Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

by Catherine Gallagher

Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. The terms "woman," "author," "marketplace," and "fiction" come to define each other reciprocally.

Gallagher analyzes the provocative plays of Aphra Behn, the scandalous court chronicles of Delarivier Manley, the properly fictional nobodies of Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney, and finally Maria Edgeworth's attempts in the late eighteenth century to reform the unruly genre of the novel.

Genres: History, Feminism, Nonfiction

339 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 1994

About the author

Catherine Gallagher is an American historicist literary critic and Victorianist, and Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley. She has authored influential works including Nobody’s Story, The Body Economic, and Telling It Like It Wasn’t. Gallagher has received the Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Jacques Barzun Prize, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2020.

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The author-selves, therefore, are also partial Nobodies, but their nobodiness differs from that of fictional characters...They are rhetorical constructions, but constructions that playfully point to their role in keeping the physical writers alive." (xix)
"As long as it is in the marketplace--that is, as long as it is a commodity--the item's materiality is constantly on the brink of disappearing, being replaced and represented by a mere notation of value, such as money." (xxiii) "..the process of disembodiment in the marketplace is a recurrent theme in their work and an important element of the construction of authorship." "Associating herself with tokens of internal division (prostitutes, actresses, commodities) or with emblems of blank anonymity (money and the "nothing" of women's genitals), she eludes our desire for a positive identification." Aphra Behn's paradoxical (elusive? "nobody?") representation of the self (48)
"Her two favorite personae invite exploration of the splendors and miseries of authorship..." (oxymoronic "Royal Slave")(87)
Delarivier Manley sued for libel: "...she pleaded innocent on the grounds that she was merely a fiction writer" (89) "Delarivier Manley's comic-heroic version of her defense opposes the truth of a political crime to the fictionality of a fictional alibi." (90)
"All three of the rearticulations of politics with commerce aggravated anxieties about the possible independence of language from reality and women from men." (92)
"The literary techniques, in other words, were supposedly mere technicalities for avoiding arrest or hindering successful prosecution." (97)
"The literature of the period is full of verbal executions and complaints about the wounding and assassination of names..."(122)
"Bickerstaff" came to mean "pseudonym," a name that anyone could use and all could deny." (123)
1750 - "innocence had, at least ostensibly, become a hallmark of women's fiction" "connected both with the nonreferential, hence nonscandalous, ...and with nonlibidinous, sexually passive "nature" they newly claimed." 145
"The dignity of authorship, however, was frequently proclaimed on the basis of new relationships between authors and property." (149)
"intellectual property" (155)
"property in a copyright...initiated the legal notion that authors have a transferable right to control the printing and dissemination of their works." (156)
"The concept of literary property, then, can be said to have promoted that of "Invention," which in turn found its apotheosis in the idea of pure fabulation, or original fiction writing." (159) placed a sort of premium on originality
"shift from truth-as-historical-accuracy to truth-as-mimetic-simulation" (164)
"fictional nobodies became the more popular and respectable protagonists" (165) the more details the more fictional "Fiction was thus not always conceived as a natural stimulus to sympathy; often it was seen as a test of how far one could extend compassion." (167)
Hume: Treatise: "fictional characters were uniquely suitable objects of compassion. Because they were conjectural, suitable objects of compassion. Because they were conjectural, suppositional identities belonging to no one, they could be universally appropriated. A story about nobody was nobody's story and hence could be entered, occupied, identified with by anybody." (168)
Hume: "aggrandize the self and its properties" "Humean sympathy works by appropriating emotions." (170-1) "can feel an emotion without it becoming in some sense my own" (HUME)
More specific, more real, more confirmation of fiction 173
"Her quixotism, like that of her prototype, consists in attempting to prove that the heroic romances are true by living them." (185)
"Arabella's resistance to the fictionality of fiction gives her no practice in the various modes of having emotions, trying them out, holding them in a speculative, tentative, and above all temporary way, without making an "unlimited, irrevocable concession to them." (193-4)
"...who resembled a fictional nobody in her availability for sympathetic appropriation." (195)
Fances Burney dedicates her first private journal to Nobody! "proclaims the nonexistence of its referent but nevertheless has all the grammatical functions of any proper noun." (204) Nemo as no name Odyssey jokes - 18thc England "Nobody was not a complete cipher, for the name had come to signify a common person, a person of no social consequence." (207)
"discourse about nonentity had special resonance for people who lived off their representations. (214)
"Cecilia's moral consciousness, that is, the consciousness that she is already in debt" (238)
"Some contemporary readers, however, who expected to find the heroine's moral aspirations rewarded rather than restricted at the end of a novel, complained that Cecilia failed to repay their interest by adequately compensating the heroine." (248)
Maria Edgeworth and writing as product - leisure as burden to the public
Adam Smith's discussion of "unproductive" employments; "frivolous professions" "men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc." (265)
"the unprofitableness of these laborers with their lack of a concrete, material product. Lack of profit and lack of material substance were theoretically separable, but the early political economist seldom made the distinction." (266)
"Edgeworth was as nervous about the possibility that her authorship was a kind of deficit spending as Frances Burney had been"(266)

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gallagher does not want to argue that women's writing is a marginal tradition. Rather than falling in line with Gilbert and Gubar, who say 'the pen is a penis,' Gallagher shows how women helped shape the discourse of authorship from the beginning--and does not treat women's writing as a separate tradition from men's writing. Here, she shows how "Nobody" works as a flexible term for the "nobodiness" of authors who can only profit by alienating their claim to copyright (they have to sell their invention to publishers in order to profit, lacking the means to publish themselves), and the "nobodies" of fictional characters.

One of the things this book is best known for is its argument that fiction as a category emerges in the mid 18c, when characters start to totally lack extra-textual referent (the previous dominant mode) and therefore become blank nobodies who can belong to anybody--lacking real referent, characters lack the real body that impedes total readerly identification and sympathy. Readers can make characters their own. At the same time, the lack of real referents for fictional stories allow authors to claim total ownership over this absolute invention, and thus start to consolidate their claim on characters (David Brewer will argue that this actually happens later in the 19c, and that the reading contract in the 18c was more open to communal property in fictional character).

Gallagher follows McKeon in arguing that the status of fictionality and truth is what makes the novel special, not necessarily its 'realism.' She differs from Armstrong in that she does not view women as forging a separate tradition, while she follows Armstrong in tracing how femininity helps build the "individuality" of the author.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone working on 18th century literature.