Em/bedded Narratives: Marriage, Seduction and Adultery in the Eighteenth-Century English novel

The article deals with embedded stories of seduction in the context of eighteenth-century novels. Although literary history has focused mainly on the novel of courtship, marital and family life has actually had a very important place in literature throughout the century. Within novels about the life of a marriage the tales of chaste wives repeatedly run in narrative conjunction with embedded tales of fallen women. These do not function merely as cautionary contrasts but participate in the process of consolidating the discourse of marriage and love in the period of sensibility. The principal object of analysis is the novel of Frances Sheridan (1724–1766) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) where embedded tales of seduction problematise traditional concepts of female and conjugal morality. The article relies on recent approaches to the history of the family and on the methods of feminist narratology. Vložené příběhy: Manželství, svádění a cizoložství v anglickém románu 18. století Článek se zabývá literárním ztvárněním příběhů svedených žen v kontextu románů o manželství (novel of marriage) z 18. století. Ačkoliv stávající literární historie zkoumá zejména romány, které se věnují předmanželskému dvoření (novel of courtship), manželský a rodinný život zaujímá důležité místo v literatuře celého 18. století. Osudy věrných manželek probíhají v zajímavé narativní konjunkci s vloženými příběhy svedených žen, které nefungují pouze jako varovné kontrasty, ale participují na procesu konsolidace diskurzu manželství a lásky v období sentimentalismu. Páteřním textem pro analýzu je román spisovatelky Frances Sheridan (1724–1766) Příběh Sidney Bidulph (The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 1761), kde vložené epizody svedení problematizují tradiční pojetí ženské a manželské morálky. Článek za tímto účelem využívá nálezy historiografie rodiny a postupy feministické naratologie.

1. Amussen, Susan Dwyer (1988) An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

2. Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3. Bal, Mieke (1988) Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1980), trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

4. Ballaster, Rosalind (1992) Seductive Forms: Women ' s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

5. Bannet, Eve Tavor (2000) The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

6. Boswell, James (1934) Life of Johnson, vol. I (1791). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

7. Burney, Frances (1982) Evelina; Or, The History of a Young Lady ' s Entrance into the World (1778), ed. Edward A. Bloom with Introduction by Vivien Jones. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.

8. Chambers, Ross (1984) Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

9. Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Routledge.

10. Doody, Margaret Anne (1986) "Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time," in Fetter ' d or Free: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

11. Houlbrooke, Ralph (1998) Death, Religion and the Family in England 1450–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12. Inchbald, Elizabeth (1987) A Simple Story (1791). London and New York: Pandora Press.

13. Lanser, Susan (1986) "Toward a Feminist Narratology," Style 20.3: 341–363. CrossRef

14. Mackenzie, Henry (1999) Julia de Roubigné (1777). East Lothian: Tuckwell Press.

15. McKeon, Michael (2005) The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

16. Mezei, Kathy (1996) Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press.

17. Nelles, William (1997) Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Peter Lang.

18. Oliver, Kathleen (2003) "Frances Sheridan ' s Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated, Ideal Male," SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43.3: 683–700.

19. Perry, Ruth (2004) Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef

20. Prince, Gerald (2003) A Dictionary of Narratology (1987). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

21. Richardson, Samuel (1985) Clarissa; Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–1748) Harmondsworth: Penguin.

22. Richetti, John J. (1992) Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1743 (1969). Oxford: Clarendon Press. CrossRef

23. Schellenberg, Betty (2005) The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef

24. Sheridan, Frances (1987) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph: Extracted from Her Own Journal, and Now First Published (1761), with Introduction by Sue Townsend. London and New York: Pandora Press.

25. Spencer, Jane (1986) The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

26. Staves, Susan (2006) A Literary History of Women ' s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef

27. Stone, Lawrence (1977) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

28. Tadmor, Naomi (2001) Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef

29. Thomas, Keith (1959) "The Double Standard," Journal of the History of Ideas 20: 195–216. CrossRef

30. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977) The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

31. Trumbach, Randolph (1978) The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York and London: Academic Press.

32. Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of (1688) The lady ' s New-years gift, or, Advice to a daughter: under these following heads, viz. religion, husband, house and family, servants, behaviour and conversation, friendship, censure, vanity and affectation, pride, diversion, dancing. London: Printed for Matt. Gilyflower at Westminster Hall and James Partridge at Charing Cross. https://archive.org/details/ladysnewyearsgif00hali (visited 16 June 2015)

33. Lanser, Susan S. (2013) "Gender and Narrative," in The living handbook of narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/gender-and-narrative (visited 17 June 2015)

34. Nünning, Ansgar (2000) "Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: Concepts, Diachronic Approaches and Projects," in Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings, ed. B. Reitz and S. Rieuwerts. Trier: WVT, 345–73, quoted in Lanser, Susan S.: "Gender and Narrative," Paragraph 10, in the living handbook of narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/gender-and-narrative (visited 20 June 2015)

35. Warhol Robyn (1989) Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Warhol%20Gendered/03.pdf (visited 20 June 2015)