43– 67; and maternal relations, 63, 66, 67,
198 Index
Clarissa (Richardson) (continued ) Comedy: and the absurd, 88; and The
72, 75, 77–79, 80, 81, 142, 143, 144, Castle of Otranto, 113, 115, 117, 121,
168n27; and matriarchy, 64; and mel- 122; and Clarissa, 65; and fantastic
ancholia, 144; and middle class, 61; narrative, 102, 103–4, 105; and Pa-
and misogyny, 63, 68; and morality, mela, 58; and realist narrative, 53, 107;
62, 67, 80, 81, 82, 163n1; and murder, and sentimentality, 87; and sublime,
61; and mutuality, 70–71, 142, 168n27; 87, 102, 105, 106, 107; and Tristram
and narcissism, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 81, Shandy, 13, 87, 91, 95, 102, 103–4, 105,
93; and objectification, 62, 65, 85; and 106, 107, 117, 144
oceanic experience, 84; and omnipo- Commodification: and alienation, 39;
tence, 79; and otherness, 74, 78, 85, and body, 39, 44, 82, 160n28; and
143; and parody, 77, 81; and paternal Clarissa, 62, 82; and desire, 39; and
relations, 62–63, 68, 72, 80, 82, 83; family, 36; and Moll Flanders, 36, 39,
and patriarchy, 60, 63, 64, 80, 82, 83, 42–43, 44; and reification, 39, 160n25,
120; and penetration, 68, 76, 81, 160n26; and Robinson Crusoe, 34; and
165n12; and perversity, 163n1; and Roxana, 36, 44, 47, 160n28; and self,
pornography, 59–60, 66, 75, 76, 80, 54; and sexuality, 43; and women, 36,
84, 85, 143, 145; and possession, 69, 39
79; and possessiveness, 79; and Complementarity, 142, 183n8, 184n12
poststructuralism, 57; and power, 62, Connectedness: and affectivity, 37; and
63, 65, 66, 68, 73, 79, 80; and prop- Clarissa, 71, 72, 79, 80, 142; and erot-
erty, 62, 63, 67, 82; and prostitution, ics, 107, 108; and fictionality, 146;
61, 76, 77; and psychological rela- and heterosexuality, 60; and homoso-
tions, 60, 61, 71–85; and Puritanism, ciality, 143; and individuality, 37, 60;
164–65n9; and rape, 61, 65, 70, 76–78, and power, 165n14; and reciprocity,
80, 81, 83, 85; and rationality, 71; and 37, 143; and reproductive relations,
reader response, 60, 85, 118, 168n26; 42; and Tristram Shandy, 107, 108,
and realist narrative, 11, 57, 60, 61, 144, 145
68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 80, 82, 83, Consciousness: and contradiction, 47;
84, 85, 163n1, 165n13, 166n16; and divided, 51; and fantastic narrative,
reciprocity, 83, 143; and recognition, 30, 47; and gothic literature, 111; and
13, 71, 142, 144; and regression, 75, ideology, 52, 55; and individualism,
80; and religion, 64, 72, 81, 82, 83, 84, 5, 19, 51, 159n22; and interaction of
169n29; and sadism, 60, 63, 66, 72, narrative modes, 22; and irrational-
73, 75, 79, 80, 163n1, 168n27; and sa- ism, 47; and middle class, 57; and
domasochism, 163n1; and self, 68, 70, modernity, 52, 109; and Moll Flanders,
71, 73, 80, 82, 83, 84–85; and self- 47, 159n22; and object-relations the-
preservation, 70; and sentimentality, ory, 52, 55; and Pamela, 57; and Puri-
83, 84, 85; and sex-gender system, 60; tanism, 22; and realist narrative, 140;
and sexuality, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 74, and Robinson Crusoe, 22, 30; and Ro-
75, 77, 83, 84, 145, 163n1; and social manticism, 140; and Roxana, 47, 140
class, 62, 63, 66; and socialization, 77; Contradiction: and bimodality, 55; and
and solipsism, 75, 78, 83, 85; and Clarissa, 62, 68, 71, 76, 83, 164–65n9;
subjectivity, 68–69, 71, 75, 80, 84, 109, and colonialism, 29; and conscious-
145; and sublime, 61, 82, 83, 84, 112; ness, 47; and fantastic narrative, 35;
and tragedy, 60, 85; and ungendered and gender, 36; and ideology, 20, 21,
condition, 60, 61 139; and individualism, 55; and Moll
Clark, Alice, 151n6 Flanders, 39–40, 47, 55; and Puritan-
Class. See Social class ism, 165–21n9; and realist narrative,
Collins, Wilkie, 155n26, 161n30 19, 21, 35; and Robinson Crusoe, 28,
Colonialism: and alienation, 158n13; 29, 32, 35, 55; and Roxana, 20, 46–47,
and Clarissa, 82; and contradiction, 29; 48, 51, 55, 142, 145; and sex-gender
and diffusionism, 157n12; and other- system, 1; and subjectivity, 46
ness, 158n13; and race, 157–58n13; Criminality, 37, 38, 40–43, 50–51, 182n2
and religion, 29; and Robinson Crusoe, Cross-gender identification, 51, 60,
29, 31, 51, 157n11; and self, 158n13 183n7
Index 199
Death: and The Castle of Otranto, 134, Lacanian theory, 12–13; and maternal
135; and Clarissa, 61, 81, 83; and fan- relations, 124; and melancholia, 7, 11;
tastic narrative, 9, 135; and The Mys- and men, 74; and naturalization, 73;
terious Mother, 134; and sexuality, and patriarchy, 60; and pornography,
134, 135; and Tristram Shandy, 102, 59, 85, 167n20; and power, 59, 66;
103 and psychoanalysis, 12–13; and race,
Deconstruction: and Clarissa, 163n5; 28; and realist narrative, 5, 7, 10, 73,
and fantastic narrative, 110–11; and 108; and reproductive relations, 3,
gothic literature, 111; and Tristram 90; and Robinson Crusoe, 28, 29, 32;
Shandy, 88 and scientific ideology, 3; and self,
Defoe, Daniel: life of, 17–19, 52; works 84–85; and sex-gender system, 3–4,
of, 13, 19–22, 52–55, 144, 149n1. See 58; sexual, 2, 3, 9, 13, 60, 74, 75, 83–
also Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; 84, 89, 103, 143, 167n20; and Tri-
Roxana stram Shandy, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 102,
Deleuze, Gilles, 168n26 117, 143, 144, 173n17; and women,
Dependency: and Clarissa, 67; and mas- 74
culinity, 28, 35, 59; and Robinson Cru- Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 182n3
soe, 23, 28, 35 Disintegration: and Clarissa, 81, 83; and
Desire: and The Castle of Otranto, 110, Robinson Crusoe, 25; and self, 25, 103
113, 122, 124, 133, 134; and Clarissa, Displacement: and family, 20; and gen-
62, 66, 70, 71, 74, 122, 142, 143; and der, 33; and Robinson Crusoe, 20, 32,
commodification, 39; and fantastic 33; and Tristram Shandy, 93, 107; and
narrative, 7, 9, 12, 60, 74, 85, 88, 103, women, 33
112, 153n17, 154n24, 176n3; and femi- Dissenters, 17, 18
ninity, 58, 74, 153n17, 153n18, 166n16; Dividedness: and The Castle of Otranto,
and gothic literature, 8, 153n18; and 127; and Clarissa, 70, 80, 85, 109; and
homosociality, 94; and incest, 110, consciousness, 51; and fantastic nar-
122, 134; and lack, 101; and loss, 13, rative, 7, 20, 88, 127; and hysteria, 51;
134; and masculinity, 60, 94, 153n17, and individualism, 5, 51, 109; and la-
153n18; and masochism, 66; and ma- bor, 2, 3, 12, 33, 34, 51, 58, 77, 88,
terialism, 7; and maternal relations, 121, 163n3; and Lacanian theory, 104;
124, 132, 141; and melancholia, 125; and Pamela, 58; and Richardson’s life,
and Moll Flanders, 35, 38, 39, 44; and 85; and Robinson Crusoe, 26, 28, 30,
mourning, 134; and The Mysterious 33, 34, 109; and Roxana, 47–48, 50, 51,
Mother, 134; and Pamela, 58; and pa- 109; and self, 5, 7, 26, 28, 30, 50, 55,
ternal relations, 134, 166n16; and per- 80, 87, 97, 133, 152n13, 183n8; and
versity, 5; and phallic economy, 104; subjectivity, 19, 88, 89, 109, 127, 139,
and pornographic imagination, 60; 183n8; and tragedy, 47; and Tristram
and Robinson Crusoe, 26, 30, 32; and Shandy, 87, 89, 95, 97, 109
Roxana, 35, 44, 46, 49, 50; and sex- Domestication: and nature, 34; and
gender system, 142, 143; and subjec- Robinson Crusoe, 34
tivity, 88; and Tristram Shandy, 93, Domestic sphere: and affectivity, 30;
94, 101, 103, 104; and the uncanny, and inequality, 30; and Moll Flanders,
132 37, 44; and novelistic form, 149n2;
Dialectics, Hegelian, 165n14 and realist narrative, 6; and Robinson
Dickens, Charles, 155n26, 156n30, Crusoe, 30, 33; and Roxana, 44, 45;
161n30, 170n2, 182n2 and women, 2, 37
Difference: and anxiety, 96; and capital- Domination: and The Castle of Otranto,
ism, 60; and The Castle of Otranto, 123; and Clarissa, 13, 65, 66, 68, 75,
117, 121, 124; and Clarissa, 60, 66, 70, 168n27; and erotics, 9, 13, 68, 72, 75,
73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 84–85, 142; and fan- 123, 143, 166nn, 168n27, 183n9; and
tastic narrative, 7, 9, 103–4; and gen- fantastic narrative, 9; and gender, 13,
der, 1, 4, 14, 28, 32, 59, 60, 70, 84, 141; and Hegelian theory, 165n14;
102, 103, 117, 151n5, 162n44, 173n17; and pornography, 143; and Robinson
and heterosexuality, 183n8; and hier- Crusoe, 27, 30; and self, 165n14; and
archy, 10, 94, 103, 107, 121, 144; and women, 123
200 Index
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 170n2 Family: and affectivity, 20, 33; and anx-
Doubleness: and bimodal fiction, 139, iety, 36, 133; and bourgeoisie, 62,
140, 147; and Clarissa, 161n30, 168n24; 123, 133, 140, 159n20; and capitalism,
and literary tradition, 161n30; and 36, 38, 159n23; and The Castle of
Roxana, 48, 50; and Tristram Shandy, Otranto, 11, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123–24;
95, 102 and Clarissa, 61–64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72,
Dracula (Stoker), 88, 155n26 83, 142; and commodification, 36;
Dream: and The Castle of Otranto, 112, and displacement, 20; and economic
113, 114, 127, 136; and Clarissa, 78, 79; relations, 2, 36, 159n20; and erotics,
and Robinson Crusoe, 27–28 123; extended, 36, 93; and fantastic
narrative, 9, 112; and gothic litera-
Eagleton, Terry, 69, 163–64n5 ture, 8, 119, 122; and heterosexuality,
Economic relations: and Clarissa, 61–63; 93, 166n18; and ideology, 159n20;
and criminality, 43; and Defoe’s life, and incest, 38–39; and individualism,
17–18; and family, 2, 36, 159n20; and 37; and instrumentalization, 47; and
gender, 1, 2; and men, 2; and Moll middle class, 2, 61, 159n20; and Moll
Flanders, 36, 39; in Robinson Crusoe, Flanders, 35, 36, 37–39; nuclear, 2, 36,
22–23, 26, 30–31; and Roxana, 20, 36, 38, 93; and patriarchy, 1–2, 9, 38, 64,
44–45, 49; and sex-gender system, 1– 83; and perversity, 38; and private
3; and sexuality, 43, 62; and women, sphere, 2, 5; and realist narrative, 9,
2, 36, 123, 151n6 93; and Robinson Crusoe, 20, 22–23,
Ego, 111, 117, 125, 126, 134–35, 152n15, 25, 28, 32–33, 36, 37, 158–59n18; and
178–79nn17, 18, 25, 184n11 Roxana, 20, 35, 36, 37, 47, 49–50; and
Egotism, 6, 8, 20, 23–24, 110, 118 self, 119; and sex-gender system, 37;
Ehlers, Leigh A., 171n11 and social class, 7, 159n20; and so-
Elias, Norbert, 5, 152n13, 155n25 cialization, 36; and Tristram Shandy,
Eliot, George, 162n38 93; and working class, 159n20
Emotion. See Affectivity Fanon, Franz, 157n13, 164n6
Empiricism, 88, 149n1 Fantastic narrative: and affectivity, 10;
Enlightenment, 10, 12, 116, 117, 158n16 and alienation, 53; and allegory, 22;
Epistemology, 10, 11, 88, 170n4, 170n5 and autonomy, 7, 19; and boundary,
Erasure: and Clarissa, 71, 84; and ma- 7, 110–11; and capitalism, 7, 150n3;
ternal relations, 91, 101, 172n14; and and The Castle of Otranto, 11, 109–10,
Robinson Crusoe, 20, 31, 33; and Tris- 116, 117, 118, 124, 127, 135; and Clar-
tram Shandy, 91, 101, 142; and issa, 11, 57, 60, 61, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78,
women, 20, 31, 33 82, 84, 85, 118, 163n1, 165n13; and
Erotics: and affectivity, 107; and The comedy, 102, 103–4, 105; and con-
Castle of Otranto, 123; and Clarissa, sciousness, 30, 47; and contradiction,
13, 65–66, 68, 72, 75, 79, 85, 143, 35; and cross-gender representation,
168n27; and community, 107; and 60; and death, 9, 135; and decon-
connectedness, 107, 108; and domina- struction, 110–11; and desire, 7, 9, 12,
tion, 9, 13, 68, 72, 75, 123, 143, 166nn, 60, 74, 85, 88, 103, 112, 153n17,
168n27, 184n9; and family, 123; and 154n24, 176n3; and Dickens’s works,
fantastic narrative, 9; and heroism, 182n2; and difference, 7, 103–4; and
177n15; and indeterminacy, 103; and dividedness, 7, 20, 88, 127; and dom-
Lacanian theory, 105; and maternal ination, 9; and erotics, 9; and family,
relations, 129; and Moll Flanders, 39; 9, 112; and femininity, 77; and gen-
and Robinson Crusoe, 33, 143; and der, 34, 60, 61, 72, 85, 88, 140,
Roxana, 44, 48, 143; and self- 153n17, 154n24, 184n8; and gothic lit-
transcendence, 105; and Tristram erature, 7–8, 87–88, 109–10, 111,
Shandy, 94, 107, 108, 143 150n3, 176n3; and Hegelian theory,
Exchange value, 30, 43 165n14; and heterosexuality, 9, 74;
Exploitation: and Moll Flanders, 36, 39, and homosexuality, 9; and homoso-
41; and pornography, 167n20; and ciality, 143; and horror genre, 87–88;
Robinson Crusoe, 28, 31, 34, 35, 37; and and identification, 60, 132; and ideol-
Roxana, 36, 44, 45; and subjectivity, 41 ogy, 139; and impotence, 60; and in-
Index 201
cest, 9, 75, 112; and indeterminacy, 7, Femininity: and affectivity, 34; and
10, 14; and individualism, 7, 21–22; autonomy, 48, 72, 82; and capitalism,
and integration, 7, 21; and interiority, 43; and Clarissa, 62, 70, 72, 74, 79, 81,
7, 48, 88, 110; and loss, 137; and love, 82, 85; and desire, 58, 74, 153n17,
73–74; and marriage, 8, 9; and mas- 153n18, 166n16; and fantastic narra-
culinity, 8–9, 34, 60; and materialism, tive, 77; and gothic literature, 8; and
7; and maternal relations, 9, 75, 77; identification, 60; and identity, 2, 43;
and melancholia, 7, 14, 125, 126–27, and ideology, 22, 35, 43; and impo-
143; and misogyny, 9; and modern- tence, 85; and individualism, 19,
ism, 7, 10, 109; and Moll Flanders, 41, 20–22, 35, 37, 41, 42, 44, 51, 52; and
42; and mourning, 143; and mutu- interiority, 3, 155n27; and Lacanian
ality, 143; and The Mysterious Mother, theory, 173n19; and masochism, 8,
110, 132; and narcissism, 112; and 66, 72, 153n19, 166n15, 166n16; and
necrophilia, 135; and object-relations maternal relations, 74; and Moll
theory, 53, 54–55; and objectification, Flanders, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 51;
9; and otherness, 14, 29; and para- and narcissism, 66; and nature,
noia, 7, 9, 143; and paternal relations, 33–34; and objectification, 85; and
9; and patriarchy, 7; and picaresque, otherness, 85; and paternal rela-
21, 46, 49; and pornography, 60, 75, tions, 166n16; and perversity, 37;
84, 164n7; and postmodernism, 8, 109; and possessiveness, 42, 51; and
and power, 60, 77; and psychoanaly- power, 77; and realist narrative,
sis, 12, 13, 55, 124–27, 140, 154n24; 42, 45, 75; and Robinson Crusoe,
and psychological relations, 10, 60, 32–34; and Roxana, 21, 35, 44, 45,
61, 88, 111, 150n3, 155n26; and realist 46, 48, 160n28; and self-awareness,
narrative, 1, 10–11, 14–15, 19–20, 22, 8, 51; and sensibility, 151n7; and
28, 30, 34, 49, 51, 60, 61, 70, 82, 84, subjectivity, 47, 75, 145, 150n2,
85, 87, 88, 102, 109, 110, 116, 124, 153n17; and Tristram Shandy, 93, 107,
145, 154n24, 155n26; and regression, 145
10, 60, 75; and repression, 126, 127; Feminism: and Clarissa, 13, 163–64n5;
and Robinson Crusoe, 11, 19–20, 21, and gender, 142, 146; and Hegelian
22, 26–30, 31, 34, 35, 118; and ro- theory, 165n14; and indeterminacy,
mance genre, 8, 10, 88, 150n3; and 103; and individualism, 51–52; and
Romanticism, 8, 109; and Roxana, 21, Lacanian theory, 173n20; and mater-
44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51; and sadism, nal relations, 141–42; and melancho-
72; and satire, 170n2; and self, 7, 10, lia, 146; and object-relations theory,
14, 30, 53, 55, 61, 74, 95, 103, 112; 13, 141, 165–66n14, 183n5; and por-
and self-awareness, 7, 9, 31, 34; and nographic imagination, 142; and psy-
self-reflection, 7, 46; and sex-gender choanalysis, 141–42, 145, 146, 182n3,
system, 7; and sexuality, 8, 9, 72, 75, 183n5; and reproductive relations, 91;
77, 88; and social context, 88; and and romance genre, 149n2; and Rox-
solipsism, 8–9, 60, 75, 88; and subjec- ana, 45, 51, 160n28; and sex-gender
tivity, 9, 10, 11, 54, 88, 89, 127, system, 142, 146; and Tristram
154n24; and the sublime, 10, 61, 84, Shandy, 145, 170–171n8, 171n11
102, 104, 105, 107, 112, 177n15; and Ferguson, Frances, 163n5
the supernatural, 112, 154n24; and Fetishism: and Clarissa, 76, 78; and Tris-
tragedy, 8, 53, 103, 110; and Tristram tram Shandy, 93, 97
Shandy, 11, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 102, 103– Feudalism, 1, 177n13
4, 107, 145; and the uncanny, 133, Fiedler, Leslie, 165n13
154n24; and ungendered condition, Fielding, Henry, 57, 149n1, 169–70nn1–
60, 61 2, 175n1
Fantasy, psychoanalytic theory of, 126– Filmer, Robert, 150n4, 171n10
27, 178–79n25 Flint, Christopher, 158n18
Faurot, Ruth, 171n11 Foster, James, 156nn2, 7
Feeling. See Affectivity Foucault, Michel, 150n2
Felman, Shoshana, 155–56nn28–29 Fragmentation, psychic, 7, 11, 80, 81,
Female traits. See Femininity 97, 102, 117, 133
202 Index
Frankenstein (Shelley), 88, 153n17, tivity, 2, 4, 12, 14, 80, 102, 109, 149n2,
154n23, 155n26, 179n27, 182n2 154n24; and tragedy, 142; and Tris-
Freud, Sigmund, 12–13, 55, 88, 89, 92, tram Shandy, 102, 109, 117, 142, 144,
94, 117, 140–41, 152nn14–15, 161n34, 145, 171nn, 173n17, 175n31; and un-
162nn, 165n11, 166n15, 167n19, gendered condition, 12, 69, 61
170n6, 172nn13–15, 178n25, 182n4, Gilman, Sander, 164n6
183n5; and humor, 173–74n21; and Godwin, William, 154n23, 155n26
hysteria, 47; and melancholia, 125–26, Gogol, N. V., 170n2
168–69n28, 172n13, 178nn17–18, 181– Gothic literature: and affectivity, 8; and
82n53; and mourning, 125–26, 172n13; The Castle of Otranto, 13, 87, 109–10,
and nachtraglichkeit, 182n1; and oed- 118, 119, 155n26; and Clarissa, 81,
ipal struggle, 133, 141, 158n17; and 165n13; and consciousness, 111; and
sublimation, 111, 176n4; and the un- deconstruction, 111; and desire, 8,
canny, 10, 132, 181n48, 181n49 153n18; and egotism, 8; and family,
8, 119, 122; and fantastic narrative, 7–
Gallagher, Catherine, 149n2 8, 87–88, 109–10, 111, 150n3, 176n3;
Gallop, Jane, 173n20, 174n22 and femininity, 8; and feudalism,
Ganner, Michael, 164n8 177n13; and homosexuality, 154n23;
Gaze, 98, 144 and horror genre, 87; and imprison-
Gender: and authorship, 153n17, ment, 177n9; and individualism, 8;
156n30; and body, 60; and capitalism, and irony, 123; and irrationalism, 111;
1, 2; and The Castle of Otranto, 11, and libertinism, 123, 162n38; and
117, 145; and Clarissa, 11, 13, 60, 61, marriage, 8; and masculinity, 8; and
65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 83, 84, 109, masochism, 8, 153n19, 165n13,
142, 145, 166n16; and complementar- 166n15; and melancholia, 124–25; and
ity, 183n8, 184n12; and contradiction, melodrama, 87; and The Mysterious
36; and cross-gender identification, Mother, 13, 127; and paranoia, 9,
51, 60, 183n7; and difference, 1, 4, 11, 154n23; and patriarchy, 8; and politi-
14, 28, 32, 59, 60, 66, 70, 84, 102, 103, cal relations, 177n13; and pornogra-
117, 151n5, 162n44, 173n17; and dis- phy, 164n8; and possessiveness, 8;
placement, 33; and domination, 13, and psychoanalysis, 110, 117, 124–25,
141; and economic relations, 1, 2; and 134, 166n15; and romance genre, 111,
fantastic narrative, 34, 60, 72, 85, 88, 150n3, 154n21; and sadism, 8, 166n15;
140, 153n17, 154n24, 184n8; and femi- and self, 119; and self-awareness, 8,
nism, 142, 146; and identification, 60, 9; and self-control, 8; and sexuality,
85, 183n7, 183n8; and identity, 12, 55, 8; and solipsism, 8–9; and sublime,
166–67n18; and ideology, 21; and in- 123; and the supernatural, 10, 111,
determinacy, 102–3, 144; and inequal- 150n3, 175n3, 177n9; and tragedy, 87;
ity, 6, 141; and interaction of narra- and Tristram Shandy, 87
tive modes, 14, 85, 154n24; and labor, Gray, Thomas, 175n1
2, 51, 77, 88, 121, 153n17; and Lacan- Gwynn, Stephen, 175n1, 179–80n36,
ian theory, 13, 162n44; and medieval- 180nn39, 41
ism, 116; and melancholia, 11, 142,
143, 144, 183n7; and middle class, 1, Haggerty, George, 180n39
2; and Moll Flanders, 20, 21; and nat- Hardy, Thomas, 155n26
uralization, 58; and nature, 33; and Harley, Robert, 18
oedipal struggle, 183n8; and patriar- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 161n30
chy, 151n5; and pornographic imagi- Hegel, G. W. F., 72, 165
nation, 59, 60–61; and power, 59, 66; Henriques, Julian, 184n12
and psychoanalysis, 12, 162n44, Heterosexuality, 3, 9, 60, 65, 66, 73–74,
165n14; and reader response, 60, 85; 93, 123, 142, 143, 145, 166n18, 183n8
and realist narrative, 6, 7, 74, 153n17, Hierarchy: and The Castle of Otranto,
154n24, 166n16; and Robinson Crusoe, 121; and difference, 10, 94, 103,
11, 28, 32, 34, 109, 145; and Roxana, 107, 121; and pornographic imagin-
21, 109, 145; and self, 21, 61; and so- ation, 59; and realist narrative, 10,
cial class, 1–2, 3, 151n5; and subjec- 30, 34; and Robinson Crusoe, 28, 29,
Index 203
30, 34; and Tristram Shandy, 94, 103, 43; and gender, 21; and identity, 43;
144 and individualism, 19, 22, 28, 35, 57,
Hill, Christopher, 164–65n9 59, 109, 165n9; and instrumentaliza-
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 132 tion, 36–37; and interaction of narra-
Hogg, James, 154n23 tive modes, 11; and libertinism, 69;
Homoeroticism, 9, 133, 136 and marriage, 3; and masculinity, 32,
Homophobia, 9, 154n23 69, 165n9; and Moll Flanders, 20, 35,
Homosexuality, 9, 129, 166n18, 180n39, 36–37; and nationalism, 28; and ob-
183n7 ject-relations theory, 13, 52, 55; and
Homosociality, 33, 93–94, 105, 143, 145 Pamela, 57; and pornographic imagi-
Horney, Karen, 168n25 nation, 59; and prostitution, 3; and
Horror genre, 87–88 psychological relations, 21, 52, 55;
Hughes, Peter, 177n15 and realist narrative, 6, 21; and reli-
Hulme, Peter, 157n11 gion, 83; and reproductive relations,
Hunter, John Paul, 170n8 20; and Robinson Crusoe, 28, 36–37,
Hysteria: and The Castle of Otranto, 118; 109; and Roxana, 20, 21, 35, 36–37,
and dividedness, 51; and psychoanal- 109; and science, 3; and self, 21; and
ysis, 47, 51; and Roxana, 47, 51; and sexuality, 3, 35; and structure of feel-
women, 47, 51 ing, 161n32; and Tristram Shandy, 109
Imagination, 111, 117
Idealization: and paternal relations, 94, Imperialism, and Robinson Crusoe, 20,
101; and Phallus, 101, 105; and Tris- 23, 33, 34
tram Shandy, 93, 94, 98, 100, 101; and Impotence: and Clarissa, 75, 79, 85; and
women, 93 fantastic narrative, 60; and feminin-
Identification: and Clarissa, 72, 78, 79, ity, 85; and libertinism, 75; and Tris-
85, 142, 169n29; cross-gender, 51, 60, tram Shandy, 92, 93, 97, 100, 101
183n7; and fantastic narrative, 60, 132; Incest: and anxiety, 38, 159n22; and
and femininity, 60; and fictionality, capitalism, 159n23; and The Castle of
146; and gender, 12, 60, 85, 183nn7–8; Otranto, 110, 122, 123, 134, 135; and
and masculinity, 60; and maternal re- desire, 9, 110, 122, 134; and fantastic
lations, 60, 168n27, 193n8; and mel- narrative, 9, 75, 112; and loss, 134;
ancholia, 172n13; and The Mysterious and Moll Flanders, 38–39, 159n22; and
Mother, 132; and oedipal struggle, The Mysterious Mother, 130, 131, 134,
183n8; and pornographic imagina- 136
tion, 60; and realist narrative, 72; and Inchbald, Elizabeth, 150n3
sex-gender system, 139, 142, 143; and Incorporation, 125–26, 133, 135
sexuality, 168n26, 183n7; and Tris- Indeterminacy, 1, 7, 10, 11, 14, 83, 107,
tram Shandy, 94 144, 192–93, 104
Identity: and autonomy, 59; and The Individualism: and affectivity, 5, 7, 8,
Castle of Otranto, 119; and Clarissa, 83; and autonomy, 4, 17, 25, 36–37;
67, 71; and femininity, 2, 43; and and capitalism, 4, 17, 19, 28, 31, 35,
gender, 55, 166–67n18; and ideology, 39, 54, 59; and The Castle of Otranto,
43; and masculinity, 2, 28, 59, 166– 117, 118, 123, 124; and Clarissa, 69,
67n18; and Moll Flanders, 41–42; and 83, 109, 118, 163n1; and conscious-
paternal relations, 90; and race, 157– ness, 5, 19, 51, 159n22; and contradic-
58n13; and realist narrative, 139; and tion, 55; and Defoe’s life, 17, 52; and
reproductive relations, 90; and Robin- dividedness, 5, 51, 109; and family,
son Crusoe, 28, 29, 31–32, 34; and 37; and fantastic narrative, 7, 21–22;
Roxana, 50; and sexuality, 41, 168n26; and femininity, 19, 20–22, 35, 37, 41,
and Tristram Shandy, 90, 170n5 42, 44, 51, 52; and feminism, 51–52;
Ideology: and autonomy, 36–37; and and gothic literature, 8; and ideol-
capitalism, 28, 32, 59; and Clarissa, ogy, 19, 22, 28, 35, 57, 59, 109, 165n9;
62, 69, 83, 109; and consciousness, 52, and instrumentalization, 4–5, 36–37;
55; and contradiction, 20, 21, 139; and masculinity, 19, 35, 41, 52, 69,
and family, 159n20; and fantastic 165n9; and maternal relations, 43,
narrative, 139; and femininity, 22, 35, 142; and middle class, 149n1; and
204 Index
Individualism (continued ) ana, 46, 47, 48, 52; and socioeconomic

Moll Flanders, 19, 20, 21, 35, 36–37, relations, 155n27; and solipsism, 88
39, 41, 42–44, 55, 159n22; and nation- Intersubjectivity, 141, 144, 165n14,
alism, 31; and object-relations theory, 183n8
54, 55; and Pamela, 57; and pica- Introjection, 125–26, 133, 134, 178nn17–
resque, 22; and pornographic imagi- 18, 179n25
nation, 59; possessive, 7, 8, 19, 20, 30, Irigaray, Luce, 167n20, 171n12, 174n23
35, 42, 51, 117, 118, 123, 124, 165n9; Irony: and The Castle of Otranto, 123;
and realist narrative, 5, 22, 26, 30; and gothic literature, 123; and Moll
and Robinson Crusoe, 19–20, 21, 22, Flanders, 35–36; and Pamela, 58; and
25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36–37, 44, 52, 55, Tristram Shandy, 88, 91, 102, 107, 117
109; and Roxana, 19, 20, 21, 35, 36–37, Irrationalism: and consciousness, 47;
44, 49, 51–52, 55, 109, 142; and self, and gothic literature, 111; and psy-
31, 54; and self-awareness, 4, 10, 22; choanalysis, 55, 132; and Robinson
and self-consciousness, 152n15; and Crusoe, 22, 25; and Roxana, 46, 47;
sex-gender system, 19, 35, 37, 44; and and subjectivity, 55; and the un-
solipsism, 83, 117; and subjectivity, canny, 132
30; and tragedy, 95; and Tristram Isaacs, Susan, 178n25
Shandy, 95, 109 Iser, Wolfgang, 172n16
Individuality: and affectivity, 37; and
autonomy, 31; and connectedness, 37, Jackson, Rosemary, 154n24, 176n3
60; and masculinity, 19, 33, 34–35, Jacobinism, 18
166n16; and Moll Flanders, 37; and Jacobus, Mary, 182n3
narcissism, 53–54; and political rela- James, Henry, 154n24
tions, 34; possessive, 35; and realist Johnson, Claudia L., 153n20
narrative, 33; and reciprocity, 37; and Jouissance, 104–5, 106, 107, 142, 173n19,
Robinson Crusoe, 19, 31, 33, 34, 37; 174n25
and Roxana, 37; and sexuality, 37; Journal to Eliza (Sterne), 93, 105
and Tristram Shandy, 145 Joyce, James, 88
Inequality: and domestic sphere, 30;
and gender, 6, 141; and realist narra- Ketton-Cremer, Robert Wyndham,
tive, 5, 6; and Robinson Crusoe, 29, 30; 176n8, 179n28, 180n38, 180n38, 39
and sex-gender system, 123 Kilgour, Maggie, 177n13
Instrumentalization: and The Castle of Klein, Jurgen, 170n5
Otranto, 117, 118; and family, 47; and Klein, Melanie, 106, 174n30, 178n25
ideology, 36–37; and individualism, 4– Knowledge, 75, 89, 99, 101, 103, 104,
5, 36–37; and Moll Flanders, 35, 37, 106, 111, 146
38, 44, 45; and otherness, 10; and Kohut, Heinz, 13, 52–55, 118, 161nn34,
Robinson Crusoe, 31, 37; and Roxana, 37, 162nn39–44
35, 37, 44, 45, 47, 51; and sexuality, Kristeva, Julia, 10, 103, 107, 167n22,
51 172n13, 174n23, 175n33, 181n48
Integration: and Clarissa, 84; and fan-
tastic narrative, 7, 21; and maternal Labor: division of, 2, 3, 12, 33, 51, 58,
relations, 141; and Moll Flanders, 41; 77, 88, 121, 153n17, 163n3; exploita-
and object-relations theory, 53, 54; tion of, 34, 36; and gender, 2, 51, 77,
and realist narrative, 6, 10; and Rob- 88, 121, 153n17; and Moll Flanders, 36;
inson Crusoe, 24, 26, 27, 31, 54; and and Pamela, 58; and Robinson Crusoe,
Roxana, 21; and self, 31, 41, 53, 54, 26, 30, 33, 34; and Roxana, 36; and
84, 93, 165n14; and subjectivity, 89; women, 36, 151n6
and Tristram Shandy, 89, 93, 102 Lacan, Jacques, 88, 157–58n13, 161n35,
Interiority: and autonomy, 26; and The 162n44
Castle of Otranto, 110; and Defoe’s Lacanian theory: and body, 104–5,
life, 19; and fantastic narrative, 7, 48, 174n30; and castration, 13, 104, 106,
88, 110; and femininity, 3, 155n27; 173n19, 174n22; and difference, 12–13;
and masculinity, 3; and Moll Flanders, and dividedness, 104; and erotics,
40; and Robinson Crusoe, 26; and Rox- 105; and femininity, 173n19; and
Index 205
feminism, 173n20; and gender, 13, Shandy, 88, 89, 93, 97, 106, 107, 143
162n44; and homosociality, 105; and Love: and Clarissa, 73, 79; and fantastic
hors-sexe, 105; and jouissance, 104–5, narrative, 73–74; and heterosexuality,
106, 107, 173n19, 174n25; and lan- 74; and melancholia, 125; and realist
guage, 97, 101; and materiality, 105; narrative, 73; and Robinson Crusoe,
and maternal relations, 174n30; and 28, 32; and struggle for change, 147
mirror stage, 153n16, 161n35, 165n14; Lukács, Georg, 160nn25, 26
and misogyny, 13; and narcissism,
161n35; and object-relations theory, McKeon, Michael, 57, 150n2, 151n5,
161n35; and patriarchy, 97; and phal- 170n1
lic economy, 104; and phallic Macksey, Richard, 170n8, 173n18
signifier, 101, 173n19, 174nn; and the Magical realism, 88
Real, 10, 103; and religion, 104–5; Male traits. See Masculinity
and self, 89, 106, 153n16, 161n35; and Marcuse, Herbert, 159–60n24
self-transcendence, 104–5; and sexu- Marginality: and Defoe’s life, 17; and
ality, 89; and subjectivity, 13, 89, 104; Defoe’s works, 28–29; and Sterne’s
and Symbolic order, 103; and Tris- works, 87, 169n1
tram Shandy, 13, 87, 97, 101, 103–6, Marriage: and The Castle of Otranto,
171n8, 172n15, 173nn18–20; and 121, 123, 135; and Clarissa, 61, 62, 66,
women, 104–5, 174n25 67, 68, 69; and fantastic narrative, 8,
Lack: and desire, 101; and Tristram 9; and gothic literature, 8; and heter-
Shandy, 13, 93, 94, 97, 100, 101 osexuality, 65, 73; and ideology, 3;
Language: and affectivity, 10, 124; and and incest, 38; and Moll Flanders, 36,
The Castle of Otranto, 117, 124; and 37, 38, 43; and Pamela, 57–58; and
castration, 97, 98, 174n22; and intro- property, 62; and realist narrative, 6–
jection, 126; and Lacanian theory, 97, 7, 73; and Robinson Crusoe, 29, 33;
101; and Lockean theory, 88, 99; and and Roxana, 36, 44, 45–46, 49
melancholia, 126, 146; and mourning, Masculinity: and anxiety, 121, 168n27;
126, 146; and patriarchy, 97; and pri- and autonomy, 21, 28, 34, 59; and
mal bond, 145; and self, 89; and Tris- body, 97, 107; and The Castle of
tram Shandy, 13, 88, 89, 95, 97, 98, 99, Otranto, 110, 117; and Clarissa, 60, 62,
101, 103, 117, 144, 145 66, 70, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85; and
Lanham, Richard, 172n16 community, 107; and dependency,
Laplanche, J., 170n6, 182n1, 183n5 28, 35, 59; and desire, 60, 94, 153nn17–
Laqueur, Thomas, 151–52n8 18; and fantastic narrative, 8–9, 34,
Lawrence, D. H., 155n26 60; and gothic literature, 8–9; and
Lefanu, Sheridan, 155n26 heterosexuality, 60; and homosocial-
Leites, Edmund, 152n8, 163n3 ity, 93–94; and identification, 60; and
Lewis, Matthew, 88, 153n18, 155n26, identity, 2, 28, 59, 166–67n18; and
164n8, 180n39 ideology, 32, 69, 165n9; and individ-
Lewis, W. S., 127, 128, 175n1, 179–81nn ualism, 19, 35, 41, 52, 69, 165n9; and
Libertinism: and The Castle of Otranto, individuality, 19, 33, 34–35, 166n16;
123; and Clarissa, 59, 61, 69, 75, and interiority, 3; and masochism,
162n38; and ideology, 69; and impo- 168n26; and mastery, 60; and materi-
tence, 75; and literary tradition, ality, 150n2; and maternal relations,
162n38; and Pamela, 57; and 77–78, 166n16, 168n27; and
pornographic imagination, 59; and misogyny, 60; and Moll Flanders, 41;
the sublime, 123, 177n15 and nature, 34; and otherness, 94;
Locke, John, 88, 99, 150–51n4, 158n15, and Pamela, 58; and perversity, 110;
170n4, 176n5 and pornographic imagination, 59–
Loewald, Hans, 175n32 60, 80; and possessiveness, 35; and
Loss: and The Castle of Otranto, 11, 13, power, 62, 79–80, 119; and psycho-
110, 124, 134; and fantastic narrative, analysis, 141; and rationality, 3, 34;
137; and incest, 134; and melancho- and reader response, 60; and realist
lia, 11, 14, 125, 126, 133; and porno- narrative, 33, 60; and repression, 21;
graphic imagination, 143; and Tristram and reproductive relations, 90–91;
206 Index
Masculinity (continued ) 172n14, 182n4; and realist narrative,

and Robinson Crusoe, 19, 20, 21, 28, 32– 7; and Robinson Crusoe, 22–23, 28, 32,
35, 37; and sadism, 60, 72, 73, 33–34; and Roxana, 20–21, 35, 44, 47,
166nn15–16, 168n26; and sameness, 49, 50, 51, 142; and sex-gender sys-
93; and self, 85; and self-interest, 58; tem, 142; and sexuality, 43, 50, 51,
and sensibility, 151n7; and sexuality, 74, 75, 167n23, 168n26; and socializa-
3, 167n18; and subjectivity, 33, 41, 89, tion, 38, 77, 120; and Tristram Shandy,
117, 145; and sublimation, 37; and 91–93, 101, 106, 107, 142, 144–45; and
Tristram Shandy, 89, 93–94, 101, 102– Walpole’s life, 128, 129, 130, 179–
3, 145; and wholeness, 59, 60 81nn; and wholeness, 141
Masochism: and The Castle of Otranto, Matriarchy, and Clarissa, 64
120; and Clarissa, 66, 72, 80, 83, Maturin, Charles, 154n23, 175n3
163n1, 165n13; and desire, 66; and Melancholia: and The Castle of Otranto,
femininity, 8, 66, 72, 153n19, 166nn15– 11, 110, 124, 127, 133, 134, 135, 142,
16; and gothic literature, 8, 153n19, 144; and Clarissa, 144; and difference,
165n13; and martyrdom, 169n29; and 7, 11; and fantastic narrative, 7, 14,
masculinity, 168n26; and narcissism, 125, 126–27, 133, 143; and feminism,
83; and religion, 169n29; and sex- 146; and gender, 11, 142, 143, 144,
gender system, 66; and women, 66 183n7; and gothic literature, 124–25;
Masse, Michelle A., 153n19, 165n13, and language, 126, 146; and loss, 11,
166n15 14, 125, 126, 133; and maternal rela-
Master-slave relation, 165–66n14 tions, 126, 142, 144, 181n49; and
Mastery: and Clarissa, 73; and mascu- misogyny, 14, 142, 145; and The
linity, 60; and object-relations theory, Mysterious Mother, 131, 133; and
54; and Robinson Crusoe, 26, 28–29, 33; pornography, 142–43; and psycho-
and self, 29, 54, 139 analysis, 124–27, 133, 135, 172n13,
Materialism: and capitalism, 8; and 178nn17–18; and realist narrative, 14;
Clarissa, 62, 67; and desire, 7; and and self, 125, 143; and struggle for
fantastic narrative, 7; and middle change, 147; and the sublime, 176n6;
class, 62; and sexuality, 8 and Tristram Shandy, 93, 142, 144, 145;
Materiality: and Lacanian theory, 105; and the uncanny, 133, 181n49; and
and masculinity, 150n2 Villette, 182n2; and Walpole’s life,
Maternal relations: and affectivity, 74, 127, 137
141, 142; and anxiety, 124, 141; and Melmouth the Wanderer (Maturin),
body, 34, 92, 103, 106, 107, 126, 133, 154n23, 175n3
142, 174nn, 181n49; and The Castle of Melodrama, 87, 117, 145
Otranto, 120, 123, 124, 135–36, 142, Men: and appropriation of women’s
143, 144; and castration, 78, 92, 83; roles, 91, 93–94, 105, 123; and cross-
and Clarissa, 63, 66, 67, 72, 75, 77–79, gender identification, 51; and de-
80, 81, 142, 143, 144, 168n27; and dependence upon women, 35, 121; and
sire, 124, 132, 141; and difference, difference, 74; and economic rela-
124; and erasure, 91, 101, 172n14; tions, 2; and identification with
and erotics, 129; and fantastic narra- women, 60; and individualism, 35;
tive, 9, 75, 77; and femininity, 74; and reader response, 85; and sexual-
and feminism, 141–42; and identifica- ity, 3, 163n3
tion, 60, 168n27, 183n8; and individu- Menippean satire, 170n2
alism, 43, 142; and integration, 141; Middle class: and Clarissa, 61; and con-
and Lacanian theory, 174n30; and sciousness, 57; and empiricism, 149n1;
masculinity, 77–78, 166n16, 168n27; and family, 2, 61, 159n20; and gen-
and melancholia, 126, 142, 144, der, 1, 2; and individualism, 149n1;
181n49; and middle class, 2; and Moll and materialism, 62; and novelistic
Flanders, 20, 35, 37–38, 42–43, 47; and form, 1; and Pamela, 57; and rational-
The Mysterious Mother, 129, 130, 132, ism, 149n1; and realist narrative, 5,
133; and narcissism, 162n40; and par- 11; and Robinson Crusoe, 23
ody, 77; and patriarchy, 77; and psy- Mirror stage, 153n16, 161n35, 165n14
choanalysis, 91–92, 141–42, 165n14, Misogyny: and The Castle of Otranto,
Index 207
120, 123, 124; and Clarissa, 63, 68; 39, 42; and religion, 42, 156n4; and
and fantastic narrative, 9; and Lacan- repressive de-sublimation, 159–60n24;
ian theory, 13; and masculinity, 60; and reproductive relations, 20, 36, 37,
and melancholia, 14, 142, 145; and 42–43, 159n19; and self, 39–41; and
Roxana, 21, 51; and sadism, 63; and self-awareness, 42; and self-interest,
subjectivity, 104; and Tristram 40; and self-reflection, 44; and sex-
Shandy, 13, 93, 102, 104, 106, 107, 142, gender system, 20, 21, 35, 37, 44; and
145, 171nn10, 11 sexuality, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41; and so-
Mitchell, Juliet, 159nn20, 23 cial embeddedness, 21, 35; and so-
Modernism: and fantastic narrative, 7, cialization, 38; and solipsism, 47; and
10, 109; and self, 140; and subjectivist spiritual autobiography, 156n4; and
fiction, 155n26 subjectivity, 41, 47; and women, 20,
Modernity: and consciousness, 52, 109; 35–36, 39, 42, 43, 159n19
and self, 40; and self-awareness, 9, The Monk (Lewis), 153n18, 155n26, 164n8
10, 11, 13, 19, 109, 111; and sex- Morality: and Clarissa, 62, 67, 80, 81, 82,
gender system, 66, 124, 142, 146; and 163n1; and Moll Flanders, 40–42; and
subjectivity, 12, 40, 54, 55, 104 Pamela, 57–58; and Robinson Crusoe, 24;
Moll Flanders (Defoe): and affectivity, and Roxana, 46, 47; and self-control,
20, 35, 37, 40; and alienation, 36, 39, 5; and subject-in-process, 175n33
42, 44, 47; and anxiety, 36, 38, 159n22; Morrison, Toni, 156n30
and appropriation, 42; and auton- Mourning: and The Castle of Otranto,
omy, 36–37, 38, 51; and bourgeoisie, 110, 113, 118; and desire, 134; and
43; and capitalism, 35, 38, 39, 42–43, fantastic narrative, 143; and lan-
159n19; and children, 20, 37; and guage, 126, 146; as productive work,
commodification, 36, 39, 42–43, 44; 15; and psychoanalysis, 125, 134–35,
and consciousness, 47, 159n22; and 172n13, 184n11; and struggle for
contradiction, 39–40, 47, 55; and change, 147; and Tristram Shandy, 93;
criminality, 37, 38, 40–43; and desire, and Walpole’s life, 129
35, 38, 39, 44; and domestic sphere, Murder: and Clarissa, 61; and Roxana,
37, 44; and economic relations, 36, 39; 50–51
and erotics, 39; and exchange value, Mutuality: and Clarissa, 70–71, 142,
43; and exploitation, 36, 39, 41; and 168n27; and fantastic narrative, 143;
extra–marital relations, 36, 37, 40; and Hegelian theory, 165n14; and sex-
and family, 35, 36, 37–39; and fantas- gender system, 143
tic narrative, 41, 42; and femininity, The Mysterious Mother (Walpole): and
35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 51; and gen- death, 134; and desire, 133–34; and
der, 20, 21; and identity, 41–42; and fantastic narrative, 110, 132; and
ideology, 20, 35, 36–37; and incest, 38– gothic literature, 13, 127; and identifi-
39, 159n22; and individualism, 19, 20, cation, 132; and incest, 130, 131, 134,
21, 35, 36–37, 39, 41, 42–44, 55, 136; and incorporation, 133; and in-
159n22; and individuality, 37; and introjection, 133; and maternal
strumentalization, 35, 37, 38, 44, 45; relations, 129, 130, 132, 133; and mel-
and integration, 41; and interiority, ancholia, 131, 133; and paternal rela-
40; and irony, 35–36; and labor, 36; tions, 132–33; and preservative re-
and marriage, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43; and pression, 133; and psychological
masculinity, 41; and maternal rela- relations, 131–32, 133–36; publication
tions, 20, 35, 37–38, 42–43, 47; and of, 130; and self, 133; and the super-
morality, 40–42; and nature, 42; and natural, 133; and tragedy, 110, 127,
objectification, 41; and patriarchy, 36, 130; and the uncanny, 133; and Wal-
38; and perversity, 37, 38, 39, 45; and pole’s life, 127, 129–32
picaresque, 20, 44; and possessive-
ness, 42; and private sphere, 37, 43; Nachtraglichkeit, 182n1
and prostitution, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41; Narcissism: and The Castle of Otranto,
and psychological relations, 20, 21; 118; and Clarissa, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72,
and realist narrative, 20, 42, 45, 51; 81, 83; and fantastic narrative, 112;
and reciprocity, 37; and reification, and femininity, 66; and humor,
208 Index
Narcissism (continued ) Paranoia: and The Castle of Otranto, 118,

173n21; and incorporation, 125; and 124; and fantastic narrative, 7, 9, 143;
masochism, 83; and maternal rela- and gothic literature, 9, 154n23; and
tions, 162n40; and melancholia, 125; homosociality, 143; and Robinson Cru-
and object-relations theory, 13, 53–54, soe, 27, 29, 51
161–62nn; and pornography, 143; Parody: and The Castle of Otranto, 110,
and psychoanalysis, 125, 173n21; and 113; and Clarissa, 77, 81; and mater-
sex-gender system, 66; and subject-in- nal relations, 77
process, 175n33; and subjectivity, Paternal relations: and alienation, 122,
107, 144; and sublime, 162n38; and 123, 134; and allegory, 32; and anxi-
Tristram Shandy, 95, 107, 144; and ety, 121; and The Castle of Otranto,
women, 66 110, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123–24, 127,
Nationalism, 28, 31 134; and Clarissa, 62–63, 68, 72, 80,
Naturalization: and difference, 73; and 82, 83; and desire, 134, 166n16; and
gender, 58; and Pamela, 58; and real- fantastic narrative, 9; and femininity,
ist narrative, 5, 6, 73; and Robinson 166n16; and homoeroticism, 9; and
Crusoe, 29, 30 idealization, 94, 101; and identity, 90;
Nature: and domestication, 34; and and The Mysterious Mother, 132–33;
femininity, 33–34; and gender, 33; and psychoanalysis, 94, 141, 172n14;
and masculinity, 34; and Moll Flan- and realist narrative, 6, 7, 32; and re-
ders, 42; and Robinson Crusoe, 31 ligion, 25, 32, 33; and reproductive
Necrophilia, 135 relations, 90, 121; and Robinson Cru-
Nihilism, 123 soe, 22–23, 25, 28, 30, 32–33, 158n15;
and sadism, 9; and sexuality, 9, 122,
Object-relations theory, 13, 52–55, 141, 168n26; and subjectivity, 166n16; and
161–62nn, 165n14, 183n5 temporality, 103; and Tristram
Objectification: and The Castle of Shandy, 90–91, 93–94, 101–2, 144; and
Otranto, 117; and Clarissa, 62, 65, 85; Walpole’s life, 128, 129, 179nn,
and fantastic narrative, 9; and femi- 181n47
ninity, 85; and Moll Flanders, 41; and Patriarchy: and capitalism, 7, 38, 60,
pornography, 167n20; and realist 123; and The Castle of Otranto, 117,
narrative, 30; and Robinson Crusoe, 119, 120, 123–24; and Clarissa, 60, 63,
24, 30; and Roxana, 50; and women, 64, 80, 82, 83, 120; and difference, 60;
41, 62, 167n20 and family, 1–2, 9, 38, 64, 83; and
Objectivity, and psychoanalysis, 162n42 fantastic narrative, 7; and gender,
O’Brien, Mary, 91 151n5; and gothic literature, 8; and
Oceanic experience, 84 Lacanian theory, 97; and language,
Oedipal struggle, 32–33, 75, 119, 133, 97; and maternal relations, 77; and
141, 158n17, 171n12, 183n8 medievalism, 116; and Moll Flanders,
Omnipotence, 79, 143, 165n14 36, 38; and political relations, 150n4;
Otherness: and appropriation, 109; and and Robinson Crusoe, 30, 32; and Rox-
Clarissa, 74, 78, 85, 143; and colonial- ana, 36, 45, 160n28; and sexuality, 60,
ism, 158n13; and ego, 184n11; and 64; and social class, 151n5; and Tris-
fantastic narrative, 10, 29; and femi- tram Shandy, 97, 117, 144, 171n10
ninity, 85; and instrumentalization, Penis, 92, 94, 100–101, 106, 173n20,
10; and masculinity, 94; and race, 174n22; and penis/breast, 92, 106,
158n13; and realist narrative, 10; and 174n30
Robinson Crusoe, 11, 27, 29–30, 157n10; Perry, Ruth, 171nn
and Roxana, 47–48; and self, 10, 89, Perversity: and The Castle of Otranto,
94, 109, 158n13, 164n6, 165n14; and 110, 117; and Clarissa, 163n1; and de-
sexuality, 132; and Tristram Shandy, sire, 5; and family, 38; and feminin-
93, 94, 97, 106, 142 ity, 37; and masculinity, 110; and
Ownership, 26, 29, 62 Moll Flanders, 37, 38, 39, 45; and Rox-
ana, 37, 45, 47; and Tristram Shandy,
Pamela (Richardson), 57–59, 149n2, 102, 107, 144
163n1, 170n1 Phallic economy, 94, 104
Index 209
Phallic signifier, 101, 173n19, 174nn and masculinity, 62, 79–80, 119; and
Phallus, 101, 102, 105–6, 173n20 pornographic imagination, 59–60;
Picaresque: and allegory, 25; and De- and reproductive relations, 124; and
foe’s life, 19; and fantastic narrative, Robinson Crusoe, 26, 27, 28, 31; and
21, 46, 49; and individualism, 22; and sexuality, 63, 79, 163n3; and Tristram
Moll Flanders, 20, 44; and realist nar- Shandy, 98, 101, 117
rative, 6, 19, 20, 22, 46; and Robinson Praz, Mario, 165n13
Crusoe, 22, 25, 46; and Roxana, 21, 45, Primal scene, 89–90, 170n6
49 Private sphere: and The Castle of Otranto,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 135, 161n30 121; and family, 2, 5; and Moll Flan-
Political relations: and The Castle of ders, 37, 43; and pornographic imagi-
Otranto, 119, 124, 177n14; and De- nation, 59; and socioeconomic rela-
foe’s life, 17–18; and gothic literature, tions, 2, 3; and women, 2, 43
177n13; and individuality, 34; and Property: and The Castle of Otranto, 119;
patriarchy, 150n4; and Robinson Cru- and Clarissa, 62, 63, 66, 82; and mar-
soe, 19, 30, 31, 34; and Walpole’s life, riage, 62; and Robinson Crusoe, 30, 32;
116–17, 128–29, 177n13 and Tristram Shandy, 90
Pontalis, J. B., 170n6, 182n1, 183n5 Prostitution: and Clarissa, 61, 76, 77;
Pope, Alexander, 175n1 and ideology, 3; and Moll Flanders,
Pornography: and The Castle of Otranto, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41; and Roxana, 21, 35,
122–23, 143; and Clarissa, 59–60, 66, 36, 46, 48
75, 76, 80, 84, 85, 143, 145; and differ- Psychoanalysis: and alienation, 140;
ence, 59, 85, 167n20; and domination, and autonomy, 165n14; and bimodal-
143; and exploitation, 167n20; and ity, 55, 140; and childhood, 140, 141;
fantastic narrative, 60, 75, 84, 164n7; and difference, 12–13; and ego, 111,
and feminism, 142; and film, 167n20; 117, 125, 126, 134–35, 178–79nn,
and gothic literature, 164n8; and het- 184n11; and fantastic narrative, 12,
erosexuality, 66; and ideology, 59; 13, 55, 124–27, 140, 154n24; and fan-
and imagination, 59–60, 66, 75, 80, tasy, 125–26, 178–79n25; and femi-
142; and knowledge, 75; and mascu- nism, 141, 145, 146, 182n3, 183n5;
linity, 59–60, 80; and melancholia, and gender, 12, 162n44, 165n14; and
142–43; and narcissism, 143; and gothic literature, 110, 117, 124–25,
objectification, 167n20; and reader re- 134, 166n15; and Hegelian theory,
sponse, 60; and realist narrative, 59, 165n14; and humor, 173–74n21; and
60, 164n7; and romance, 76; and sa- hysteria, 47, 51; and introjection, 125–
dism, 143, 164n7; and sadomaso- 26, 134, 178nn17–18, 179n25; and ir-
chism, 163n3; and subjectivity, 75; rationalism, 55, 132; and literary criti-
and sublime, 84 cism, 155n28; and masculinity, 141;
Possessiveness: and The Castle of and maternal relations, 91–92, 141–
Otranto, 117, 118, 123, 124; and Clar- 42, 165n14, 172n14, 182n4; and mel-
issa, 79, 118; and femininity, 42, 51; ancholia, 124–27, 133, 135, 172n13,
and gothic literature, 8; and individ- 178nn17–18, 181–82n53; and mourn-
ualism, 7, 19, 20, 30, 35, 42, 51, 117, ing, 125, 134–35, 172n13, 184n11; and
118, 123, 124, 165n9; and individual- narcissism, 125, 173n21; and object-
ity, 35; and masculinity, 35; and Moll relations theory, 13, 52–55, 141, 161–
Flanders, 42; and Robinson Crusoe, 19, 62nn, 165n14, 183n5; and objectivity,
30, 35; and Roxana, 20, 44, 51; and 162n42; and oedipal struggle, 32–33,
subjectivity, 30 75, 133, 141, 158n17, 171n12, 183n8;
Postmodernism, 52, 53, 87, 109, 161n31 and paternal relations, 94, 141,
Poststructuralism, 57 172n14; and primal scene, 89–90,
Power: and The Castle of Otranto, 117, 170n6; and race, 157–58n13; and re-
119, 121, 123–24; and Clarissa, 62, 63, pression, 126, 159–60n24; and self, 12,
65, 66, 68, 73, 79, 80; and connected- 52–55, 89, 140, 165n14; and self-
ness, 165n14; and difference, 59, 66; consciousness, 165n14; and sex-
and fantastic narrative, 60, 77; and gender system, 141, 146; and sociali-
femininity, 77; and gender, 59, 66; zation, 13, 167n19; and solipsism,
210 Index
Psychoanalysis (continued ) 9, 93; and fantastic narrative, 1, 10–

165n14; and subjectivity, 13, 52, 55, 11, 14–15, 19–20, 22, 28, 30, 34, 49,
89; and sublimation, 111, 176n4; and 51, 60, 61, 70, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95,
superego, 111, 140, 168–69n28, 102, 109, 110, 116, 124, 145, 154n24,
174n21; and the uncanny, 132–33, 155n26; and femininity, 42, 45, 75;
181nn48–49; and the unconscious, 12, and gender, 6, 7, 74, 153n17, 154n24,
125, 126, 132, 136, 137, 140–41, 166n16; and hierarchy, 10, 30, 34;
152nn14–15, 172n13, 178–79n25; and and homosociality, 143; and identifi-
women, 47, 51, 165n11 cation, 72; and identity, 139; and ide-
Psychological relations: and The Castle ology, 6, 21; and individualism, 5, 22,
of Otranto, 117–19, 122–24, 127, 26, 30; and individuality, 33; and in-
132, 133–36; and Clarissa, 60, 61, equality, 5, 6; and integration, 6, 10;
71–85; and fantastic narrative, 10, and introjection, 126; and love, 73;
60, 61, 88, 111, 150n3, 155n26; and and marriage, 6–7, 73; and masculin-
ideology, 21, 52, 55; and Moll Flan- ity, 33, 60; and maternal relations, 7;
ders, 20, 21; and The Mysterious and melancholia, 14; and middle
Mother, 131–32, 133–36; and object- class, 5, 11; and Moll Flanders, 20, 42,
relations theory, 52–55; and Pamela, 45, 51; and naturalization, 5, 6, 73;
58; and race, 157–58n13, 164n6; and and object-relations theory, 54; and
Robinson Crusoe, 19, 25–26, 28, 30, 32; objectification, 30; and otherness, 10;
and Roxana, 47–48, 50; and Tristram and Pamela, 57–58; and paternal rela-
Shandy, 88–107; and wholeness, 25, tions, 6, 7, 32; and picaresque, 6, 19,
59, 60 20, 22, 46; and pornography, 59, 60,
Public sphere, 2, 3, 6, 59, 121, 152n13 164n7; and public sphere, 6; and Rob-
Puritanism, 1, 22, 164–65n9 inson Crusoe, 11, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26,
28, 30, 31, 33, 34–35, 46, 51; and ro-
Race: and colonialism, 157–58n13; and mance genre, 150n3; and Romanti-
difference, 28; and identity, 157– cism, 140; and Roxana, 20–21, 44, 45,
58n13; and otherness, 158n13; and 49, 51; and self, 10, 25, 30, 31, 40, 54,
psychological relations, 157–58n13, 68; and self-awareness, 6; and self-
164n6; and Robinson Crusoe, 28, 157– interest, 6; and sexuality, 75; and so-
58n13 cial context, 140; and subjectivity, 89,
Radcliffe, Ann, 88, 153–54nn, 155n26, 139, 154n24; and sublime, 61, 83, 84;
177n9 and superego, 140; and tragedy, 102;
Rape: and The Castle of Otranto, 143; and Tristram Shandy, 11, 87, 88, 89,
and Clarissa, 61, 65, 70, 76–78, 80, 81, 93, 95, 102, 107, 145; and Victorian
83, 85, 143 period, 155n26; and wholeness, 6,
Rationalism, 12, 88, 149n1, 152n15 117, 139; and women, 35
Rationality: and affectivity, 160n26; and Reciprocity: and Clarissa, 83, 143; and
Clarissa, 71; and masculinity, 3, 34; connectedness, 37, 143; and individu-
and object-relations theory, 54, 55; ality, 37; and Moll Flanders, 37; and
and Robinson Crusoe, 26, 27; and Tris- Robinson Crusoe, 23, 37, 143; and Rox-
tram Shandy, 102 ana, 37, 143; and Tristram Shandy,
Reader response, 60, 85, 118, 168n26 143, 144
Real, the, Lacanian concept of, 10, 103 Recognition, 13, 71, 89, 142, 143, 144,
Realist narrative: and allegory, 22, 25, 146, 165n14, 183n8
26, 32, 82; and autonomy, 6, 19, 25, Regression: and allegory, 82; and The
54; and boundary, 10; and capitalism, Castle of Otranto, 136; and Clarissa,
53, 150n3; and The Castle of Otranto, 75, 80, 82; and fantastic narrative, 10,
11, 110, 116, 124; and Clarissa, 11, 57, 60, 75; and pornographic imagina-
60, 61, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 80, tion, 60
82, 83, 84, 85, 163n1, 165n13, 166n16; Reich, Theodor, 169n29
and comedy, 53, 107; and conscious- Reification: and commodification, 39,
ness, 140; and contradiction, 19, 21, 160nn25–26; and Moll Flanders, 39, 42;
35; and difference, 5, 7, 10, 73, 108; and self, 39; and self-preservation,
and domestic sphere, 6; and family, 160n26; and sexuality, 160n26; and
Index 211
subjectivity, 160n25, 160n26; and sphere, 30, 33; and domination, 27,
women, 160n26 30; and dream, 27–28; and economic
Religion: and allegory, 19, 32, 82, 83, 84; relations, 22–23, 26, 30–31; and ego-
and Clarissa, 64, 72, 81, 82, 83, 84, tism, 20, 23–24; and erasure, 31, 33;
169n29; and colonialism, 29; and De- and erotics, 33, 143; and exchange
foe’s life, 17–18; and ideology, 83; value, 30; and exploitation, 28, 31, 34,
and Lacanian theory, 104–5; and 35, 37; and family, 20, 22–23, 25, 28,
masochism, 169n29; and medieval- 32–33, 36, 37, 158–59n18; and fantas-
ism, 116; and Moll Flanders, 42, 156n4; tic narrative, 11, 19–20, 21, 22, 26–30,
and paternal relations, 25, 32, 33; and 31, 34, 35, 118; and femininity, 32–34;
Robinson Crusoe, 19, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, and gender, 11, 28, 32, 34, 109, 145;
33; and Roxana, 46, 47; and self, 26, and hierarchy, 28, 29, 30, 34; and
84; and sentimentality, 84; and sub- homosociality, 33, 143; and identity,
lime, 82, 83, 84, 169n30 28, 29, 31–32, 34; and ideology, 28,
Repression: and autonomy, 21; and de- 32, 36–37, 109; and imperialism, 20,
sublimation, 159–60n24; and mascu- 23, 33, 34; and individualism, 19–20,
linity, 21; and melancholia, 126, 127, 21, 22, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36–37, 44,
135; preservative, 126, 127, 133 52, 55, 109; and individuality, 19, 31,
Reproductive relations: and alienation, 33, 34, 37; and inequality, 29, 30; and
42, 90, 91; and appropriation, 91; and instrumentalization, 31, 37; and inte-
body, 20, 36, 42; and capitalism, 42, gration, 24, 26, 27, 31, 54; and inter-
159n19; and The Castle of Otranto, action of narrative modes, 11, 19–20,
121, 124; and connectedness, 42; 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 46; and
and difference, 3, 90; and feminism, interiority, 26; and irrationalism, 22,
91; and homunculus theory, 91, 25; and labor, 26, 30, 33, 34; and
171n10; and identity, 90; and love, 28, 32; and marginality, 28–29;
ideology, 20; and legal relations, 91; and marriage, 29, 33; and masculin-
and masculinity, 90–91; and men’s ity, 19, 20, 21, 28, 32–35, 37; and
dependence on women, 121; and mastery, 26, 28–29, 33; and maternal
Moll Flanders, 20, 36, 37, 42–43, relations, 22–23, 28, 32, 33–34; and
159n19; and paternal relations, 90, middle class, 23; and morality, 24;
121; and power, 124; and Roxana, 36, and nationalism, 28, 31; and naturali-
159n19; and temporality, 42; and zation, 29, 30; and nature, 31; and
Tristram Shandy, 90–91, 105; and objectification, 24, 30; and oedipal
women, 3, 36, 42, 90, 91, 105, 121 struggle, 32–33; and otherness, 11, 27,
Richardson, Samuel, 85, 149n1, 175n1. 29–30, 157n10; and ownership, 26, 29;
See also Clarissa; Pamela and paranoia, 27, 29, 51; and pater-
Richter, David H., 177n9 nal relations, 22–23, 25, 28, 30, 32–33,
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe): and affectivity, 158n15; and patriarchy, 30, 32; and
22, 30, 33, 37; and alienation, 24, 26– picaresque, 22, 25, 46; and political
27, 30, 34; and allegory, 19, 22, 24–26, relations, 19, 30, 31, 34; and posses-
32; and anxiety, 26–27, 30, 32, 34, 36; sion, 22–23, 30, 34, 69; and posses-
and appropriation, 31, 33, 34; and siveness, 19, 30, 35; and power, 26,
autonomy, 19, 21, 22–23, 25–29, 31, 27, 28, 31; and property, 30, 32; and
32, 34, 35, 37; and bimodality, 145; psychological relations, 19, 25–26, 28,
and body, 34; and capitalism, 20, 28, 30, 32; and Puritanism, 22, 25; and
30–32, 34; and colonialism, 29, 31, 51, race, 28, 157–58n13; and rationality,
157n11; and commodification, 34; 26, 27; and realist narrative, 11, 19,
and consciousness, 22, 30; and con- 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34–
tradiction, 28, 29, 32, 35, 55; and De- 35, 46, 51; and reciprocity, 23, 37, 143;
foe’s life, 22; and dependency, 23, 28, and religion, 19, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, 33;
35; and desire, 26, 30, 32; and differ- and self, 22–26, 29, 31; and self-
ence, 28, 29, 32; and disintegration, awareness, 19, 21, 31, 34; and self-
25; and displacement, 20, 32, 33; and preservation, 23; and sex-gender sys-
dividedness, 26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 109; tem, 21, 44; and sexuality, 32, 33, 37,
and domestication, 34; and domestic 145; and slavery, 23–24; and social
212 Index
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) (continued ) 50, 51, 142; and misogyny, 21, 51;
class, 23, 31, 32, 143; and social em- and morality, 46, 47; and murder, 50–
beddedness, 23; and solipsism, 27; 51; and objectification, 50; and other-
and spiritual autobiography, 22, 24– ness, 47–48; and patriarchy, 36, 45,
25; and subjectivity, 11, 33, 109, 145; 160n28; and perversity, 37, 45, 47;
and sublimation, 33; and sublime, and picaresque, 21, 45, 49; and pos-
112; and surplus value, 26, 30; and sessiveness, 20, 44, 51; and prostitu-
temporality, 24, 26, 157n8; and un- tion, 21, 35, 36, 46, 48; and psycho-
canny, 27; and wholeness, 25; and logical relations, 47–48, 50; and
women, 20, 31–32, 33, 37; and xeno- realist narrative, 20–21, 44, 45, 49, 51;
phobia, 29 and reciprocity, 37, 143; and religion,
Romance genre, 8, 10, 76, 88, 111, 46, 47; and repressive de-sublima-
149n2, 150n3, 154n21 tion, 159n24; and reproductive rela-
Romanticism: and consciousness, 140; tions, 36, 159n19; and self, 46–48,
and doubleness, 161n30; and fantas- 50; and self-awareness, 46, 51; and
tic narrative, 7, 109; and Frankenstein, self-consciousness, 45; and self-
182n2; and libertinism, 162n38; and preservation, 47; and self-reflection,
object-relations theory, 52, 54, 55; 46; and sex-gender system, 20, 35, 37;
and realist narrative, 140; and sado- and sexuality, 35, 36, 37, 44, 48, 49,
masochism, 163n1; and self, 140 50, 51, 145; and slavery, 160n28; and
Roxana (Defoe): and affectivity, 20, 35, social class, 143; and social embed-
37, 48; and alienation, 36, 44, 47; and dedness, 35; and subjectivity, 21, 46–
anxiety, 36; and autonomy, 36–37, 44, 47, 109, 145; and sublime, 112; and
47, 48, 49; and bimodality, 21, 145; tragedy, 21, 47; and women, 35–36, 51
and body, 47, 160n28; and capitalism,
20, 35, 159n19; and children, 20, 44, Sade, Marquis de, 75, 163n1
47, 49–50; and commodification, 36, Sadism: and The Castle of Otranto, 120;
44, 47, 160n28; and consciousness, 47, and Clarissa, 60, 63, 66, 72, 73, 75, 79,
140; and contradiction, 20, 46–47, 48, 80, 163n1, 168n27; and fantastic nar-
51, 55, 142, 145; and criminality, 50– rative, 72; and gothic literature, 8;
51; and cross-gender identification, and masculinity, 60, 72, 73, 166nn15–
51; and desire, 35, 44, 46, 49, 50; and 16, 168n26; and melancholia, 178n17;
dividedness, 47–48, 50, 51, 109; and and misogyny, 63; and paternal rela-
domestic sphere, 44, 45; and double- tions, 9; and pornographic imagina-
ness, 48, 50; and economic relations, tion, 143, 164n7; and sexuality, 63
20, 36, 44–45, 49; and erotics, 44, 49, Sadomasochism: and Clarissa, 163n1;
143; and exploitation, 36; and extra- and pornography, 163n3; and Ro-
marital relations, 20, 36, 44, 45, 48, 49; manticism, 163n1
and family, 20, 35, 36, 37, 47, 49–50; Sartre, Jean-Paul, 72
and fantastic narrative, 21, 44, 46, 47, Satire, 170n2
48, 49, 50, 51; and femininity, 21, 35, Scientific ideology, 3
37, 44, 45, 46, 48, 160n28; and femi- Scientific skepticism, 152n15
nism, 45, 51, 160n28; and gender, 21, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 154n23,
109, 145; and homosociality, 143; and 180n39, 184n9
hysteria, 47, 51; and identity, 50; and Self: and alienation, 10, 26, 47, 53, 112,
ideology, 20, 21, 35, 36–37, 109; and 140, 165n14; and allegory, 25, 84; and
individualism, 19, 20, 21, 35, 36–37, androgyny, 84; and autonomy, 26,
44, 49, 51–52, 55, 109, 142; and in- 71, 83, 144, 161n35, 165n14; and
dividuality, 37; and instrumental- boundary, 71, 73, 94, 165n14; and
ization, 35, 37, 44, 45, 46, 51; and capitalism, 31, 53; and The Castle of
integration, 21; and interaction of Otranto, 110, 117, 118, 119, 123, 133;
narrative modes, 21, 46, 49, 51; and centered, 22; and Clarissa, 68, 70, 71,
interiority, 46, 47, 48, 52; and irra- 73, 80, 82, 83, 84–85; and colonialism,
tionalism, 46, 47; and labor, 36; and 158n13; and commodification, 54; de-
marriage, 36, 44, 45–46, 49; and ma- centered, 22; and difference, 84–85;
ternal relations, 20–21, 35, 44, 47, 49, and disintegration, 25, 103; divided,
Index 213
5, 7, 26, 28, 30, 50, 55, 80, 87, 97, 133, 7, 46; and Moll Flanders, 44; and Rox-
152n13, 183n8; and domination, ana, 46; and Tristram Shandy, 96, 102
165n14; and family, 119; and fantas- Self-transcendence: and Lacanian the-
tic narrative, 7, 10, 14, 30, 53, 55, 61, ory, 104–5; and the sublime, 102, 105,
74, 95, 103, 112; and gender, 21, 61; 111; and Tristram Shandy, 102, 107
and gothic literature, 119; and Hege- Sentimentality: and Clarissa, 83, 84, 85;
lian theory, 165n14; and ideology, 21; and comedy, 87; and Tristram
and indeterminacy, 107; and individ- Shandy, 87, 106
ualism, 31, 54; and integration, 31, A Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 93, 105
41, 53, 54, 84, 93, 165n14; and Lacan- Sex-gender system: and capitalism, 1–2,
ian theory, 89, 106, 153n16, 161n35; 110; and The Castle of Otranto, 110,
and language, 89; and masculinity, 123, 124; and Clarissa, 60; and contra-
85; and mastery, 29, 54, 139; and diction, 1; and desire, 142, 143; and
melancholia, 125, 143; and modern- difference, 3–4, 58; and economic re-
ism, 140; and modernity, 40; and lations, 1–3; and family, 37; and fan-
Moll Flanders, 39–41; and mourning, tastic narrative, 7; and feminism, 142,
126; and otherness, 10, 14, 89, 94, 146; and heterosexuality, 143; and
109, 158n13, 164n6, 165n14; and por- identification, 139, 142, 143; and indi-
nographic imagination, 61; and post- vidualism, 19, 35, 37, 44; and inequal-
modernism, 53; and psychoanalysis, ity, 123; and interaction of narrative
12, 52–55, 89, 140, 165n14; and Puri- modes, 1; and masochism, 66; and
tanism, 22, 25; and realist narrative, maternal relations, 142; and modern-
10, 25, 30, 31, 40, 54, 68; and recogni- ity, 66, 124, 142, 146; and Moll Flan-
tion, 89, 143, 165n14; and reification, ders, 20, 21, 35, 37, 44; and mutuality,
39; and religion, 26, 84; and repre- 143; and narcissism, 66; and novelis-
sentation, 53–54; and Robinson Crusoe, tic form, 1, 4, 149n2; and Pamela, 57–
22–26, 29, 31; and Romanticism, 140; 58; and psychoanalysis, 141, 146; and
and Roxana, 46–48, 50; and sex-gender Robinson Crusoe, 21, 44; and Roxana,
system, 3–4; and sublimation, 111; 20, 35, 37; and self, 3–4; and social
and sublime, 111; and Tristram class, 4, 57; and subjectivity, 1, 12
Shandy, 87, 89, 93, 94–95, 97, 144; and Sexuality: and anxiety, 11, 63; and capi-
the uncanny, 109, 132; ungendered, 61 talism, 60; and The Castle of Otranto,
Self-awareness: and alienation, 139; and 11, 120, 122–23, 134, 135, 145; and
The Castle of Otranto, 110; and ego- Clarissa, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 74, 75, 77,
tism, 6; and fantastic narrative, 7, 9, 83, 84, 145, 163n1; and commodifica-
31, 34; and femininity, 8, 51; and tion, 43; and criminality, 43; and
gothic literature, 8, 9; and individual- death, 134, 135; and difference, 2, 3,
ism, 4, 10, 22; and interaction of nar- 9, 13, 60, 74, 75, 84, 89, 93, 103, 143,
rative modes, 11; and modernity, 9, 167n20; and economic relations, 43,
10, 11, 13, 19, 109, 111; and Moll 62; and fantastic narrative, 8, 9, 72,
Flanders, 42; and realist narrative, 6; 75, 77, 88; and gothic literature, 8;
and Robinson Crusoe, 19, 21, 31, 34; and heroism, 177n15; and identifica-
and Roxana, 46, 51; and solipsism, 5, tion, 168n26, 183n7; and identity, 41,
110; and subjectivity, 139; and sub- 168n26; and ideology, 3, 35; and in-
lime, 111–12; and Tristram Shandy, determinacy, 83, 102–3; and individ-
109 uality, 37; and instrumentaliza-
Self-consciousness: and Hegelian the- tion, 51; and Lacanian theory, 89;
ory, 165n14; and individualism, and masculinity, 3, 167n18; and ma-
152n15; and psychoanalysis, 165n14; terialism, 8; and maternal relations,
and Roxana, 45; and Tristram Shandy, 43, 50, 51, 74, 77, 167n23, 168n26;
97, 145; and the unconscious, 152n15; and Moll Flanders, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41;
and women, 97 and otherness, 132; and Pamela, 57–
Self-control, 5, 8, 152n13 58; and paternal relations, 9, 122,
Self-interest, 5, 6, 40, 58 168n26; and patriarchy, 60, 64; and
Self-preservation, 23, 47, 70, 160n26 pornographic imagination, 60; and
Self-reflection: and fantastic narrative, power, 63, 79, 163n3; and realist nar-
214 Index
Sexuality (continued ) Stoker, Bram, 88, 155n26, 161n30

rative, 75; and reification, 160n26; Subjectivity: and autonomy, 139; and
and Robinson Crusoe, 32, 33, 37, 145; capitalism, 52; and The Castle of
and Roxana, 35, 36, 37, 44, 48, 49, 50, Otranto, 117, 120, 127, 145; and Clar-
51, 145; and sadism, 63; and social issa, 68–69, 71, 75, 80, 84, 109, 145;
class, 69, 150n2; and sublimation, 57, and contradiction, 46; and desire, 88;
176n4; and the sublime, 177n15; and divided, 19, 88, 89, 109, 127, 139,
Tristram Shandy, 11, 93, 95, 103; and 183n8; and domination, 139; and em-
the uncanny, 132; and Walpole’s life, piricism, 88; and exploitation, 41; and
180n39; and women, 3, 35, 36, 74, fantastic narrative, 9, 10, 11, 54, 88,
120, 152n8, 167n20 89, 127, 154n24; and femininity, 47,
Shakespeare, William, 175n1 75, 145, 150n2, 153n17; and gender,
Shelley, Mary, 88, 153n17, 154n23, 2, 4, 12, 14, 80, 102, 109, 149n2,
155n26, 161n30, 179n27, 182n2 154n24; and indeterminacy, 1; and
Showalter, Elaine, 164n5 individualism, 30; and integration, 89;
Silverman, Kaja, 173n20 and irrationalism, 55; and knowl-
Slavery: and Clarissa, 67; and Robinson edge, 88; and Lacanian theory, 13,
Crusoe, 23–24; and Roxana, 160n28 89, 104; and masculinity, 33, 41, 89,
Smollett, Tobias, 175n1 117, 145; and misogyny, 104; and
Social class: and The Castle of Otranto, modernity, 12, 40, 54, 55, 104; and
134; and Clarissa, 62, 63, 66; and fam- Moll Flanders, 41, 47; and narcissism,
ily, 7, 159n20; and gender, 1–2, 3, 107, 144; and object-relations theory,
151n5; and medievalism, 116; and 13, 52, 54; and paternal relations,
Pamela, 57–58; and patriarchy, 151n5; 166n16; and performance, 102; and
and Robinson Crusoe, 23, 31, 32, 143; pornography, 75; and possessiveness,
and Roxana, 143; and sex-gender sys- 30; and psychoanalysis, 13, 52, 55, 89;
tem, 4, 57; and sexuality, 69, 150n2; and rationalism, 88; and realist nar-
and Tristram Shandy, 173n17 rative, 89, 139, 154n24; and reifica-
Social context: and fantastic narrative, tion, 160nn25–26; and Robinson Cru-
88; and realist narrative, 140 soe, 11, 30, 33, 109, 145; and Roxana,
Social embeddedness: and knowledge, 21, 46–47, 109, 145; and self-
89; and Moll Flanders, 21, 35; and awareness, 139; and sex-gender sys-
Robinson Crusoe, 23; and Roxana, 35; tem, 1, 12; and Tristram Shandy, 88–
and Tristram Shandy, 89, 95 89, 93, 94, 97, 102, 104, 107, 109, 144–
Socialization: and Clarissa, 77; and fam- 45; and ungendered condition, 12;
ily, 36; and maternal relations, 38, 77, and women, 120
120; and Moll Flanders, 38; and psy- Sublimation: and masculinity, 37; and
choanalysis, 13, 167n19 Pamela, 57; and repressive de-
Solipsism: and The Castle of Otranto, sublimation, 159–60n24; and Robinson
110, 117; and Clarissa, 75, 78, 83, 85; Crusoe, 33, 37; and self, 111; and sex-
and fantastic narrative, 8–9, 60, 75, uality, 57, 176n4; and Tristram
78, 88; and gothic literature, 8–9; and Shandy, 95
Hegelian theory, 165n14; and indi- Sublime: and affectivity, 10; and aliena-
vidualism, 83, 117; and interiority, 88; tion, 111, 112; and anxiety, 112,
and Moll Flanders, 47; and porno- 169n30; and The Castle of Otranto,
graphic imagination, 60; and psycho- 123, 136; and Clarissa, 61, 82, 83, 84,
analysis, 165n14; and Robinson Cru- 112; and comedy, 87, 102, 105, 106,
soe, 27; and self-awareness, 5, 110; 107; and fantastic narrative, 10, 61,
and Tristram Shandy, 94, 95, 106 84, 102, 104, 105, 107, 112, 177n15;
Spencer, Jane, 149n2 and gothic literature, 123; and imagi-
Spiritual autobiography, 22, 24–25, nation, 111; and libertinism, 123,
156n4 177n15; and melancholia, 176n6; and
Stallybrass, Peter, 154–55n25 narcissism, 162n38; negative, 84, 112,
Sterne, Laurence. See Tristram Shandy 136, 176n6, 177n15; and pornogra-
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 155n26, phy, 84; and realist narrative, 61, 83,
161n30, 179n27 84; and religion, 82, 83, 84, 169n30;
Index 215
and Robinson Crusoe, 112; and Rox- and dividedness, 87, 89, 95, 97, 109;
ana, 112; and self-awareness, 111–12; and doubleness, 95, 102; and empiri-
and self-transcendence, 102, 105, 111; cism, 88; and epistemology, 11, 88,
and sexuality, 177n15; and the super- 170nn4–5; and erasure, 91, 101, 142;
natural, 111; and tragedy, 107; and and erotics, 94, 107, 108, 143; and
Tristram Shandy, 87, 102, 104, 105, family, 93; and fantastic narrative,
106, 107, 112; and the uncanny, 11, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 102, 103–4, 107,
181n48 145; and femininity, 93, 107, 145; and
Superego, 111, 140, 152n15, 168–69n28, feminism, 145, 171nn; and fetishism,
174n21 93, 97; and gaze, 98, 144; and gender,
Supernatural, the, 10, 111, 112, 114–15, 102, 109, 117, 142, 144, 145, 171nn,
117, 133, 150n3, 154n24, 175n3, 177n9 173n17, 175n31; and gothic literature,
Supplementarity, 103, 104 87; and heterosexuality, 145; and hi-
Surplus value, 26, 30 erarchy, 94, 103, 144; and hobby-
Surrealism, 112, 117 horse, 95–97, 102, 144, 172–73nn15–
Swift, Jonathan, 170n2 16, 173n19; and homosociality, 93–94,
Symbolic order, 103 143, 145; and idealization, 93, 94, 98,
100, 101; and identification, 94; and
Temporality, 24, 26, 42, 52, 87, 103, 139, identity, 90, 170n5; and ideology, 109;
156n8, 161n33 and imagination, 117; and impotence,
Thomas, Calvin, 171n8 92, 93, 97, 100, 101; and indetermi-
Time. See Temporality nacy, 11, 102–3, 104, 107, 144; and in-
Todd, Janet, 149n2 dividualism, 95, 109; and individual-
Todorov, Tzvetan, 154n24 ity, 145; and integration, 89, 102; and
Torok, Maria, 13, 110, 124–26, 133, 134– interaction of narrative modes, 11,
35, 136, 137, 144, 172n13, 178nn 87, 88, 89, 95, 102, 145; and intersub-
Tragedy: and alienation, 53; and The jectivity, 144; and irony, 88, 91, 102,
Castle of Otranto, 113, 115, 121; and 107, 117; and jouissance, 104–5, 106,
Clarissa, 60, 85; and dividedness, 47; 107; and knowledge, 89, 99, 101, 103,
and fantastic narrative, 8, 53, 103, 104, 106; and Lacanian theory, 13, 87,
110; and gender, 142; and gothic lit- 97, 101, 103–6, 171n8, 172n15,
erature, 87; and individualism, 95; 173nn18–20; and lack, 13, 93, 94, 97,
and melodrama, 87; and The Mysteri- 100, 101; and language, 13, 88, 89, 95,
ous Mother, 110, 127, 130; and realist 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 117, 144, 145; and
narrative, 102; and Roxana, 21, 47; legal relations, 91; and Lockean the-
and sublime, 107; and Tristram ory, 88, 99, 170n4; and loss, 88, 89,
Shandy, 95, 102 93, 97, 106, 107, 143; and marginality,
Tristram Shandy (Sterne): and affectiv- 87; and masculinity, 89, 93–94, 101,
ity, 103, 106; and alienation, 89, 91; 102–3, 145; and maternal relations, 91–
and allegory, 101; and ambisexuality, 93, 101, 106, 107, 142, 144–45; and
106, 175n31; and ambivalence, 106; melancholia, 93, 142, 144, 145; and
and androgyny, 106; and anxiety, 90, misogyny, 13, 93, 102, 104, 106, 107,
91, 96, 97, 100, 101, 107, 121, 171nn; 142, 145, 171nn; and naming, 98, 106;
and appropriation, 91, 94, 105, 106, and narcissism, 95, 107, 144; and
144; and autonomy, 144, 145; and nose, 92, 97, 99–101; and otherness,
body, 94, 97, 106, 107, 144; and 93, 94, 97, 106, 142; and paternal re-
boundary, 94, 144, 145; and breast/ lations, 90–91, 93–94, 101–2; and pa-
penis, 92, 106; and carnivalesque, 106; triarchy, 97, 117, 171n10; and penis,
and castration, 13, 92, 93, 97, 98, 106, 92, 94, 100–101, 106; and perfor-
107; and comedy, 13, 87, 91, 95, 102, mance, 102; and phallic economy, 94,
103–4, 105, 106, 107, 117, 144; and 104; and Phallus, 101, 102, 105–6; and
community, 107; and connectedness, polymorphous perversity, 107, 144;
107, 108, 144, 145; and desire, 93, 94, and postmodernism, 87; and power,
101, 103, 104; and difference, 89, 90, 98, 101, 117; and primal scene, 89–90;
93, 94, 96, 102, 103, 117, 143, 144, and property, 90; publication of,
173n17; and displacement, 93, 107; 170n3; and rationalism, 88; and ra-
216 Index
Tristram Shandy (Sterne) (continued ) gion, 25; and Robinson Crusoe, 25;
tionality, 102; and realist narrative, and Tristram Shandy, 93, 94
11, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 102, 107, 145; Whyte, Lancelot Law, 152n15
and reciprocity, 143, 144; and recog- Wiegman, Robyn, 160n28
nition, 89, 142, 144; and reproductive Wilde, Oscar, 155n26
relations, 90–91, 105; and sameness, Williams, Linda, 163n3, 167nn20–21,
93; and self, 87, 89, 93, 94–95, 97, 168n26
144; and self-awareness, 109; and Williams, Raymond, 161n32, 164n6
self-consciousness, 97, 145; and Wilt, Judith, 168n24
self-reflection, 96, 102; and self- Winnicott, D. W., 96, 172n16
transcendence, 102, 107; and sen- Women: and affectivity, 20, 51, 74; and
timentality, 87, 106; and sexuality, autonomy, 20, 35–36; and biological
11, 93, 95, 103; and social class, determinism, 35; and body, 3, 35, 36,
173n17; and social embeddedness, 89, 42, 47, 60, 107; and capitalism, 35, 42,
95; and solipsism, 94, 95, 106; and 159n19; and The Castle of Otranto, 119–
subjectivity, 88–89, 93, 94, 97, 102, 21; and commodification, 36, 39; and
104, 107, 109, 144–45; and sublima- difference, 3, 74; and displacement,
tion, 95; and sublime, 87, 102, 104, 33; and domestic sphere, 2, 37; and
105, 106, 107, 112; and temporality, domination, 123; and economic rela-
87, 103; and tragedy, 95, 102; and tions, 2, 36, 123, 151n6; and erasure,
wholeness, 93, 94; and women, 93, 20, 31, 33; and exclusion, 93, 107; and
94, 97, 105, 107, 173n17 exploitation, 39; and hysteria, 47, 51;
Trumbach, Randolph, 166–67n18 and idealization, 93; and individual-
Turner, James Grantham, 177n15 ism, 20, 35; and labor, 36, 151n6,
163n3; and Lacanian theory, 104–5,
Uncanny, 10, 27, 109, 132–33, 142, 174n25; and lack, 97; and legal
154n24, 181nn48–49 relations, 123; and masochism, 66;
Unconscious, 5, 10, 12, 125, 126, 132, men’s dependence upon, 35, 121;
136, 137, 140–41, 152n14, 152n15, men’s identification with, 60; men’s
172n13, 178–79n25 usurpation of, 33, 91, 93–94, 105, 123;
Ungendered condition, 12, 60, 61 and Moll Flanders, 20, 35–36, 39, 42,
43, 159n19; and narcissism, 66; and
Victorian period, 155n26, 161n30 objectification, 41, 62, 167n20; and
Villette (Brontë), 153–54n21, 155n26, private sphere, 2, 43; and psycho-
179n27, 182n2 analysis, 47, 51, 165n11; and reader
response, 85; and realist narrative, 35;
Walpole, Horace, 87–88, 109–10, 112, and reification, 160n26; and repro-
116–17, 127–30, 136, 137, 175nn1–2, ductive relations, 3, 36, 42, 90, 91,
176n8, 177nn13–14, 179–81nn. See 105, 121; and Robinson Crusoe, 20, 31–
also The Mysterious Mother; The Castle 32, 33, 37; and Roxana, 35–36, 51; and
of Otranto scientific ideology, 3; and self-
Warner, William, 69, 163nn4–5 consciousness, 97; and sensibility,
Watt, Ian, 5, 57, 59, 69, 149n1, 150n2, 151n7; and sexuality, 3, 35, 36, 74,
162–63n1, 169n1 120, 152n8, 163n3, 167n20; and sub-
Weiskel, Thomas, 169n30, 176nn5–6 jectivity, 120; and temporality, 103;
White, Allon, 154–55n25 and Tristram Shandy, 93, 94, 97, 105,
Wholeness: and The Castle of Otranto, 107, 173n17
117; and masculinity, 59, 60; and ma- Woolf, Virginia, 155n26
ternal relations, 141; and porno- Working class, and family, 159n20
graphic imagination, 59–60; and
realist narrative, 6, 117, 139; and reli- Xenophobia, and Robinson Crusoe, 29
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the trauma of gender

THE TRAUMA OF GENDER

University of California Press

University of California Press, Ltd.

q 2001 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moglen, Helene, 1936–

PR858.F45 M64 2001

Manufactured in the United States of America

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes 1

1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism 17

2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination 57

3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy 87

4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History 109

Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory 139

Many acts of generosity and friendship sustained me in the writing

constructions can be mined, adapted and transcended. In my three

I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and

sovereign, the family became a distinct unit of organization, with the

male interiority was identified with reason, female interiority with

tally, as objects. At the psychological level, the individual’s obsession

them as timeless and inevitable. Mediating between the power of

subordinated to her socially responsive moral consciousness. The

established the subjectivist form that was elaborated later in Roman-

ipsistic tendencies of modern self-awareness are intensified as a toxic

backward toward a regressive past. While realism poses the possi-

ing or devaluing the other. Those who have constructed realism as

Together and separately, these canonical texts explore, from male

jectivity and sexuality. They use sexual difference to anchor psychic

haunting presence of the past. Hostage to memory and dependent

A pivotal and provocative figure, Daniel Defoe embodied in his own

Crusoe’s island adventure, exposes psychic division as the dark un-

doning mother engages the story of the prosperous whore, Roxana

demonstrates the impossibility of female individualism, Defoe lays

be materially independent is to be powerful in possession. Striving

illusion of independence. Further, by identifying himself with the

“others, “ who are reduced to the level of childlike “primitives.” As

Now, in Crusoe’s mind, Friday is no longer separable from the other

Here, the passion for domination is revealed to be the other side of

individualistic self of capitalism is shown to depend for its consoli-

that the ideology of bourgeois capitalism affirms and specifically dis-

whom he transports with other “necessaries” from England, who

text as the primal maternal body, nature is simultaneously destruc-

the possessive male individual, as Defoe constructs it, is a narrative

Constructing Crusoe as a possessive individualist, Defoe reveals

ileges autonomy and instrumentalizes relationships, and the indi-

gests how desire is constructed and distorted within the vaguely

(198). Not content with being a hypocrite, Moll chooses at times to

availability of identities in the next world by lamenting those that

through one of her unwanted pregnancies, delivering and disposing

picaresque fiction with a peaceful domesticity that is as undisturbed

I found, that a Wife is treated with Indifference, a Mistress with a

She remains resistant to wedlock even when she is pregnant with

vacillations about the value and desirability of marriage are matched

other as the self. And although this fantastic aspect of Roxana’s

Validating her mistress’s behavior, Amy shadows Roxana through

princess (the performance that represents Roxana’s unrestrained

Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy