fiction and autobiography in mary hays's memoirs of emma courtney (1796)

Fiction and Autobiography in Mary Hays’sMemoirs of Emma Courtney (1796)

Georgina Green*University of Oxford

Abstract

This essay was runner-up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate EssayPrize, Romanticism Section.

Although current critical strictures prohibit the reading of biography between thelines of fiction, Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) demands thatwe do so. The novel is laced with autobiography. The novel developed out of asuggestion by the philosopher William Godwin that Hays write a sketch of her lifein order to challenge her ‘habitual melancholy’. Thus, although Emma Courtney isnot an autobiography in the strictest sense of the term, the discourse of autobiographyis fundamental to it. Emma Courtney reproduces almost verbatim much of Hays’scorrespondence. The novel is literally sourced from life, quilted from the textualacts of that life, its letters. The autobiographical mode used by the novel transpiresinto an investigation of the relationship between fiction and reality. Godwin’smentoring of Hays illuminates this complex relationship between autobiographyand fiction. Godwin’s criticism of Hays’s novel crystallises into a debate about reality.In their dialogue, Hays defends the imagination as a valid, and more importantly,inevitable part of experience. This enquires into the very possibility of the Godwinian‘virtue’ of self-knowledge by making the Real itself problematic.

The feminist novelist Mary Hays was a member of the late-eighteenth-centuryradical dissenting circle associated with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson.The circle included William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraftand the philosopher William Godwin, author of Political Justice. Hays isparticularly known for her turbulent friendship with Mary Wollstonecraftand William Godwin, and for her initial encouragement of their relationshipwhich ultimately culminated in marriage. Beset with ‘habitual melancholy’(Hays to Godwin, 13 October 1795), Hays turned to the philosopherWilliam Godwin for help, and so their correspondence began.1 As an author,Hays is best known for her first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, publishedin 1796. The novel developed out of a suggestion by Godwin that Hayswrite a sketch of her life. Thus, although Emma Courtney is not an auto-biography in the strictest sense of the term, the discourse of autobiographyis fundamental to it. When William Godwin called for alterations to the

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manuscript of the novel Hays insisted, ‘No, my friend, my story is too real,I cannot violate its truth’ (To Godwin, 11 May 1796).

Although current critical strictures prohibit the reading of biographybetween the lines of fiction, Memoirs of Emma Courtney demands that we doso.The novel is laced with autobiography. The plot focuses on the unrequitedlove of Emma Courtney for Augustus Harley, and the counsel of Mr. Francis.It abounds with parallels to Hays’s life: her unrequited love for theCambridge Unitarian William Frend matches the ‘(non)relationship’ (Rajan214) between Augustus and Emma in the novel. Similarly, Godwin providesthe model for Mr Francis.Emma Courtney reproduces almost verbatim muchof Hays’s correspondence with both Frend and Godwin. The novel is literallysourced from life, quilted from the textual acts of that life, its letters.

Godwin’s mentoring of Hays illuminates this complex relationshipbetween autobiography and fiction. Sincere confession and self-examinationare integral components of Godwin’s programme for reform. Autobiographyis therefore a central component of his advice to Hays. For Godwin,autobiography has the iconoclastic power to reveal the false architecture of‘things as they are’ (the subtitle of Godwin’s Caleb Williams); it exposes the‘airy foundations’ of what currently seems natural. Transparent commu-nication of the self has the power to effect reform. This positivism isfoundational to Godwin’s account of the perfectibility of man. Within thisphilosophical context, Hays’s letters to Godwin are tools of transparentself-externalisation. In Godwinian autobiography, there is no space forfiction.

However, the dialogue between Godwin and Hays is by no meansone-way. Hays interrogates and tests Godwin’s Political Justice. She assertsher own case as evidence of its failure to account fully for our experienceof reality, asserting that subjectivity prevents any transparent access to the‘truth’. Ultimately, this makes the Real itself problematic. Godwin’sepistemological debate with Hays is structured by the concept of idolatry.Godwin represents Hays as idolatrous. However, the Hays-Godwin debateis a striking example of what Peter Logan has described in his discussion ofrealism: ‘representations of fetishism always occur within a dialogue thatentails competing claims of fetishism, in which the critic and fetishist becomestructurally interchangeable’ (2). Both the fictional Emma Courtney andthe letter writing Mary Hays implicate the rational in their fetishism. Haysraises the possibility that Godwin’s iconoclastic, demystifying autobiographicaldiscourse merely valorizes or fetishizes another false and incomplete versionof the self. Objective truth is, after all, merely a fiction. This epistemologicaluncertainty hinders reform when reform depends upon access to the truth.

Hays’s interrogation of Godwin’s philosophy constitutes an explorationof the self that has parallels with recent critical debates about the subject. Thenovel is remarkably open to psychoanalytical criticism, partly due to itstemporal proximity to the roots of psychology in associationism. Recentanalysis has approached the novel in this way (Jacobus 202 –34; Mandell).

710 . Fiction and Autobiography in Memoirs of Emma Courtney

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 709–720, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00436.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Hays shows that ultimately, there is no space outside of history – outside offiction – for an essential self to exist. Current debates about the subjectaddress similar axes in their theorisations of the subject. The moment ofsubjection is textual; the subject is always determined by a discourse – inEmma’s case, that discourse is the sentimental epistolary novel.

***In Hays’s first letter to Godwin she requests a copy of his Enquiry ConcerningPolitical Justice and describes her ‘ardor for the perusal of this work’, whichmight offer hope of change. Hays wishes to personally escape a retrogressive,repetitive structure, ‘like the pendulum of a clock’, by a ‘progressiveimprovement’ (To Godwin, 14 October 1794): she had a ‘habitualmelancholy’. Godwin has faith in the reformative powers of autobiographicalexpression. The autobiographical stance is central to Godwin’s philosophy.An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice asserts the revolutionary power ofsincere confession:

the popish practice of auricular confession has been attended with some salutaryeffects. How much better would it be, if, instead of a practice thusambiguous . . . every man would make the world his confessional, and the humanspecies the keeper of his conscience? (136)

Secular confession is mediated textually, imagined as a ‘history’ or a‘narrative’, and, in the subsequent paragraph, as something that we ‘publishto the world’ (Political and Philosophical Writings). In apparent obedience tothe tenets of Political Justice Hays attempts to ‘publish’ herself to Godwinthrough the medium of the letter,‘when I write to you I write confessions’(To Godwin, 8 March 1796).

To effect reform we must transparently objectify or externalise the self.After all, ‘we cannot expect to have our disorders heal’d by the Physician . . .while we conceal any of their symptoms’ (Hays to Godwin, 5 November1795). Elsewhere Godwin wrote: ‘Style should be the transparent envelopof our thoughts’ (The Enquirer 136); a choice of vocabulary that is suggestivein this discussion of the letter as the means of externalising the self. PoliticalJustice expresses the mind’s availability to quasi-scientific observation bycomparing the mind to the material universe, and those who reflect uponthe mind with natural philosophers (Political Justice 162). Hays remains withinthis metaphoric field when she compares the investigation of the mind tothe work of the physician: ‘Like a skilful physician’, she says, ‘I can retracethe causes, the symptoms, the progress, & thoroughly understand the natureof my mind’s disorders’ (To Godwin, 13 October 1795). ‘To trace’ is amethod of observation borrowed from anatomy. Hays presents her writingas capable of being symptomatised, part of the notion of the written as anobjective manifestation of the self which is at the heart of autobiography.

However, the ambivalence of this process of objectification is implicitin the violence involved in anatomy, especially when only cadaverscould be anatomised. As William Wordsworth expressed it, ‘we murder to


Fiction and Autobiography in Memoirs of Emma Courtney . 711

dissect’. This is not to say that Godwin himself was sensitive to thisambivalence: The progress of his thought and of his revisions has beenrepeatedly recognised as a mellowing of strict rationalism by the need toaccount for more Romantic aspects of character and self. In 1796 Hays isalready sensitive to this ambivalence and invokes emergent Romantic valuesto criticise Political Justice.

The competing languages Hays uses are manifestations of the inadequaciesof mental anatomy. The language of these confessions moves from the formallanguage and analogies of rational philosophy, to the short, blunt clauses offrankness and onto the fragmented, somatically suggestive, language ofsensibility. The letters of January 1796, for example, include the controlled,formal sentence:

I like your friend, tho’ I can perceive his faults, they appear to me to rise out ofa generous source_Where there is A,B,C, (says Lavater) there will be D,E,F_the excess of our virtues shade, almost imperceptibly, into vices.

The sentence marshals its focus from particular to general via the invocationof authority. The letters also make use of blunt, short clauses that denotecandour: ‘I hate suspicion, I have no distrusts, I delight to confide, & Iconfide fearlously’. The rhythm of such clauses is choreographed into aperoration that exploits the rhetorical efficacy of candour. Part of that rhetoricis to express ‘things as they are’ in a factual form. The fact resists change,it asserts ‘things as they are’ but at the same time asserts those things asmonumental, not easily subject to change or progression. Considering Hays’sneed for change, this is damning. The letters also incorporate the languageof sensibility, at one point exclaiming ‘what a wretched farce is life!’ in anecho of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling; at another, using hyperbolicfigurative language: ‘a barbed & invenomed arrow rankles in my bosom’(To Godwin, 11 January 1796). This hyperbolic, fragmentary form gesturestowards that which escapes representation. The language of sensibility is aform of self-representation that paradoxically denies self-representation;it gestures towards an indescribable excess, an excess murdered when wedissect. The warring of these contrasting styles registers a difficulty inassimilating or limiting the self to Godwin’s rational self-examination.

This, in turn, questions the Godwinian faith in change, a doubt registeredin the novel’s want of linear movement. The plot is driven by a series ofsubstitutions and repetitions rather than variations. Emma substitutes for herAunt’s lost child; Emma’s love for Mrs Harley is transferred to anothersubstitute, a portrait of Augustus, and then transferred to Augustus himself;Emma becomes a substitute mother for Augustus’s son, who repeats Emma’serrors in the next generation. Events are repeated – twice in the novel anaccident lands Augustus Harley in the care of Emma. When he wakes heeven comments, ‘every object appears to me double’ (Memoirs 199).Remembrance ‘harrows up’ (41) the past, and the prefix re-peppers the text,suggesting that the effort of autobiography itself might militate against change,entrenching further the patterns of the past by retracing, recounting,



recording, reflecting, repeating, remembering and recollecting them. Themeaning of the word ‘revolution’ as both change and return is analogouswith this tension between a linear and a repetitive movement in the novelas a whole.

A similar tension manifests itself in the way that the word ‘trace’ and itscognates reappear throughout the novel as images of both linearity andrepetition. ‘To trace’ is one of Godwin’s key metaphors for rationalexamination. Hays’s novel, however, explores the multiple meanings of‘trace’, to emphasise the passive subjugation to the patterns of the past thatit could imply. The ambivalence of tracing as anatomising has already beendiscussed. A similar ambivalence is inherent in tracing as following orcopying. In one way, the action of tracing is an aid to understanding andthus an agent of change. ‘Tracing’ is the process of following or observingconnection: ‘tracing . . . the passions in the minds of others; . . . from theseeds by which they have been generated, through all their extendedconsequences’ (Godwin, Political Justice 127). Godwin most often employsthe term ‘trace’ in this sense. As a verb whose action is nevertheless passive,to trace is an ideal verb to describe the ‘action’ of the objective stance, whichseeks to obscure the interpretive effort involved in its report of ‘data’. Totrace is a spatial metaphor, which, when applied to the realm of cause andeffect, converts the temporal movement or continuum of a progressionthrough time into the stasis of the spatial, a more easily observable objectfor science.

However, in recalling the action of copying, tracing also involves the ideaof involuntary repetition. Though in 1796 the idea of imitation may nothave acquired the negative emphasis it has in post-Romantic writing, in anovel of reform dependence on imitation has a politically reactionaryconsequence. It is telling that even after writing Emma Courtney Hays saysshe has never produced an ‘original composition’ (To [anon.], c.1795),suggesting that its method of ‘tracing’ makes it unoriginal. But Hays’svalorisation of originality is confirmed by her resistance to revising hermanuscript for the sake of ‘originality’ (To Godwin, 11 May 1796).

The self-analytical role of the letters in the Godwin-Hays correspondenceproceeds from the idea that the letter is an objectified version of theself at a particular moment. Consider this provocative moment in thecorrespondence: ‘I was thinking, while dressing . . . how many faults youhad discovered in me’ (To Godwin, 5 November 1795). The letter admitsthe reader into a private space. The private space of thought is concurrentwith the private space of the dressing room – ‘thinking, while dressing’ –but also with the space of the letter: ‘My heart unfolds itself to you’ (ToGodwin, January 1796).

Hays’s resistance to revising the manuscript stems from her theories aboutthe letter as an externalisation of the self; which contrast Godwin’s intheir emphasis on spontaneity. In attempting to perfect a transparent styleGodwin emphasizes a ‘nice attention’ to the ‘words and the arrangement



of . . . phrases’ in contrast to ‘the illiterate effusions of the nurse or the rustic’(The Enquirer 241). In contrast, Hays values spontaneity. In a comment thatrecalls Richardson’s ‘writing, to the moment’, Hays writes: ‘On lookingover what I have written, I perceive it is a wild, incoherent, scrall, but it isthe effusion of the moment, & you shall have it’ (To Godwin, 11 January1796). This also justifies reproducing the letters almost verbatim in the novel,as she told Frend when requesting the return of her letters for the purposesof composing the novel: ‘Nothing coolly written cou’d express, with equalforce, the feelings, mistakes & miseries, I mean to depicture’ (To Godwin,6 February 1796). Spontaneous language is a symptom, bearing an intimatecausal relationship to the experience of the self.

This conflict between values of imitation and values of originality can beexplored via the multiple meanings and qualities of the trace in Hays’swriting. Both the novel and the letters’ process of self-examination aredescribed as procedures of ‘tracing’. This can be ‘to trace a faithfuldelineation’ (Memoirs 119). However, the action of tracing also allows Emmato delude herself about Augustus: ‘my imagination, ever lively, traced theglowing picture, and dipped the pencil in rainbow tints!’ (133). The spectreof interpretive failure is raised by this insurgence of imaginative originality,this insurgence of fiction. In Emma Courtney, that hermeneutic problemmanifests itself as a problem of reading letters.

Reading letters also involves tracing. The intimate tracing of the (wouldbe) lover’s letter is hinted at with Emma’s fetishist response to Augustus’handwriting,‘those characters, I had been accustomed to trace with delight’(165). Here, to ‘trace’ is a close attention, an intimacy focused on the physicalform of the characters themselves rather than their meaning. This intimate,fetishist fixation upon the letter is connected with the ‘phantasy of intimatebodily connection’ (Jacobus 232) offered by the letter. The fetishist idea ofthe letter as an externalisation of self is an essential fiction of thelove-letter. The letter is the embodiment of an absent lover. At the sametime, however, the letter signifies the radical lack of the person it merelystands in for. As Mary Jacobus formulates it:

Predicated as it is on non-presence, the letter lends itself to an alternative model,that of writing conceived as mechanically iterable, independent of an actualauthor or sender, and subject to the mechanical markings of repression, repetition,and the materiality of print culture. (232)

The reproduction of letters is central to the composition of the novel. Theletters in the novel that were based on letters to Frend, those ‘effusions ofthe moment’ that guaranteed the truthfulness of character, are, however,based on ‘imperfect copies’ (To Godwin, 6 February 1796). Their trans-position into the novel then, is already a transposition of a transposition, amechanistic, imperfect, reproduction. The possible dislocation betweenwriting and the body of the person it stands in for is an anxiety expressedby Emma when she reacts to one of Augustus’s ‘cold’ letters: ‘Some onehad, surely, usurped his signature, and imitated those characters, I had been



accustomed to trace with delight’ (Memoirs 164–5). This raises the possibilitythat the letter is an inauthentic or fetishized sign. That possibility hasimplications for an autobiography whose medium is the letter.

By exploring the action of tracing throughout the novel, Hays unpicksthe hermeneutic problems of the stance; difficulties that remain largelyunaddressed in Political Justice.This forms a meta-autobiographical commentupon the objectification of the self through the medium of the letter. Thepossibility of mechanism, whilst it offers the fiction of unmediated data,introduces the possibility of arbitrariness; these symptoms could merely besigns of the mechanism itself rather than bearing an innate relationship tothe self. This complicates the notion of the letter or the confession as anexternalisation of the self.

That complication is implicit in Hays’s reflections upon her predispositionto confession:

Even my ingenuousness . . . has in it a mixture of policy . . . there is a sort ofactivity in the human mind that incites it to search the more eagerly after thatwhich is the most studiously conceal’d. I therefore resolved . . . to make a kindof composition with, my vices . . . (To Godwin, 5 November 1795)

The creative term ‘composition’ suggests that Hays’s confessions, herself-constructions, might involve the artifice of rhetoric. Paradoxically,candour is a tool of concealment. In the midst of a paragraph espousing acommitment to the ‘beauties of truth’, Hays appropriates that ‘beauty’ toits antithesis, dissimulation, much as the fashionable ladies of the day might.Robert Robinson, one of Hays’s earlier mentors within the dissentingtradition, seems alive to this possibility: ‘Short as the narrative you give ofyourself is, it is a miniature portrait of a lady in danger and distress, the workof an exquisite artist calculated to touch the heart’ (Robert Robinson toHays, 11 January 1783). Robinson uses creative terms to describe Hays’s‘narrative’, suggesting that the artifice of self-construction, rather thanself-expression, informs her writing. In the word ‘calculated’ and the phrase‘a lady in danger and distress’, Robinson notes the rhetoric of chivalry andromance underlying Hays’s appeal to male mentors.

Indeed, Hays and her first love, John Eccles, constructed and conductedtheir relationship according to the literature of romance. As Marilyn L.Brooks’s introduction to the correspondence documents in detail, theirlove-letters are steeped with allusions to literary lovers and sentimentalliterature; from Troilus and Cressida to Eloisa and Abelard. Eccles commentsat one point that ‘we now have a pretty good collection; sufficient to maketwo volumes’ (To Hays, 4 November 1779), the standard format for asentimental novel, as Brooks points out. When Eccles dies, Hays producesa morocco-leather bound narrative of their relationship by writing up theletters, and publishes it to their friends. This is almost inevitable, as the lettersalready constitute a sentimental novel, so governed are they by its codesand conventions. Similarly, though the Hays-Godwin correspondence is



ostensibly modelled on the philosophical principal of sincere confession, thepossibility of fiction haunts them. The relationship between fiction andreality becomes uncertain, even mutually determining.

***It is perhaps inevitable, then, that Hays’s epistolary autobiographical enquirieslead to the fictional outcrop that is Memoirs of Emma Courtney. As we haveseen, the novel began in an autobiographical discourse founded onGodwinian ideals of sincerity and access to intrinsic truth; but its fictionalheritage is equally important. The autobiographical mode used by the noveltranspires into an investigation of the relationship between fiction andreality. This enquires into the very possibility of the Godwinian ‘virtue’ ofself-knowledge, by making the Real itself problematic. Iconoclasm is acentral term in this debate. The dissenting project of demystification providesa context for this exploration of iconoclasm. The possibility of fetish is thecrucial epistemological problem for Hays. This is Godwin’s essential criticismof both Hays’s melancholy and her novel. In the words of Mr Francis: ‘Thewhole force of everything which looks like a misfortune was assiduously,unintermittently, provided by yourself ’ producing ‘an immense overbalanceof excruciating misery’, ‘Your conduct will scarcely admit of any otherdenomination than that of moon-struck madness’ (Memoirs 169). One ofhis comments, though, suggests that critic and fetishist are interchangeable:‘had you worshipped at the altar of reason but half as assiduously as you havesacrificed at the shrine of illusion’ (169). The synonymy of ‘altar’ and ‘shrine’suggests that ‘reason’ is only an alternative idolatry. Indeed, both theeponymous Emma Courtney and Hays insist:‘do you not perceive, that myreason was the auxiliary of my passion_ or rather, my passion, the generativeprinciple of my reason?’ (To Godwin, 6 February 1796; cf. Memoirs of EmmaCourtney 172). This structural interchangeability is a feature of any attemptto accuse another of fetishism.

Godwin’s autobiographical ideal of sincere confession essentially servesthe purposes of iconoclasm. Godwin asks:‘What is it that at this day enablesa thousand errors to keep their station in the world, priestcraft, tests, bribery,war, cabal, and whatever else is the contempt and abhorrence of theenlightened and honest mind?’ He answers, men’s fear of telling the truth;at the heart of Godwin’s autobiographical ideal is iconoclasm. The sameterms of religious dissent that dominate the history of iconoclasm situateGodwin’s stance. Godwinian autobiography should not idealise (or idolize)the self but objectify it in order to expose falsity.

An important caveat is that Godwin’s auto/biographical efforts incommemorating his wife Mary Wollstonecraft after her death in 1797complicate this description of ‘Godwinian autobiography’. Throughexamining the problems of Hays’s autobiographical efforts we equally cometo understand Godwin’s biographical ones. After Wollstonecraft’s death,Godwin defends his ‘melancholy pleasure in living in the midst of objects,which have been rendered interesting to me by her presence’.2 He argues



that whilst this ‘weakens indeed my stocism’ it ‘raises my sensibility’.3

Godwin’s grief over Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797 seems to challengehis iconoclasm, and his reverence for the dead is consistently couched interms of an idolatry or fetishishtic attachment with a positive effect:

[E]verything which practically has been associated with my friend, acquires avalue from that consideration; his ring, his watch, his books, and hishabitation . . . they possess the virtue which the Indian is said to attribute to thespoils of him he kills, and inspires me with the powers, the feelings and the heartof their preceding master. (Essay on Sepulchres 8)

This closing image is a definition of the fetishist. The structural interchange-ability of critic and fetishist seems to be partly confirmed by these moments.

Godwin’s criticism of Hays’s novel crystallises into a debate about reality.Godwin argues that the characters of the story act unnaturally, unrealisti-cally. Hays’s easy answer to this is ‘that it is not an impossible event, myown experience affords a proof ’ (To Godwin [May 1796]). Godwin objectsthat the story is uninteresting, implicitly suggesting that there are no ‘real’incidents to explain the emotions of Emma. Godwin identifies the formalproperties of the novel with the structure of idolatry that causes Hays’smelancholy. But Hays demands: ‘What does it signify, whether abstractedlyconsider’d (if there be any such thing as abstraction) a misfortune be worthyof the names, substantial, or real, if the consequences are the same?’ (ToGodwin, 6 February 1796). This question strikes at the very heart ofGodwin’s early philosophy – questioning his belief that we have access tothe intrinsically true. The crux of the problem is that Hays and Godwinhave not reached an agreement about the nature of the real. Hays hadintended to publicly address her novel to Godwin, but was disappointed. Thisfailure to address Godwin is more than just an accident of publication, orof personal foibles, Godwin cannot be addressed by Hays because theycannot agree on what is real.

In Hays’s article ‘On Novel Writing’, a critique of idealism in novels iscouched in terms of a critique of idolatry as delusion; Richardson has ‘magicpowers’, he produces ‘a magic lantern of shadows’ and ‘illusive repre-sentations of life’. The ideal heroine of Richardson’s Clarissa is described as‘a beautiful superstructure upon a false and airy foundation’ (180 –1), thearchitectural metaphor familiar to discussions of idolatry. Hays opposes herown writing to what she sees as the idealistic tendency of novelists likeRichardson. However, Emma Courtney is directly concerned with thepersistence of these idealistic tendencies. Augustus’s reasons for hoping forthe love of an attached woman is described by his guardian, Emma, as ‘afinely proportioned structure, resting on an airy foundation’ (Memoirs 42).The novel dramatises the production of a melancholy attachment as theidolatrous production of an idealistic novel. Early education predisposes Emmato such novelistic production. In Emma’s youth the imaginary world servesas a substitution for reality in yet another of the texts substitutive structures.



Though Emma Courtney is formed as an antithesis to the idolatrous novelsof Richardson’s ilk, it cannot propose an alternative ‘reality’ to supply theplace of idolatry. It can describe the idolatry of fiction, but it cannot escapebeing inscribed by it. Hays articulated the hegemonic nature of this systemto Godwin:

With women, the connection of this affection [idealised love] with othersentiments is still more wide & complicated than with men . . . theirestablishment, all their importance in society, yes, their very social existence, isclose-twisted with it . . . their whole education has this tendency, & unless youcou’d make them wholly independent of circumstances, you cannot cure theeffects which these trains of thinking & acting produce. (To Godwin, 1 March1796).

Woman is both the subject of desire (the psychoanalytical subject) and thesubject of political circumstances. Because of this, her subjection is inevitable.Fiction, in historically specific circumstances, forms the desires of the subject,and predetermines the course of life, which ‘passes like a tale that is told’(Memoirs 220). However, the finer qualities of the self are entangled in thisnovelistic tendency:

Love, in minds of any elevation, cannot be generated but upon a real, or fancied,foundation of excellence. But what would be a miracle in architecture, is truein morals – the fabric can exist when the foundation has mouldered away.(Memoirs, 173; cf. Hays to Godwin, January 18, 1796)

The architectural image that had been accepted as an intuitive argumentagainst the novelistic impulse is here exposed as fallacious. It is simply falseto apply the syllogistic principles of rational analogy to this higher qualityof the mind. This returns us to the fundamental ambivalence of rationalself-examination – that we murder to dissect.

***In dialogue with Godwin, Hays defends the imagination as a valid, and moreimportantly, inevitable part of experience. Emma asks at the end of hermemoirs, ‘And is this all of human life – this that passes like a tale that istold?’ This question captures the text’s enquiry into the determination ofthe subject by fiction; not only in its self-representations but also in the waythat it conducts its life. Fiction predetermines the subject within its discourse.Life ‘passes’ as if it is already over, it is already determined, it has alreadybeen ‘told’. The shift from continuous present to past participle expresses apessimistic inevitability. It expresses the condition of subjection; which is abelated position, after the event of determination by external forces. Hays’sreflections upon the determination of the subject by textual discourses makethese fictional memoirs meta-autobiographical. When the determiningrelationship between fiction and reality is chiasmatic, it is unsurprisingthat whilst the discourse of autobiography can be used to reflect uponEmma Courtney, it is equally true that Emma Courtney reflects uponautobiography.



Acknowledgement

This article was written during an AHRC studentship and I gratefullyacknowledge the AHRC’s support.

Short Biography

Georgina Green is currently writing a D.Phil. at Hertford College, Oxford.Her D.Phil. thesis is provisionally entitled:‘Representing the People: The Practiceof Radical Prose in the 1790s’ and explores how the ultimate problem of howthe people are to be represented in a democracy is negotiated in the practiceof writing radical prose. Her research interests are focused upon radical 1790swriters such as Mary Wollstonecraft,Thomas Paine and John Thelwall.

Notes

* Correspondence: Hertford College, Catte Street, Oxford, OX1 3BW, UK. Email:[email protected].

1 Hays, Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays. All subsequent references are to this edition.2 William Godwin, letter to Hugh Skeys, 4 Oct. 1797, Abinger papers, Bodleian Lib., Oxford.Pamela Clemit has compiled the miscellaneous fragments of the archive into letters and discoverednew letters. For the identification of correspondents I follow a table extracted from Clemit XX(537–48).3 William Godwin, letter to Amelia Anderson, 23 Oct. 1797, Abinger Papers, Bodleian Lib.,Oxford.

Works Cited

PRIMARY

Godwin,William.The Enquirer (1797).Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin.Volume5. Ed. Mark Philp. Pickering Masters. 7 vols. London:William Pickering, 1993. 73–289.

——. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin.Volume 3. Ed. Mark Philp. Pickering Masters. 7 vols. London:William Pickering, 1993.

——. Essay on Sepulchres (1809). Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin. Volume 6.Ed. Mark Philp. Pickering Masters. 7 vols. London:William Pickering, 1993. 1–30.

——. Letter to Amelia Anderson. 23 Oct. Dep. B. 227/8 (a). Abinger Papers. Oxford: Bodleian Lib,1797.

——. Letter to Hugh Skeys. 4 Oct. Dep. B. 227.8 (a). Abinger papers. Oxford: Bodleian lib, 1797.——. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin. Ed. Mark Philp. Pickering Masters. 7

vols. London:William Pickering, 1993.Hays, Mary. The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist. Ed. Marilyn L. Brooks.

Mellen Critical Editions and Translations 13. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.——. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Ed. Marilyn L. Brooks. Broadview Literary Texts. Peterborough,

ON: Broadview Press, 2000.——. ‘On Novel Writing’. The Monthly Magazine September 1797.

SECONDARY

Clemit, Pamela. ‘William Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine: Letter-Press Copies inthe Abinger Papers’. The Bodleian Library Record 18.5 (2005). 532–60.



[email protected]

Jacobus, Mary. Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. Clarendon Lectures in English Literature.Oxford: Clarendon, 1999 [1997].

Logan, Peter Melville. ‘George Eliot and the Fetish of Realism’. Studies in the Literary Imagination35.2 (2002): 26.

Mandell, Laura. ‘The First Women (Psycho)Analysts; or, the Friends of Feminist History’. MLQ:Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (2004): 69–92.

Rajan, Tilottama. ‘ “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays” “Memoirs of EmmaCourtney” ’. Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Eds. Tilottama Rajan andJulia M. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 213–39.



fiction and autobiography in mary hays's memoirs of emma courtney (1796)

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