by Steven Moore
That subtle tweak of literary conventions is one of many ways Vertue Rewarded recalls Incognita. It is sub-subtitled “A New Novel” and goes out of its way to distinguish itself from romance, as when the narrator excuses the prince’s failure to take Limerick: “the days of errantry are past, nor have our warriors now such swords as those of knights of old that could hew a way through the thickest walls, and do wonders greater than our age will believe” (114). Yet the characters’ names are straight out of romance (Malinda, Celadon, Astolfo), as are the plot elements (disguises, interpolated tales, conveniently overheard conversations, serenades, fortune-telling, even a magic well), and occasionally the diction (“Now had the active Sun run through our celestial sign, and his pale sister the Moon gone through her monthly course and changed her orb . . .” [123]). Like Congreve, the narrator displays a rather arch attitude toward his materials and occasionally addresses the reader, usually to explain why he is forgoing an expected description: “I will not set down how many of these fits of joy and grief he had whilst he was in the camp; neither will I romance so much as to write down all the thoughts he had of her, and all the many wise dialogues he had with himself about her; those the reader can better imagine than the author tell” (110). Vertue Rewarded doesn’t have a critical preface like Incognita’s, but it does have a truculent “Preface to the Ill-Natured Reader” in which the author states “whether you believe, or disbelieve, like, or dislike [the novel] is indifferent to me” (37). Again like Congreve, the narrator offers a sophisticated spin on an old genre rather than something new, but he accomplishes this with confident artistry. For example, there’s a point near the end when two comic subplots seem to overtake the main one, which the narrator compares to “the main wheel of a clock, though it turns all the rest, yet goes itself with such an insensible motion that to an unskillful eye it seems to stand still” (131); sure enough, we later learn that Malinda participated in one of those subplots, moving the main wheel of her plot without the reader’s knowledge. Earlier, the narrator had expressed the hope the reader would “sympathize exactly with His Highness’s thoughts as two clocks, well made, keep time with another” (110). The novel may be based on an old design, but the author draws our attention to its clockwork structure and Old World craftsmanship.
New World horrors are the most unusual feature of Vertue Rewarded, still a novelty five years after Oroonoko. An outlandishly dressed visitor shows up one night at a ball to reveal herself as a South American princess; during the short novel’s longest interpolated tale, she explains how she fell in love with a Spanish soldier during a war with the neighboring Inca—with lots of lurid details involving blood sacrifices, cannibalism, and witchcraft—then accompanied him to Spain, got separated, and made her way to Ireland in the hope of finding him. (She does; this is a romance, after all.) Based on The Royal Commentaries of Peru by Garcilaso de la Vega—the same source Françoise de Graffigny would draw upon 50 years later for Letters from a Peruvian Woman—the exotic tale anachronistically describes events that occurred a good century earlier, but it shines a disturbing colonialist light on the relationship between the invading German prince and the besieged Irish virgin that complicates the novel’s happy ending.
Congreve may have been only 18 when he wrote Incognita, but Catharine Trotter (1679?–1749) might have been only 14 when she anonymously published her first and only novel. The Adventures of a Young Lady (1693; aka Olinda’s Adventures) resembles a monologic epistolary novel, but it’s closer to French memoir-novels like Villedieu’s Memoirs (see pp. 246–49 above) in that it consists of seven long letters recounting the story of her early life addressed to a platonic male friend called “Cleander” (the names are romantic, but the novel is realistic), followed by two short, uncharacteristic letters to her future husband, which were probably added by the book’s editor. Now 18 and living alone in the country, Olinda tells Cleander how she lost her father at an early age, which reduced her and her mother to straitened circumstances in London. Consequently, her mother wants to marry her daughter off, and over the course of these letters Olinda comments pertly on the “catalogue of lovers” who sought her hand beginning at age 13.97
Unlike the aristocratic cast of most romance novels of the time, Olinda’s suitors include a goldsmith, an old Dutch colonel, and several fops and soldiers, some of whom are already married. The most eminent is the powerful and respectable Cloridon, who encounters Olinda when she’s 15 and thereafter arranges for several clandestine assignations under the guise of helping her mother with certain matters. Naive Olinda is surprised when the middle-aged married man reveals his love for her, but is kinda flattered, and eventually agrees to allow him to settle her in the country until his wife dies, which she does at the end of the short novel. Olinda leaves her correspondent hanging as to what happens next.
Olinda is neither the virtuous maiden of earlier fiction nor the “lewd creature” one rejected suitor calls her, but rather a typical teen, though a little smarter than most. (She tosses off references to Aristotle, Luther, and Dryden.) Of the first guy who shows interest in her, she admits, “I was well enough pleased with the love, though not with the lover, for ’tis natural at that unthinking age to covet a crowd of admirers, though we despise them” (1). She teases and leads some of them on, taunts others for insincerity, and though she can be mischievous and spiteful, she exhibits the kind of sprightliness found in the heroines of later novels like Riccoboni’s Letters from Lady Catesby and even Jane Austen’s. She’s not eager to get married, telling her correspondent: “though I was never an enemy to marriage, yet I always preferred a single life to it” (7), and earlier in the same letter—justifying her decision to marry someone else when Cloridon looked unavailable—she shrugs unromantically: “since my circumstances would oblige me to marry, and that I knew I could never love any man, I thought it might as well be he as any other.” This statement, coming after her remarks in letter 3 about her “love” for a girlfriend named Ambrisia (whom she is now encouraging her correspondent to marry), leads Josephine Donovan to find in Trotter’s novel “one of the first expressions of a lesbian feminist standpoint” (85), especially since Trotter herself is known to have enjoyed some lesbian flings before she married a curate in 1708.
Olinda’s indifference to marriage, her wariness of romantic clichés, her resolution to overcome passion with reason—“many of our sex have ruined themselves for want of time to think” (6)—and her cagey dealings with the middle-class marriage mart set her apart from most 17th-century heroines, and set The Adventures of a Young Lady apart from other novels of the day. As Day concludes the introduction to his reprint, this petite novel “ably anticipates in embryo so many features which the English domestic and realistic novel would develop in its age of maturity and popularity” (vii).
Trotter published her first play in 1696, but that year her older friend Mary Pix (1666–1709) outdid her by publishing two plays and a novel, The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed. No critic is likely to praise this lurid novel’s “feminist standpoint,” for the moral of the story, as the author points out to her female readers on the penultimate page, is “to beware the insinuations of the designing part of your own sex” (236). The designing woman in question in Donna Olympia, a niece of Pope Innocent X (1644–55) and one of the most powerful women in Rome. She dotes on the corrupt cardinal Antonio Barbarino, the pope’s nephew, but when he confesses he’s in lust with the French ambassador’s daughter, Melora, Olympia offers to help him satisfy his “violent desires.” Like Merteuil and Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, they set about their plan with ruthless efficiency.
Interestingly enough, the main tool they use is fiction. Soon after Olympia makes Melora’s acquaintance, she narrates the “The History of Alphonsus and Cordelia,” a typical romantic adventure that ends happily and encourages Melora to welcome the cardinal’s advances because he disguises himself as a character from that that novella: a storybook hero come to life, in Melora’s naive eyes.
Later, to encourage her to risk parental disapproval, Barbarino gets his favorite, Francisco, to narrate “The History of Emilius and Lovisa,” another romantic adventure in which a father comes to regret his attempt to force his daughter to marry another man. (These two tales take up 150 of the novel’s 237 pages.) Thus The Inhumane Cardinal is a novel exposing the danger of novels, especially to gullible readers like Melora who “took delight in nothing more than hearing the histories of persons where the caprices of Fortune had been most evident” (115). Emboldened by the second story, she agrees to a secret marriage to the disguised cardinal, and for “six months this insatiable priest revels on that luxurious banquet, blooming youth and yielding beauty” (213). Eventually satiated, he decides to poison her; meanwhile, Francisco has repented of his participation in her seduction and decides to tell her the “true” story—and if this were a romance of the sort Melora liked to hear, he would arrive in the nick of time and save her. But in this novel, he arrives too late, Melora drinks the poison, and she becomes the tragic heroine of “this sad story” (235).
Although The Inhumane Cardinal isn’t great literature—it was presumably written to cash in on the fad for scandalous “secret histories” of famous people, and the style is undistinguished (except for slipping in and out of the present tense)—it stands apart from other novels of the period because of its bleak view of human nature: as Constance Clark comments, “its unidealized and cynically desolate ending resembles more a Jacobean tragedy than the prose fiction of its time. It is pervaded with the Jacobean sense of life as passionate, cruel, and corrupt.”98 Though written by a woman, it is unusually harsh on women—Pix harps upon their vanity, ambition, duplicity, and gullibility—and it is one of the few novels of the time that makes explicit reference to sodomy (225). Like other novelists of the 1690s, Pix mixes romance and realism, putting new wine into old bottles.
The most inventive, profound, and mindblowing novel of this time straddles the 17th and 18th centuries. The brilliant Irishman Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote most of A Tale of a Tub between 1695 and 1697, but didn’t publish it until 1704, when it appeared in an anonymous volume along with two shorter satires of his, The Battle of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. The Tale is usually described as a “prose satire,” a vague term that suits the other two works; however, the Tale not only meets the minimal requirements for a novel as Webster’s and I define the term (a book-length fiction), but thematically, structurally, and visually it can easily be located on the long line of eccentric, erudite novels that stretches from Petronius’s Satyricon to Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew and beyond. In fact, like the latter it can be read as an avant-garde novel satirizing avant-gardism in the person of a desperate writer going mad. True, A Tale of a Tub doesn’t resemble most novels of its time, but avant-garde novels never do: by definition they are always ahead of the pack, or (if you prefer) out on the lunatic fringe. Nabokov’s Pale Fire doesn’t resemble most novels of its time, but it does resemble the Tale, as its mentally unstable narrator admits: “I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of fou rire” (mad laughter; note to line 270).99 Only a blinkered, conservative critic would claim that Swift “is not Flaubert or James. He is not, in the sense implied by those names, a novelist at all,” forgetting that even those two wrote unconventional, experimental novels (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, The Sacred Fount).100 Frederik Smith was right to complain in 1979 that “Critics in our century show a naive reluctance to acknowledge the crucial place of A Tale of a Tub—or Gulliver’s Travels, for that matter—in the history of the English novel” (125).101 At a Swift symposium five years later, Maximillian Novak urged fuddy-duddy critics to get with it: “Now that most modern critics have abandoned the notion of the novel as some higher form existing amidst a mass of malformed narrative types, it is time that we pay more attention to Swift’s masterpieces as belonging to long established, if not very well delineated, fictional genres” (159).
Actually, A Tale of a Tub does resemble one novel of its time, evidently one of the many targets of Swift’s satire. Like Dunton’s Voyage round the World, Swift’s Tale opens with a parade of preliminaries, and features an eccentric, self-absorbed narrator who leaves erudite droppings throughout the text and delights in digressions.102 After a title page as wordy as Dunton’s (including three passages in Latin), Swift introduces his narrator by way of a list of “Treatises wrote by the same author, most of them mentioned in the following discourses, which will be speedily published.” This is as incisive a piece of characterization as a novelist could offer, telling readers virtually everything we need to know about him, for what kind of person would write books like A Panegyrical Essay upon the Number THREE; An Analytical Discourse upon Zeal, Histori-theo-physi-logically Considered; and A General History of Ears, among other works?103 The 11-title list also alerts us upfront that the narrator is an identifiable character clearly distinct from Swift (who never wrote such books, needless to say), which makes it puzzling why some critics have “rejected the notion of the narrator as ‘an identifiable character clearly distinct from Swift’ ” and argue instead that Swift is speaking “in propria persona.”104 The latter would apply only to the “Apology” Swift added to the expanded 1710 edition of the Tale (the edition most editors reprint today), and even there it’s problematic. At best, we might imagine the recently ordained Swift as a ventriloquist speaking through a dummy: “Though speaking in tongues,” John Traugott argues, “playing the fool, the author of the Tale is always Swift, but Swift relieved of responsibility and its decorums and hence liberated and energized” (87–88). Still, the narrator is clearly distinct from Swift: he’s in his 50s,105 spent time in Bedlam, now lives in a garret with “a body spent with poxes ill-cured by trusting to bawds and surgeons” (44), is a sucker for occult beliefs, sides with the mods in the ancients versus moderns controversy, and is scorned by local booksellers as “a clown and a pedant, without all taste and refinement, little versed in the best companies of court and town” (22). He’s not the most rounded character in fiction, but he is a fictional character.
Here’s a reminder of how the rest of the novel is laid out:
To the Right Honourable John Lord Sommers (pp. 16–18), written by the ignorant, opportunist bookseller/publisher (also a character), because he didn’t like the one the narrator wrote. Most of it concerns the trouble he had writing this dedication.
The Bookseller to the Reader (p. 19), written in 1704 to explain why he sat on the manuscript for six years (“I thought I had better work upon my hands”), and why he is publishing it now without the author’s knowledge.
The Epistle Dedicatory, to His Royal Highness Prince Posterity (pp. 20–24), in which the narrator defends his work and that of his fellow Grub Street writers.
The Preface (pp. 25–33), where the narrator explains why and how he wrote the book.
Section I: The Introduction (pp. 34–45), on various means of communication, and a defense of the use of parables by “Grubæan sages” like the narrator.
Section II (pp. 47–59): beginning of a parable of the history of Christianity: a dying father gives coats (religion) to his three sons Peter (Catholicism), Martin (Anglicanism), and Jack (Calvinism), along with a will (the Bible), and cautions them not to alter them. After his death, they are seduced by the religion of fashion, and scholarly Peter begins (mis)interpreting their father’s will to allow for alterations to their coats.
Section III: A Digression Concerning Critics (pp. 60–67): narrator distinguishes between traditional scholars and “the TRUE CRITIC,” that is, “a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults” (62).
Section IV (pp. 68–79): Peter’s inventions and projects (i.e., Catholic scams like purgatory, absolution, “holy” water, ad nauseum) begin to worry Martin and Jack, who reexamine their father’s will and realize they have digressed from the text
. Peter kicks them out of their house, which he had confiscated from a lord (i.e., the “Donation” of Constantine).
Section V: A Digression of the Modern Kind (pp. 81–86): takes the side of modern writers and critics in the ancients versus moderns controversy.
Section VI (pp. 87–94): Martin and Jack strip down their coats to get back to basics, but while Martin takes a cautious approach to religion, Jack goes fanatical.
Section VII: A Digression in Praise of Digressions (pp. 95–98). Cf. Dunton’s Kainophilus: “I love a digression” (1.8).
Section VIII (pp. 99–104): on the theology of Jack’s “Aeolist” followers, meaning “All pretenders to inspiration whatsover” (99n; i.e., Puritans, Dissenters, Quakers, Anabaptists, et al.).
Section IX: A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth (pp. 105–16). This occupies the position and function of the climax in a traditional novel.
Section X (pp. 117–21): a further digression on writers, readers, and the book’s future critics.
Section XI (pp. 122–33): Jack’s religious practices, and their resemblance to Peter’s.
The Conclusion (pp. 134–36).
To hear him tell it, the narrator has been asked by the government to write something so profound that it will divert “the wits of the present age” from criticizing the church and state, just as sailors throw a tub in the ocean to divert a threatening whale. The narrator sees this as his big chance to write something of more lasting value than his previous “fourscore and eleven pamphlets” (44), something that will engage future commentators. But like the intrusive, self-conscious narrators of other 17th-century novels, his ego gets in the way and he botches the job; for instead of defending his religion and government, he inadvertently undermines them and exposes himself as a madman.