The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore

Eve Tavor Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution performs a revolution of its own. Bannet turns upside down the historical assumption that domesticity was something that happened to women in Britain and argues that Enlightenment feminists were central participants in the rise of the ‘Angel in the House.’ She surveys writers from Mary Astell to Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft to demonstrate that women writers, not conduct books by men, invented and promoted women’s new domestic role and that, in its eighteenth-century configuration, this role was revolutionary and empowering. Her book is dedicated to documenting "a domestic revolution that was largely the fruit of women’s imagination and the effect of women’s work" (2). In this way, Bannet takes part in the historiographic shift towards studying women as agents, not objects, of history, a shift that has seen critics in the past decade re-evaluate Nancy Armstrong’s monolithic domestic thesis. Whereas Armstrong’s Foucaultian reading of power in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) portrayed women as the dupes of ideology (for even when they thought they were consenting to their new maternal role, their consent was only a more complex form of ideological coercion), Bannet’s conclusion asserts a different theory of power; she unravels the "unofficial technes of power" which challenge Foucault’s theory and shows women wielding a tremendous "interior power" over men (199). Like Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels (1995), Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution revises the image of the "proper lady" to reveal how, far from being the insipid, passive, dependent weakling that previous historians have made her out to be, the new domestic woman was a self-governing powerhouse of social and moral change.

The strength of The Domestic Revolution lies in how it is persuasive and clear in its overall thesis--that women formed a domestic revolution of their own in the eighteenth century as important to history as the Glorious or French Revolutions--while acknowledging the paradoxes and complexities within this thesis. Bannet perceptively rereads the century to put back into play these complexities; for instance, she reminds us that when Hannah More was arguing for women’s government of the family, the family was not yet marginalized in the private sphere but was a central political institution (141). This is a refreshing insight as often the history of gender in the eighteenth century has been read through the retrospective gaze of the Victorian period. Scholars have traced straight lines of origin for such nineteenth-century phenomena as ‘separate spheres’ or ‘passive femininity’ back into the eighteenth century and thus have been blind to other possible avenues or, more significantly, to the ways eighteenth-century feminists promoted domesticity that were unlike the conservative version that achieved dominance in the Victorian era (if, indeed, it ever did). Citing Clifford Siskin, Bannet calls this retrospective history the "Great Forgetting" (219). In contrast, Bannet seeks to revitalize the multiple and contested positions on ‘the family’ that circulated within Enlightenment feminisms. She writes, "Enlightenment feminist writers inhabited a complex discursive world where diverse feminist and patriarchal agendas were articulated upon one another" (5). Bannet is critical of scholars such as Janet Todd who divide eighteenth-century women writers into two camps--conservative and liberal; she argues that these are twentieth-century categories which do not fit the time period. In addition, labeling a writer like Jane West as ‘conservative’ has had the unfortunate consequence of rendering West’s satiric and vibrant literary oeuvre plodding, proper and patriarchal. Like recent critical re-interpretations by April London, Eleanor Ty and Lisa Wood, Bannet rights this wrong and provides nuanced philosophical discussions of Jane West and other writers normally dismissed by feminist history as ‘conservative.’

Bannet replaces the distinction between conservative and liberal or radical writers, with a different pairing of categories--Matriarchal and Egalitarian--one she argues better reflects the philosophical tenets underpinning the two major strains of Enlightenment feminisms. The two categories broadly map onto the main feminist approaches to sexual difference: on the one hand are feminists who affirm sexual difference to argue for women’s distinct, and oftentimes superior, qualities; on the other hand are those feminists who argue for equality and assert that women and men are the same. In Bannet’s provocative feminist lineage, then, Matriarchal feminists such as Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Hannah More or Jane West are the precursors to twentieth-century feminists like Luce Irigaray or Carol Gilligan since they posit the social and moral value of female difference. Bannet’s reframing of the feminist contributions of Matriarchs is the most important contribution the book makes; we are now very familiar with the egalitarian arguments of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays or Charlotte Smith, but the arguments affirming sexual difference have been overlooked because they have mistakenly been seen as reactionary.

Bannet does more than simply refuse the conservative label for Matriarchal feminists; she argues that they were more successful in achieving their goals of empowering women than Egalitarians. This is where Bannet and I part ways. Perhaps too invested in righting the wrong done by second-wave liberal feminists to eighteenth-century sexual difference feminists, Bannet argues that Matriarchs succeeded where Egalitarians failed. Egalitarian feminists, to her, were caught in the dead-end of "victim feminism" whereas Matriarchs were more pragmatic and thus, more successful: "it was the Matriarchs... who in fact... successfully implemented every plank of the seventeenth-century egalitarian platform" (9). Whatever gains women made in the eighteenth century, I would suggest, were won through a complex mixture of many types of feminist and non-feminist work. Rather than see Matriarchs as offering women a more practical and manageable strategy for achieving power and Egalitarians as foolishly utopian, I would prefer to see the two acting in a symbiotic relation, a ‘good cop/bad cop’ dynamic. It could be that women only believed a Domestic Revolution was possible because the utopian visions of Wollstonecraft and company had set the bar even higher. Without the Egalitarians work, the Matriarchs may never had found a receptive audience.

Bannet’s book is subtitled "Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel." As an intellectual history of Enlightenment feminisms, The Domestic Revolution is original, cogent, and persuasive; it will provide scholars with new conceptual frameworks for interpreting gender and the family in eighteenth-century Britain. Exceptionally strong and original is Bannet’s chapter on Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (which appeared in article form in Eighteenth-Century Studies). She depicts an overlooked effect the Act had on female sexuality and is so convincing that it is hard to believe scholars before her have missed this startling effect. While prior to the Act, unions that included sexual intercourse and the promise of marriage "were for ‘all intents and purposes’ real marriages" (96), once the Act became law, a woman who yielded before the ceremony was immediately deemed a whore and her life irreversibly ruined. Bannet surveys legal, moral, polemical, and periodical writing to support her interpretation and convincingly synthesizes an impressive breadth of sources.

The Domestic Revolution is less convincing vis-à-vis the second term of its subtitle: "the Novel." Bannet’s strength lies in conceptual and philosophical debate, not in the ambiguities and nuances of close reading. Her inclusion of fiction oftentimes feels instrumental; novels are introduced through plot summaries as examples or illustrations of an already convincing idea. Thus, the fiction feels like an afterthought. I found myself craving more in-depth readings as surely a novel as complicated as Inchbald’s Simple Story is more than the power dynamics at play in the family. But what the book lacks in literary depth, it makes up for in conceptual breadth, creating its own feminist philosophical revolution and adding a fascinating new story to the history of gender, the family, and domesticity.