3. Narrative and Self-Violence

Framing Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Caleb Williams posits a particular relationship between the narrator and the narrating body, one in which the impulse to speak is itself identified as a product of the speaker’s nervous disease rather than a response to it. His speech, initially seen as outside the structure of his disorder, is ultimately defined as its very essence. Two years after Godwin published his novel, Mary Hays revisited this narrative problem in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). In this novel, the young and philosophical Emma writes a memoir of her relationship with Augustus Harley, a man she falls in love with but who is secretly married. This memoir is in turn framed within the remarks of an older Emma. She sees her earlier justifications as the outpourings of a diseased mind. She presents the narrative as a cautionary tale to her adopted son, who is in love with a married woman, a relationship he has justified through the same kind of reasoning Emma had practiced earlier. Hays’s use of this narrative structure, however, differs significantly from Godwin’s. The most evident difference is in her narrator’s intense relationship to the earlier narrative. Whereas Caleb Williams has lost all interest in narration, Emma Courtney experiences it as a violation: “Rash young man!—why do you tear from my heart the affecting narrative?” are her opening words.^[1] She is wounded by the necessity of retelling her story, and that retelling requires an involuntary self-violence that stands in stark contrast to Caleb’s lack of narrative affect. This narrative position can be directly tied to the novel’s representation of a social experience for women that differs from that of men. This experience produces a distinct relationship between the narrator and her nervous body, and it is this distinction that leads to the premium Hays places on this narratorial self-violence.

Hays was an outspoken feminist and English Jacobin in London’s polarized political environment of the 1790s.^[2] She is most known today as the woman who introduced Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin and who shared with Eliza Fenwick the sad duty of nursing Wollstonecraft through her final illness. Her publications include a second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and a collection of nonfiction writing, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793). Her philosophical book on the condition of women, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), resembles Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in its major outlines. Katharine M. Rogers identifies Wollstonecraft as the more theoretical and decisive of the two in her break with sentimental ideology, whereas Hays’s strength lies in her practical illustrations of the everyday hypocrisy that is inevitable within the patriarchal home under the ideology of sentimentality.^[3] Despite the terror of the counterrevolution, Hays continued productive writing, publishing two works on distinguished women in history, Female Biography (1803) and the Memoirs of Queens Illustrious and Celebrated (1821).^[4]

Although the philosophy in Mary Hays’s first novel has been seen as derivative, a product of her “blind discipleship” to Godwin, her borrowings from Godwin are a means of pointing out the limitations of his ideas rather than an imitation of them.^[5] The borrowings themselves are overt and frequent. In her preface to Emma Courtney, Hays cites Godwin’s novel as one of her models and figuratively aligns Emma with Caleb by arguing that her work similarly explores the consequences of “one strong, indulged, passion,” in this case the heroine’s romantic passion for her enigmatic lover, Augustus Harley (EC, 1: Preface 5). Emma also quotes directly from both Caleb Williams and Political Justice, citing them in footnotes for the reader.^[6] The most substantive reference to Godwin is his inclusion in the novel as a character, the philosophical Mr. Francis, who befriends Emma and corresponds with her. His letters are recitations of specific elements of Political Justice, and their inclusion in the narrative is a means of importing Godwin’s voice and philosophy directly into the novel. This fictionalized correspondence also reproduces an actual correspondence between Hays and Godwin.^[7]

Emma’s relationship with Mr. Francis suggests an ongoing debate over the position of women in Godwinian philosophy. The crux of this debate can be identified at a particular moment three-quarters of the way through the narrative, when the Godwin double disappears. Because of a combination of untoward circumstances, Emma finds herself in London in what she labels “my present unprotected situation” (EC, 2:146). A variety of factors lead to this predicament. She has too little fortune to live independently because of a consistent pattern of patriarchal improvidence, and she has no living family to rely on. An older female friend, Mrs. Harley, the mother of Augustus, serves as a substitute mother for Emma and provides her with a home, but when she dies Emma has only one option: she travels to London, where she takes a room she cannot afford, in the hope that Mr. Francis, her sole remaining friend, will offer her his help. She sends him a note on her arrival and waits, but for once he does not reply. His house, she soon learns, is tightly shuttered, and he is far away, on the continent, his date of return uncertain. Out of options, she contemplates for a brief moment two unpalatable alternatives: the “degradation of servitude” or a life of prostitution (EC, 2:149).

The sudden and unexpected departure of the Godwin double from the narrative—he does not reappear, nor is his name even mentioned after this disappearance—is similar in effect to the death of Mrs. Harley, for Mr. Francis, too, plays a sustained parental role. His ongoing correspondence with Emma on philosophical issues is a substantial part of the novel, as the letters are transcribed at length. Within the confinement of her monotonous existence, the younger Emma welcomes his philosophical letters as a rare and vital source of intellectual stimulation. He is also significant as a sympathetic listener; her letters to him are the only means she has to voice her complaints about the enforced idleness in her life, which stifles her ideals of virtuous and socially useful activity. Mr. Francis’s replies, paraphrases of Political Justice, urge her to sharpen her powers of reason and resist the idleness that breeds excess sensibility and its hysterical manifestations. So his sudden absence opens a large hole in the web of Emma’s life. But Mr. Francis, unlike Mrs. Harley, is not dead. Instead, at the moment Emma most needs him, he is nowhere to be found.

Emma occupies a position in which Godwin’s ideas no longer apply, and so his character’s permanent departure for regions unknown is symbolic. Godwin’s philosophy, we have seen, elides the question of sexual difference by looking forward to a uniformly masculine utopia where reproduction is eliminated. Although he maintains a commitment to equality, any concept of woman as distinct from man disappears. However, in her unprotected situation, Emma occupies a distinctly gendered social position. Rather than an experience common to both men and women, her unprotected situation is typical of the social position specifically imposed on women, one that makes women’s social experience distinct from that of men. Emma Courtney, then, describes a social narrative that is unique to women rather than one predicated as universal and hence male, as in Caleb Williams. The very moment at which Emma enters on this gendered terrain of a compulsory female dependency, when she faces the choice between service and prostitution—at that moment she discovers that the male voice of Godwinian reason resides in a foreign land. She is “alarmed by this silence” (EC, 2:147), and well she should be. What had once seemed so near and helpful, an unconventional and hence reliable friend for an unconventional woman, appears now remote, alien, and inaccessible.

In the last exchange of letters between Emma and her Godwinian mentor, immediately preceding his disappearance, his failure to account for woman’s social experience is specifically addressed, so the relationship between the letters and the incident is that of theory and practice. The exchange takes place at the dramatic climax of the story, immediately after Emma learns that Augustus is secretly married. She has actively pursued him, even against his stated wishes, and finally proposes to live with him without the ceremony of marriage because she believes that he returns her love, and reason tells her to proceed.^[8] She is right about him. When she discovers that he has a wife and children, however unloved, she concludes that her pursuit of him has in fact been an act of passion, not reason. In lengthy epistles to both Harley and Mr. Francis, she had carefully justified that pursuit in Godwinian terms, reasoning through the thicket of social proscriptions that prohibit women from actively pursuing men. But in retrospect she sees her actions differently. She was in fact the most deluded at the moment she felt most convinced of her rationality. As a result, her letters to Mr. Francis after the discovery are written in a state of wholly ungrounded perception, for she has come to doubt her basic ability to distinguish desire from reason, fantasy from reality. In this state, she initiates the final correspondence with Mr. Francis, and what she writes is substantial: the narrative of her life that we later read as the Memoir.

His critique of her narrative is blunt. Her pursuit of Augustus, Mr. Francis opines, was a “moon-struck madness,” which “the smallest glimpse of sober reflection” would have brought to an end (EC, 2:99). With this, Emma is in full agreement. But he goes on to claim, in a perfect paraphrase of Godwin, that her “disappointed love” is not one of the “real evils,” such as “bodily pain, compulsory solitude, severe corporal labour” (EC, 2:99). By indulging her excess sensibility, she has created an imaginary pain, a form of self-inflicted violence caused by “hunting after torture” (EC, 2:99). He explains: “Evils of this sort are the brood of folly begotten upon fastidious indolence. They shrink into non-entity, when touched by the wand of truth” (EC, 2:100).

At the center of this self-indulgent condition is the social dependency that leads to such indolence. It is not excess sensibility itself that is at issue in this hunt for torture so much as the underlying social dependency that generates the tendency to inflict wounds on oneself. “May every power that is favourable to integrity, to honour, defend me from leaning upon another for support,” he writes; “…I will not be weak and criminal enough, to make my peace depend upon the precarious thread of another’s life or another’s pleasure. I will judge for myself” (EC, 2:100–101). He faults Emma for allowing her happiness to depend on the emotional whims of Augustus, thereby surrendering her independence.^[9] This kind of emotional dependency impedes the independent function of reason, and that is why Mr. Francis calls it “criminal,” for all rational judgments are disinterested, in his view, and not prejudiced by the needs or desires of others. “The first lesson of enlightened reason,” he emphasizes, “…is independence” (EC, 2:100), without which reason itself is not possible. Because she has surrendered her independence, her wounds are self-inflicted.

But it is precisely this independence that is systematically denied women in Emma’s narrative. Her “unprotected situation,” at the moment of Mr. Francis’s disappearance makes manifest the compulsory social dependency that all women face. As she states the problem, when alone in London, “[a]ctive, industrious, willing to employ my faculties in any way, by which I might procure an honest independence, I beheld no path open to me, but…the degradation of servitude” (EC, 2:148–49). Servitude is inherently degrading because it entails the surrender of independence. It is not that she does not share Mr. Francis’s view on dependence but that there is no “path” to independence for women. This is the point on which she directly challenges Godwin’s philosophy in her last letter to his double: “Why call woman, miserable, oppressed, and impotent, woman—crushed and then insulted—why call her to independence—which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her? This is mockery!” (EC, 2:107). Because women are denied independence by their social condition—that is, because dependence is part of the social narrative written into women’s bodies—Emma’s pain is not self-willed, as Mr. Francis would have it, but a genuine social evil. As she twice asks, quoting Godwin against himself, “Are we, or are we not (as you have taught me) the creatures of sensation and circumstance?” (EC, 2:104). Mr. Francis’s refusal to accept as “real” the pain she experiences is a refusal to acknowledge the gendered condition of women, for his philosophy treats women as if they had equal access to independence and, with it, the rationality that would cure her romantic love and her pain at its disappointment.

Self-violence, as Janet Todd points out, is the definitive characteristic of this (as well as Wollstonecraft’s) fiction.^[10] It is also a characteristic that is constantly under interrogation in the Memoir and one that the frame story shares with the inner narrative. As we have seen, through its opening words the novel connects self-violence with the basic coming-into-being of the narrative. Within the narrative, self-violence is explicitly under discussion in the exchange between the female and male philosophers, but it is implicitly always under discussion, for the competing interpretations of Emma’s painful actions—that they were avoidable, that they were unavoidable—are the issues at stake in the story of her life. Self-violence is both the specific issue in the break between Emma and Mr. Francis and the general issue against which the question of a distinctly gendered woman’s social experience is formulated.

The disappearance of Godwin, as Mr. Francis, reflects a general pattern in the novel in which Emma’s relationship to reason—and not just to its metonym—is marked by a tenuous unpredictability. Emma goes through three separate cycles in which she appears to recover from a distemper, acts in what she believes is a rational manner, and then rediscovers that “my own boasted reason has been, but too often, the dupe of my imagination” or that her philosophy “was swept before the impetuous emotions of my passions like chaff before the whirlwind” (EC, 1:84, 1:85). For Emma, the certainty of her own rationality becomes the primary symptom of its absence. Whereas reason in Caleb Williams is a present, palpable force, in Emma Courtney it is itself bracketed as an object of desire, a shadow that one wants to embrace but that always eludes one’s grasp. There is no triumphant moment for the narrative of reason to rival that in Caleb Williams. There are moments in which rational truth should have this compelling force, as when Emma proposes a completely rational discourse with Augustus: “Let us walk together into the palace of Truth, where…every one was compelled by an irresistible, controuling, power, to reveal his inmost sentiments!” (EC, 1:180).^[11] But such moments, including this, are consistently redefined as products of passion, suggesting that she does not know her own “truth.”

Hays’s version of self-delusion is more insistent than Godwin’s, a characteristic that can be traced to differences between her framing device and that of Caleb Williams. Godwin’s novel uses only a closing frame, in the postscript, to reveal the narration as a self-delusion, and so it is only in retrospect that the reader comes to perceive the extent of the narrator’s distemper. In contrast, Hays fully frames her novel, opening it with the letter (and its defining self-violence) from Emma to her adopted son, making it clear from the start that the narrative is a cautionary tale. The author’s preface reinforces the framing perspective, explaining that “the errors of my heroine were the offspring of sensibility” (EC, 1: Preface 8). The story itself is littered with apostrophes in which the older Emma labels her younger writing as “reasonings, so specious, so flattering, to which passion lent its force” (EC, 2:54). In extended quotations from the letters, the older Emma inserts footnotes warning against the rhetorical force of the diseased writer’s reasoning. At a particularly dark philosophical passage in one letter, for example, a footnote cautions, “This is the reasoning of a mind distorted by passion” (EC, 2:94 n). It is not that the novel fails to celebrate Godwinian reason; it clearly does. But these multiple framing devices make reason significantly less accessible to the subject in Hays’s novel than in Caleb Williams. In consequence, the novel has a more pronounced emphasis on the female’s incarceration within her nervous body than does its male predecessor, Caleb Williams.

That incarceration is represented as an inescapable product of woman’s social condition. Emma’s story details the evolution of her disorder as a form of excess sensibility in the protagonist, one that is explicitly compared to Caleb Williams’s uncontrollable curiosity. But the conditions that create the protagonist’s “distempered imagination” (EC, 1:89), as Emma calls it, are explored in much greater detail in Emma’s narrative than in Caleb’s. Whereas Caleb’s early years are sketched in a few paragraphs, Emma gives a sustained history of her childhood and adolescence, methodically demonstrating the wholly ordinary events that, one after the other, with compelling force, produce the excessive sensibility that finally compels her distempered condition. An educated narrator, Emma approaches the topic of her past scientifically, delineating the sequence of impressions—being weaned, being overly indulged as a child, reading romantic novels, being deprived of stimulating companionship—that molded her mind and made her susceptible to her romantic despair.^[12]

The central moment in this development occurs when she falls in love with a portrait of Augustus, before ever meeting him, and his idealized image becomes all-in-all to her.^[13] As she explains, “Cut off from all the society of mankind, and unable to expound my sensations, all the strong affections of my soul seemed concentrated to a single point” (EC, 1:113). She floods the representation of Augustus with desired qualities and invests him with a fairy-tale aura of perfection. She also recognizes that she is in love with “an ideal object” of her own making, but, she concludes, it “was in vain I attempted to combat this illusion; my reason was but an auxiliary to my passion, it persuaded me, that I was only doing justice to high and uncommon worth; imagination lent her aid, and an importunate sensibility…completed the seduction” (EC, 1:116). Where Godwin would identify this delusion as self-inflicted, she represents her romantic love as if it were as inevitable as an infection, to which she later compares it: “[A]rgue with the wretch infected with the plague—will it stop the tide of blood, that is rapidly carrying its contagion to the heart?” (EC, 2:103). To her, the condition is an occupation of the subject by a compulsory and unwanted sexuality. Her romantic feelings signal her containment within the female social narrative.

The causes of her disease are represented as conditions typically experienced by middle-class daughters, implying that her distemper is a general condition for women, not one unique to the heroine. In a pattern similar to that outlined by Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and later by Florence Nightingale in Cassandra, she identifies the underlying condition as the restricted social role of women and an economy of energy in which enforced female passivity leads the mind to turn inward:

While men pursue interest, honour, pleasure, as accords with their several dispositions, women…remain insulated beings, and must be content tamely to look on, without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical, drama of life. Hence the eccentricities of conduct, with which women of superior minds have been accused—the struggles…of an ardent spirit, denied a scope for its exertions! The strong feelings, and strong energies…forced back, and pent up, ravage and destroy the mind which gave them birth.

Emma Courtney is thus less one woman’s story of disappointed love than an examination of how late Georgian social conditions create a psychology that is unique to women and that results in a debilitating form of romantic love. Once created, it remains permanently etched in Emma’s body, “written upon my own mind in characters of blood” (EC, 1:2), constituting an irresistible part of her nervous physiology.

In Emma’s distemper, her entire being becomes focused on the object of desire to the exclusion of all else. It causes her body to tremble and blush; she feels faint in his presence; her passions run out of control. Hays’s representation of excess sensibility constructs female sexuality as a diseased product of woman’s social condition. Trapped within bodies that are sexualized by their early education and by restrictions on social activity, women become immersed within an isolated and overpowering sensibility. Sexuality in Emma Courtney perpetuates that isolation by subverting women’s rational social ties, which are abandoned in the face of a selfish and individualized passion. Thus Emma refers to her passion for Augustus as “an excess, perhaps, involving all my future usefulness” (EC, 1:116), because it compels her into self-centered, and self-indulgent, forms of behavior rather than enabling outward-directed, socially useful activities. This prediction is realized during her marriage to Montague. Having spent her passion on Augustus, she has none left for Montague, whose offer of marriage ultimately resolves the problem of her “unprotected situation.” She marries him in the same way that the spent Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility marries the spent Colonel Brandon. And that’s good. The early period in Emma’s marriage becomes for her a time in which “every hour was devoted to active usefulness, or to social and rational recreation” (EC, 2:164). This outward-directed activity contrasts favorably with Emma’s previous transformation from enforced idleness to romantic incapacitation. Like Austen’s Marianne, she develops a rational friendship with her husband. Montague “became more dear to me” after the birth of a child, and her capacity for controlled emotion seems to recover. Emma feels “new and sweet emotions” and tastes “a pure, a chaste, an ineffable pleasure” in watching a maternal tableau of husband caressing child (EC, 2:165).^[14] At the sudden reappearance of Augustus, however, her new social relations evaporate into nothingness, as the old passion reemerges. “For a moment,” she tells us, “conjugal, maternal, duties, every consideration but for one subject faded from before me!” (EC, 2:174). As if she were back before the portrait, all else fades from view when this isolating sexuality—permanently inscribed in her nervous body—directly conflicts with her participation in any outward-directed activity.

Although Emma’s memoir represents as unavoidable her confinement within this debilitating social condition, the fact of the memoir’s existence threatens formally to undermine that claim. Because the memoir exists as a form of social intercourse, Emma appears to have the social agency she represents as being categorically unavailable to women. And so Memoirs of Emma Courtney raises a problem for narrative agency similar to that raised in Caleb Williams: how to construct a subject-position for a narrator who articulates her own lack of agency without contradicting that statement through the agency involved in being a narrator.

Hays constructs two distinct subject-positions, the younger and the older Emma, and each has a different claim to narrative agency predicated on a distinct relationship between narrative voice and narrating body. The narrative, as has been noted, is initially written when the young Emma learns about her lover’s secret marriage and her distemper is at its height. She writes as a self-justification to Mr. Francis, her intended reader. Looking back, the older Emma explains, “I drew up a sketch of the events of my past life, and unfolded a history of the sentiments of my mind (from which I have extracted the preceding materials)” (EC, 2:96). Like Godwin’s novel, then, the narrative is originally produced by a disordered mind as a supposedly rational explanation for the narrator’s actions. Writing the narrative at the time is therapeutic, she explains, for “[w]hile pouring itself out on paper, my tortured mind has experienced a momentary relief” (EC, 2:95). The original act of narration soothes her nerves, as it relieves Caleb’s, by releasing the story written within her body and giving it voice.

The younger Emma, in her letters and in the remnants of the earlier “confessions” (EC, 2:115), writes as if she has the status of an agent, as if she possesses a basic independence and, with it, access to reason, despite all the suffering to which she has been subjected. She writes, that is, as if her body is not real—a heavy, physical presence—but is instead a transparent and distant object whose inscriptions do not bear on her narrative authority. Combined with her remarkable role as a sexualized agent in pursuit of the passive Augustus, this seeming detachment gives her the bearing of an intelligent, independent-minded woman who rebels against her own incarceration within the constricted female role. Thus, it is possible to read Emma Courtney as a transgressive narrative of female agency founded on desire, one that is not effectively contained by the “modicum of damage control” represented by the framing devices.^[15]

But in terms of the feminist philosophy that Hays and Wollstonecraft shared and promoted, the younger Emma’s actions are problematic, because they tie her agency to her culturally constructed sexuality.^[16] In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft articulates the ideological nature of female sexuality and shows it to be, first, socially constructed and, second, used against women as though it were a natural attribute of the female body.^[17] Wollstonecraft, like Godwin, defines sexuality, particularly female sexuality, as a social disease, one that has no place within a rational marriage, in which partners have a more intellectual appreciation of one another and can better perform their social obligations as parents: “In order to fulfill the duties of life…a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. I mean to say that they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should be otherwise employed” (Vindication, 114). It is because, paradoxically, Emma does not have a romanticized love for Montague that the marriage becomes for her an interlude of social usefulness.

Unlike Godwin, Wollstonecraft separates this disruptive sexuality from the female body’s reproductive capability. Whereas Godwin predicts the eventual disappearance of the distempered female body, with its interrelated feminine nerves and sexuality, Wollstonecraft constructs a future body in terms of maternity rather than diseased sexuality. Because of this theoretical distinction, she is able to articulate a separate social role for woman that is still founded on biological difference but is no longer limited by a disabling sexuality. By recurring to the image of the widowed mother, charged with the duty of caring for and educating children single-handedly, she argues the social necessity of educating women; they will need to assume an independent, socially useful maternal role as educators of the next generation of rational citizens, ready to contribute to social improvement.^[18] Thus, Wollstonecraft divides the concepts of female sexuality and reproduction in order to justify an active social role for women that preserves difference, and she does it by grounding that social role in a nonsexualized concept of the maternal.

Hays’s novel incorporates Wollstonecraft’s argument as the symbolic form of the narrative’s structure. The memoir is originally produced as a history of Emma’s sexuality, recording its production in her body’s excess sensibility and expressing it through her diseased reasoning. This original narrative is also a nervous narrative, one written to Mr. Francis as an appeal for sympathy, drawing attention to the narrator’s pain, and so it is also the product of the sexuality it records. In the frame story, Hays redefines this narrative precisely as Wollstonecraft redefines the female body: by discarding an agency based on sexuality and substituting one based on reproduction. The older Emma produces the narrative as the fulfillment of her maternal duty to her child, and so she gives it a clearly defined, outward-directed social function, treating its sexuality as a disease produced by an oppressive society and locating its social value in the sphere of reproduction. Thus, Hays constructs a narrative that formally enacts the redefinition of the social place of woman it proposes in its content.

The maternal Emma’s voice, with its characteristic self-violence, is complex because Emma Courtney is not a utopian novel; the heroine cannot, by an act of philosophical insight, transcend the narrative that has been written on her body. Thomas De Quincey makes that claim an integral part of his Confessions, but Emma Courtney’s immanence in the material does not allow escape. She cannot not be sexual, cannot recreate herself as a rational being, certain of the reason she does not have access to, because she can never differentiate between reason and the past sexuality that remains inscribed on her body. As it reemerges at the sight of Augustus, so too it is revisited in the act of telling the story, which recalls him to mind and brings his image again before her.^[19] This sexualized past lives on in the shape of a present and tangible pain caused by the act of narration. This is why this maternal narrator describes her narration again and again as self-violence: “It has been a painful, and a humiliating recital—the retrospection has been marked with anguish…my lacerated heart…has been again torn” (EC, 2:218). So she chastises her son and figurative reader for the “inconceivable misery” it causes her (EC, 1:1). “[I]t will cost me some pain to be ingenuous in the recital…and I feel an inclination to retract…. But…you entreat me to proceed” (EC, 2:2).

The difference between the younger and older Emmas resides precisely in the opposite relationships they assert between narrative and body. The younger Emma feels pleasure as she writes: “While pouring itself out on paper, my tortured mind has experienced a momentary relief” (EC, 2:95). Writing is a means “to beguile my melancholy thoughts” (EC, 2:95), and so it eases her feeling of despair and brings her comfort when nothing else will. This early act of narration accedes to the demands of her sexualized body; she yields to her sensations in the act of writing, and so it is a pleasurable and a sexualized act. In contrast, the older Emma defines her narration as a maternal act of “sacrifice” (EC, 1:6) in which she must overcome the demands of her body in order to tell her story. This new act is predicated on resistance to the sexualized body and its demands, and this resistance produces her pain.

Given the way Hays has described the condition of women—as uncertain of reason, denied agency, and unable to trust their own feelings—the only available sign of narrative authority is this narrator’s pain. It does not guarantee the presence of reason. It simply implies that her reason is no longer the “dupe” of her desires. That pain is the closest Emma can come to a position of intellectual disinterestedness and, so, to Godwinian rationality. Hays has created a structure that paradoxically valorizes female self-violence, not as a plea for sympathy but as a sign of a woman’s right to speak. It appears to be an agency of self-effacement or subordination—that is, a self-contradicting subject-position in which the only time a woman can know she has something to say is when her body tells her not to say it. But this pain also needs to be recognized as a sign of resistance, for what is effaced is not the female subject but the corporeal effects of an oppressive society. That resistance does indicate, obliquely, the persistence of another subject somewhere within this frame narrator’s voice, one who distinguishes herself from her body and whose presence, however tentative and unstable, is nonetheless more substantial than the fiction of agency in the younger Emma’s illusions. This complex, incarcerated voice, which can only indicate itself by turning on itself, ignoring its feelings and undermining its earlier assertions, is the consistent and larger response to Godwin and his symbolic disappearance from Emma’s story.

Notes