1. Henry James's remark that endings in fiction are never natural and that "we have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of surrender and sacrifice" suggests that novelistic closure is obtained through the same sorts of sacrificial strategies at play in the Kantian sublime. See the preface "Roderick Hudson," in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1962), 6.

2. A useful definition of patriarchy is that provided by Heidi Hartmann: "relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women." Quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3. Barbara Johnson suggests the following relation between patriarchy, misogyny, and language: "Gynophobia is structured like a language—indeed, more unsettling, language itself is structured like gynophobia. This does not mean—far from it—that women are excluded from language, but that the culpabilization of women is a necessary part of it" ("Response," Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 2 [Spring 1988]: 177).

3. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 79.

4. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 78. For an illuminating discussion of the Observations , particularly with respect to Kant's sexual politics, see Susan Shell, "Kant's Political Cosmology: Freedom and Desire in the 'Remarks' Concerning Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime ," in Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy , ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 87-119. I am grateful to James Engell for showing me this essay.

5. Kant's reading and use of the extensive eighteenth-century English literature on aesthetics is detailed in Otto Schlapp, Kant's Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der Kritik der Urteilskraft (Göttingen, 1901).

6. As Naomi Schor reminds us, Western philosophy "has, since its origins, mapped gender onto the form-matter paradigm, forging a durable link between maleness and form (eidos), femaleness and formless matter" ( Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine [New York: Methuen, 1987], 16).

7. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 129.

8. See in particular "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes" (1925) and "Female Sexuality" (1931) in Sigmund

Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 183-211; and "Femininity" (1933) in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965).

9. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 179.

10. This may be the point to recall Eve Sedgwick's astute observation that "sex as such not only resembles and conveys but represents power, including—but not only—the power relations of gender" ( Between Man , 157).

11. On the relation between the rise of the novel as a literary genre and the emergence of the theory of the sublime, see my study "The Rise of the Sublime: Sacrifice and Misogyny in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics," Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 81-99. There I point out that a comparison of publication dates of some of the most popular novels, translations of Longinus' Peri Hypsous , and commentaries on the sublime reveals a quite extraordinary overlap: Boileau's translation of Longinus, for example, first appeared in English in 1711 (subsequent editions were published in 1736 and 1752), just eight years before Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and close to the publication of Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); William Smith's translation, which was to become the standard, first appeared in 1739, remarkably close to the dates of Richardson's Pamela (1740-1741) and Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742); John Baille's Essay on the Sublime appeared in 1747, two years before Fielding's Tom Jones ; and Burke's Enquiry was published in 1757, close to the date of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). In the view of Samuel Holt Monk, whose work The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) remains the definitive history, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) stands as the document that coordinates and synthesizes the aesthetic concepts that had been current throughout eighteenth-century England.

12. Monk's study The Sublime and Ian Watt's influential Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) shed light upon one aspect of the nature of the connection between the sublime and the novel, for Monk's account of the reasons why the sublime became so prominent is surprisingly consistent with Watt's analysis of the novel as a distinctive literary form: both reflect a modern preoccupation with the nature and development of individual identity, and the value and diversity of individual taste. According to Watt, a new emphasis on the primacy of the individual and a correlative privilege of the character's experience as the ultimate arbiter of reality are integral to the novel. This innovation in literary form is accompanied by a parallel development in philosophy, for the very notion of truth is reconceived as a primarily personal and therefore unique, rather than collective and tradition-bound, phenomenon. If the novel "is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both the individual acts of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment," its technical characteristics also point to the aim that the novelist

of that period shares with the philosopher: "the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals" (Watt, Rise of the Novel , 117-18). Similarly, Monk argues that the eminence of the sublime in the eighteenth century was a result of the demand for "a theoretical defense of individualism in art" (Monk, The Sublime , iii, emphasis added). Longinus came into favor "because he could fill a need; he alone of the ancients could be used to support the idea of 'the liberty of writing'" (26-27). The emerging category of the individual and concern with the varieties of personal experience can be seen as a fundamental reason for the rise of both the novel and the sublime. Just as the former gives priority to the representation of individual identity and experience, so the latter reflects upon the individual's responses to the aesthetic object, and accounts for the subject's experience of pleasure or pain.

13. Watt's classic argument ties the popularity of the novel to the widespread growth of literacy and the expansion of the reading public to include the urban middle classes. But although Watt's argument turns on his attention to the "increasingly important female component" of the reading public, and although he acknowledges that "the majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women," his sole focus is upon woman's role as the consumer and not the producer of fiction. It is surprising that, while two of the most recent and influential studies of the novel challenge Watt, they do not take issue with this point of view. In The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) Michael McKeon argues that "the emerging novel internalizes the emergence of the middle class and the concerns that it exists to mediate" (27), but fails to ask if the concerns of the woman reader, not to mention those of the woman writer, might differ in significant respects from those of the masculine middle class that is his sole focus. And although Nancy Armstrong's brilliant Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) does make gender a crucial issue by showing that the construction of a new model of female subjectivity was central to the development of novelistic discourse—she argues that "one cannot distinguish the production of a new kind of feminine ideal either from the rise of the novel or from the rise of the new middle classes in England" (8)—Armstrong pays virtually no attention to eighteenth-century women writers; indeed, Austen's Emma is the only novel authored by a woman she discusses. Even though Armstrong echoes Woolf's view that, during this period, the fact that women ''suddenly began writing and were recognized as women writers strikes me as a central event in the history of the novel" (7), she does not question Watt's assumption that the eighteenth century woman's literary significance is due to her role either as the reader of fiction, or perhaps more important, as the heroine of novels written by men. Neither Armstrong nor McKeon attends to the connection between the emergence of the novel and women's new prominence on the literary scene. In A Room of One's Own ([New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957], 65) Virginia Woolf writes, "Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and

think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write."

14. Although of vastly different social classes and careers, Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) and Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) are two examples of exceptionally talented women who were able to support themselves entirely by writing. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who originally began to write fiction for pleasure, are also women who came to depend upon the income their novels produced. The more frequent occurrence, however, was for women to supplement their income through novel writing.

15. As B. G. MacCarthy was the first to point out ( Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel, 1621-1744 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945], 43), "so consistently did women keep step with the advance in novel-writing that to trace their progress is to trace the progress of the novel itself." And as subsequent studies by Patricia Spacks and Jane Spencer attest, the growth of the novel parallels the emergence of a distinctly feminine literary tradition. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); and Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).

16. F. G. Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Descriptive and Bibliographical Study (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1940), 8. Spencer, however, feels that his estimate is "a little high," pointing out that it "relies on always believing the 'By a Lady' claim, which is probably usually true but not an entirely reliable guide" (Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 33 n.7).

17. Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, x. Indeed, Spencer's main thesis is that "the gradual acceptance of the woman writer which took place during the eighteenth century considerably weakened this early link between women's writing and feminism. Once writing was no longer considered necessarily unfeminine the woman writer was no longer offering a resistance to male domination" (ibid.).

18. Advertisement in front of E. Boyd's Female Page (1737).

19. Susannah Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6. (First American edition under the title Charlotte: A Tale of Truth , 1794.)

20. To assert a direct correlation between the emergence of the woman writer and of modern feminism is problematic, for at least until the end of the century, women's fiction by no means challenged patriarchal views of women's role and place. Indeed, as Ruth Perry observes ( Women, Letters, and the Novel [New York: AMS Press, 1980]): "Novels embellished and perpetuated the myths of romantic love needed to strengthen the new economic imbalances between men and women and necessary to make the lives of the depressed seem fulfilled. . . . They also carried the cultural message that women's lives were to be spent in idleness, daydreams, and romance" (x). And as Spencer points out, the novel played a decisive role in popularizing the ideal of "the pure woman," who ''never disturbed her usefulness as male property by any unruly desires of her own" ( Rise

of the Woman Novelist , 109). Perhaps because women's fiction was perceived as a threat, female novelists compensated by creating characters and plots that underscored feminine docility.

A tradition of feminist thinking was nonetheless beginning to emerge. Perry names Mary Astell as "the first English feminist," citing her Preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters (1724) as a contribution crucial to the development of English feminism. According to Perry, Astell pressed "for women's right to a real education, asking them to set aside their prejudices against a woman's writing and be pleased that a woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train" ( Women, Letters, and the Novel , 16). And Spencer points out that in the last decade of the century feminism began to play a prominent role in women's fiction. She argues that "amid the ferment of radical ideas at the time of the French Revolution . . . the novel was used by writers on both sides of the political debate to promulgate their ideas, and among the radical novelists feminist ideas were given a central place" ( Rise of the Woman Novelist , 109). Accordingly, such novels as Elizabeth Inchbald's Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: On the Wrongs of Women (1798) stand out as ''maverick productions of a short-lived revolutionary era" (137). It remains to underscore that these novels are the exception, not the rule.

21. Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel , 22.

22. Spacks, Imagining a Self , 60.

23. Eliza Haywood, The Rash Resolve (London, 1724), cited in Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 21. Spencer also points out that "the pure woman, for the eighteenth century, was one who never disturbed her usefulness as male property by any unruly desires of her own. It was in the novel that the ideal of pure femininity was most memorably expressed and popularly disseminated" (109-10).

24. Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 186.

25. Spacks, Imagining a Self , 57-58.

26. For another view see ibid., 63-71, 87-91. Spacks argues that even while female novelists of the period uphold the established system, they "find images and actions to express profound ambivalence" (63). According to Spacks, "the most successful women writers of the century richly examine what others only imply: the fact that society makes women dwell in a state of internal conflict with necessarily intricate psychic consequences" (89).

27. Greenblatt's theory of "self-fashioning" emphasizes the extent to which the construction of a self depends upon its successful differentiation from a hostile other. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.

28. For critical essays that relate Frankenstein to Kantian aesthetics see Marshall Brown, "A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 26 (Summer 1987): 275-301; Frances Ferguson, "Legislating the Sublime," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics , ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 128-47; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 254-59.

29. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 224.

30. While there is no way to ascertain Shelley's intent with respect to Kant's third Critique , her comment upon learning that it was the custom at early dramatizations of Frankenstein to place a blank line next to the name of the actor who played the part of the monster, "this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good," suggests considerable familiarity with Kant's theory of the sublime and a sophisticated and ironic attitude with respect to it (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 241).

31. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting , trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 69.

32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus , ed. James Rieger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 52. Unless noted otherwise, subsequent citations in the text are to this edition of the 1818 version of the novel.

33. Frances Ferguson, discussing Frankenstein 's relationship to nuclear thinking and discourse in "The Nuclear Sublime," Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984), also points out that the Monster's "skin is too tight." According to Ferguson, ''The monster . . . is stretched too thin, as if his skin represented an unsuccessful effort to impose unity on his various disparate parts" (8-9).

34. For discussions of the gender of Frankenstein and his monster, see Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 213-47; Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100-119; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 99-109; Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 1-10; Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 155-73; U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," and Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic," in The Endurance of Frankenstein , ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 77-87, 88-119; Anne K. Mellor, "Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein ," in Romanticism and Feminism , ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 220-32, and Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 114-42; Marc Rubenstein, "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein ," Studies in Romanticism 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 165-94; William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgeny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Paul Youngquist, " Frankenstein : The Mother, The Daughter, and the Monster," Philological Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 339-59.

35. Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," 8.

36. As Homans points out, "the demon will much later kill Elizabeth, just as the demon's creation has required both the death of Frankenstein's own mother and the death and violation of Mother Nature. . . . Victor has gone to great

lengths to produce a child without Elizabeth's assistance, and in the dream's language, to circumvent her, to make her unnecessary, is to kill her, and to kill mothers altogether" ( Bearing the Word , 103).

37. Jacobus, Reading Woman , 101.

38. Here I cite the 1831 edition of Frankenstein (New York: Collier MacMillan 1961), 31.

39. Longinus, On Literary Excellence , quoted in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden , ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 174.

40. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 163-65.

41. Again I cite the 1831 edition: "It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of Nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world" (32).

42. Jane Gallop, "The Monster in the Mirror: The Feminist Critic's Psychoanalysis," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis , ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 15.

43. Jacobus, Reading Woman , 85.

44. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 240.

45. I quote Dickinson's poem in full. All quotations of Jean Rhys's novel are from Good Morning, Midnight (1938; rpt., New York: Perennial Library, 1982) and occur in the text.

46. Mary Lou Emery, "The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys's Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and The Wide Sargasso Sea ," Twentieth-Century Literature 28 (1982): 418-19.

47. Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" (1929) in Women and Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 52. Among Rhys's critics, both Judith Kegan Gardiner and Thomas F. Staley note Rhys's implied reference to Woolf. See Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism," Boundary 2 11, nos. 1-2 (Fall/Winter 1982-83): 244-46; and Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (London: MacMillan, 1979), 55-56.

48. Woolf, A Room of One's Own , 38-39.

49. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 239.

50. Mary Helen Washington cites and expands Alice Walker's notion of the "suspended woman" in "Teaching Black-Eyed Susans : An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers," in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave , ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1982), 208-17.

51. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; rpt., New York: New American Library, 1960), 27.

52. Woolf, Orlando , 33.

53. Rhys uses ellipses frequently. Square brackets around ellipses distinguish my deletions from those in the original text.

54. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 248-49.

55. Staley, Jean Rhys , 97; and Elizabeth Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys," Contemporary Literature 20, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 167.

56. Elgin W. Mellown, "Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys," Contemporary Literature 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 467.

57. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys , Lives of Modern Women Series (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 66.

58. Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia," 167.

59. Arnold E. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough: Affirmation from Despair in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight ," Contemporary Literature 24, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 363.

60. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 249.

61. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough," 349; and Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia," 167.

62. According to Thomas Weiskel ( The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 94), "the sublime moment recapitulates and thereby reestablishes the Oedipus complex, whose positive resolution is the basis for culture itself."

63. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough," 363.

64. Mary Poovey interrogates the idealist assumption that romantic love lies "completely 'outside' ideology" and that, as "an inexplicable, irresistible, and possibly even biological drive," it "flaunts the hierarchy, the priorities, the inequalities of class society" (" Persuasion and the Promises of Love," The Representation of Women in Fiction , Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981, no. 7, ed. by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], 172). She points out that ''the fundamental assumption of romantic love—and the reason it is so compatible with bourgeois society—is that the personal can be kept separate from the social, that one's 'self' can even be fulfilled in spite of—and in isolation from—the demands of the marketplace." A materialist-feminist reading of the Rhysian canon underscores precisely this point.

65. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984), 102.

66. Lorde, Sister Outsider , 123.

67. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972), 229. Atwood's injunction might be usefully juxtaposed with Fredric Jameson's criticisms of "left/liberal culture critiques." According to Jameson ( Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 130), such critiques "suggest that cultural change and social renovation can be achieved by changes in thinking, or elevations in the level of consciousness . . . thereby rendering political activity unnecessary." As Atwood would certainly agree, developing the capacity to "refuse to be a victim" is a deeply political concern.

68. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 123-27; "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21-27; and the introduction to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), in which Butler elucidates the notions of performance and performativity not as "primarily theatrical," "not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (12, 2).