Minor Novelists.

‎ The work of these five giants was accompanied by interesting experiments from a number of lesser novelists. Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry's sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence of Cervantes, also discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (known as Fanny Hill; 1748-49) presented a more contentious path describing a young girl's life. In emphatic contrast, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist, and rarefied, version of the sentimental hero, while Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765) somewhat laboriously initiated the vogue for Gothic fiction. William Beckford's Vathek (1786), Matthew Lewis Monk (1796) are among the more distinctive of its successors.

‎Major Themes in the 18th Century Novels

‎The 18th century novels assumed change through social mobility, for through them a young woman can learn the requisite codes of sensibility which will make her more attractive for marriage. As such, books of manners are a fitting and interesting model for not just women's issues but much of the social change beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. As England moved from a hierarchical society to one with a thriving middle class, social mobility became a feasible possibility. Women in particular were afforded the possibility of moving themselves (and their families) up in social status in exchange for a rather liberal dowry paid over, most

‎frequently, to a man of aristocratic birth. Such a milieu required books to give women an appropriate sense of how they should behave, deport themselves, think, feel, and respond in a new sphere of social interaction. What the books addressed on a more covert level mobile, too aware of their capacities and abilities. The books, written was the need to curb women, to keep them from becoming too by both men and women and directed mostly to daughters, were gestures of warning and approbation, texts to keep women quelled and serving the interest of the nation and its patriarchal dictates. They cautioned women about the importance of being chaste and sometimes giving advice on dress, learning, and finances. It was about teaching a moral lesson, about making the case for what to find repugnant crystal clear.

‎The class mobility and increased literacy of the eighteenth century opened up new mores which allowed for movement. It also gave voice to women novelists, and through this voice came a kind of subjectivity never before quite as active or as powerful. The attempt to suppress a surge of growth in women is evident both in novels and in other texts written during the time. We can observe this in the most popular novels of the 18th century: Pamela (1740), written by Samuel Richardson but told through gh the ostensibly female focalized perspective of Pamela; Evelina (1778), written by Frances Burney and told mostly in epistolary form between Evelina and her guardian Reverend Villars; and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1799), told by a third-person narrator who closely resembles one of the characters of the text.

‎While the rise of capitalism has given women the ability to become authors and to begin to realize some financial independence, this very system of possible freedom also necessitates for women to abide by by its strict rules. This complex social system, on the one hand, allows for women to realize their own subjectivity for the first time in history. But inherent in the system, on the other hand, is that knowledge of one's state, self-consciousness, contributes to women's seemingly new-found oppression and commodification. Pamela provides an interesting perspective. Rubin states that "kinship and marriage are always parts of total social systems, and are always tied into and is uniquely explored in Pamela. In the novel. Pameia is ultimately transferred from her parents to Mr. B. but she has exercised a great deal of control in this transfer. She has maintained her virtue and used her so-called power to consent and deny at various times in the novel. While questioning the social system that turns women into pieces of property for exchange and denies her subjectivity, Richardson is careful to maintain the social order in the end Michel Foucault theorizes the shift, beginning at the end of the 17th century, from feudal to disciplinary power paradigms. Assuming that cultural products, like literature, evince cultural practices, the shift from the epic to the early modern, novelistic hero indicates the changing modes of power that Foucault succinctly theorizes. The 18th century novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson's Pamela become sites where the contestation of conflicting cultural values get played out. Fielding's world, in Tom Jones, is governed by a stable, natural social order. Nobility will out Tom, Fielding's title character, can transgress social taboos of incest and adultery as he plods through a gauntlet of potentially tragic situations. Like the epic hero, Tom embodies his culture's values; Tom's natural virtue, and nobility assures his salvation, In contrast, Mr. B, in Richardson's Pamela, learns virtue from his servant, Pamela Where a stable class order averts tragedy in Tom Jones, Pamela averts rape, the loss of her virginity, and virtual slavery only through a disciplinary cultivation of virtue. Where virtue is embodied by the nobility in Tom Jones, virtue is learned, and more importantly, taught in Pamela.

‎This struggle between receding and emergent modes of power appears in many novels in the 18th century. They describe the contestation between modes of power which will, by the 19th century, change English cultural attitudes toward subjectivity and gender roles. However, in the eighteenth century, these attitudes are still in their germinal stage and, arguably, are getting get played out in early modern novels like Tom Jones and Pamela.