UC Berkeley

This project considers how courtship novels by women participated in the increasingly mobile world of Romantic-era Britain, which saw commodity circulation and global markets expand, political and economic power shift from landed interests to speculative investment, and the accelerated movement of persons and of property. By examining how women’s propertied rights accorded—or failed to accord—with contemporary celebrations of economic progress, and how their fiction both shaped and responded to these rights and restrictions in turn, I show how in this period the figure of the woman occupies the crucial intersection between property and mobility because of legal, social, and literary characterizations of her as a form of mobile property. The novels in this study reveal how, under expectations that she functions to transfer property from the father’s family to the husband’s and thence to the son, the woman risks sexual or physical harm stemming from the threat her movements posed to the forms of social reproduction that rely on the establishment of her body in the home.

I argue that, as the novel developed into the dominant cultural form for expressing these domestic, economic, and social concerns, the gap (at once temporal and spatial) between patriarchal homes—a dangerous yet also potentially emancipatory space that the heroine(s) must navigate—becomes a dominant organizing principle for plot itself. As the marriage plot works to establish the woman’s body in the home, the gap between the houses also reveals the instability of that trajectory, and the violence or constraints imposed on women to hold them in place. For at the same time this is a space of possible transgression, where women’s moving bodies carry the potential to disrupt the propulsion of the typical courtship narrative, with its emphasis on property ownership and wealth transfer, through their threat of reproducing—children, ideas, communities—outside of the patrilineal line.

Focused around four writers who collectively transformed the novel genre, this project examines how Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Jane Austen use their characters’ physically dangerous yet potentially emancipatory movements to explore the contradiction between the ideological placement of women as the moral and practical center of the home and their legal barriers to property ownership and bodily autonomy. In different ways, these writers critique and reimagine the relationship between—and the barriers to becoming—a feme sole (a woman who has sole ownership of property) and a femme seule (a woman alone, on the move).

The first half of this project explores the violence visited upon heroines’ bodies as they move through this gap between homes that formalizes the space of the marriage plot. The first chapter, “Frances Burney’s Miscarried Bodies,” examines how the space between houses helps to produce the violent constraints female characters suffer in Burney’s early fiction. I argue that these constraints arise from the threat that women’s unconfined bodies pose to the economic structures that depend upon their domestication in husbands’ homes. Burney uses the carriage as a vehicle of narrative propulsion, as well as a site of social and financial power, that stages women’s vulnerability to miscarriage and displacement. Chapter 2, “Transported Bodies in Radcliffe’s Gothic Prose,” explores how Radcliffe’s heroines’ visual and imaginative understanding of the sublime and picturesque landscapes through which they (unwillingly) move creates mental transports outside of their precarious physical situations. However, their ability to be transported also paradoxically signals the cultural capital that has identified them as valuable objects of capture and exchange in the first place: in the end, their very marriageability is inextricable from the conditions that make them most vulnerable.

The second half of this project shifts focus to representations of women’s legal rights and textual property. Chapter 3, “Bound Bodies: Charlotte Smith’s Contract Fiction,” shows how Smith’s representation of legal contracts in her novels reveals the ways in which contracts both regulate and imperil women, whose bodies in turn threaten to breach society’s contractual terms. By doing so, her works expose the underlying violence of sentimental fiction’s seemingly natural social and familial relations. Chapter 4, “Jane Austen’s Bodies: Late Works and Family Legacy,” explores how, in their biographies of their famous Aunt Jane, Austen’s descendants attempt to render her works and life as fixed pieces of familial property by constructing a discrete historical era detached from their own. They align their aunt’s unpublished texts with an immovable, barren body, unable to reproduce itself in the future. Austen’s own late works, however, suggest instead a modern temporal consciousness, which recognizes regeneration and proleptically resists biographical stability.

Writing at a time of advancements in transportation, changes in familial ties, and shifting legal rights for women within the institution of marriage, the authors in this study explore how women’s movement, across various forms of geographical and urban space, attracted intense cultural anxiety and regulative scrutiny. Carriage Trouble insists on the centrality of women’s movements to plot structure, to histories of the novel, and to socioeconomic accounts of a period characterized by temporal acceleration, geographical mobility, and industrial change.