Terry Lovell (1) (1938–)

Lady Wombat says:

In this accessible early feminist literary study, Lovell challenges both Ian Watt and Marxist literary theorists for failing to address novels that do not conform to the canonical formal realist criteria. “[T]his book is trying to do two things. It attempts to shift the focus of discussion of the ideological bearings of the English novel from the context of capitalist production to that of capitalist consumption. And it has paid as much attention to the conditions of literary production and consumption as it has to the text itself. But whether the focus is that of the literary system of production, or capitalist consumption, it has insisted that the question of sex and gender must be placed at the centre of analysis alongside that of class” (17).

Her opening chapter addresses the weaknesses of Watt’s account of the Rise of the Novel [the reason why I am interested in her work]. Why Watt’s connection of the novel to the “spirit of capitalism” is wrong, according to Lovell:
• Lovell argues that “capitalism itself generates and produces a necessary heterogeneity in its culture,” rather than the homogenous culture theorized by Watt (27).
• The novelist pre-1840 was not considered as creating “literature,” but rather “entertainment,” or a commodity for the market. To gain approbation as literature, the novel often adopted an anti-capitalism ideology, because the “artist as producer” in the period saw himself as “belonging to an natural elite or aristocracy of creative genius… custodians of aesthetic and intellectual values far removed from the cash nexus of a bourgeois-capitalist world in which they were systematically devalued” (28). “Because of his focus on the early novel, Watt overemphasized the extent to which the novel unproblematically reproduced the values of market capitalism” (29).
• Because of the novel’s low status, “its ability to contribute to the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony through the literary celebration and exploration of the classical bourgeois virtues, or through the interpellation of a bourgeois subject if you will, was slight” (73).
• If we look at capitalism from the consumer rather than the producer viewpoint, capitalism needs to construct subjects who are quite different from the self-restrained subject; “from the point of view of consumption, repression and rational calculation are more dubious assets” (31). “The sale and purchase of commodities implies the controlled release of pleasures and their channeling through commodity consumption” (31).
• Watt’s theory that bourgeois women had a “near-monopoly of the increasing leisure time of their class in the eighteenth century” is questionable (39).
• Novel writers in the period were more often “from professional backgrounds with ties to the landed gentry” than to the bourgeoisie (39). Quoting Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own, 37: “Women novelists [of the nineteenth century] were overwhelmingly the daughters of the upper middle class, the aristocracy, and the professions” (40).
• Novel writers in the eighteenth century were more often women than men (39). Because “women recruited to the production of novels were channeled into this occupation because they did not qualify for more traditional intellectual roles, then they were unlikely to develop that unproblematic and transparent relationship to capitalism and to the bourgeoisie that Gramsci attributed to capitalism’s organic intellectuals” (43).

In her second chapter, Lovell discusses the role of circulating libraries in the development of the “undercapitalized” novel market, and then abruptly shifts to discussing why earlier critics who term the gothic novel “subversive” are wrong: “What sense does it make to label such literature ‘subversive’ from a feminist point of view? It reproduced the middle-class woman’s relationship to patriarchal capitalism. But the relationship it reproduced is a deeply ambivalent one, which protested while it submitted…. It is neither unambiguously subversive, nor unambiguously conciliatory” (71). And“The bourgeois readers of gothic fantasy desired the rewards of feminine conformity yet simultaneously feared the dangers of submission to male domination. A fiction that gives pleasure in these circumstances will surely be one which expresses this double ambiguity…. If Moretti is right in identifying the function of the literature of terror in its ability to both express and deny forbidden desires, then it may well have also served the negotiation of women’s contradictory relationship to patriarchal capitalism” (71). The second half of the chapter abruptly shifts, to a discussion of whether or not the gothic as a genre was “subversive”; Lovell’s assertion is

Chapter 3 continues the story of the shift of the novel from “entertainment” to “cultural” commodity, or “literature.” Of most interest to me: “Novel-readers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century did not wish to be novel-owners” (50). Novels didn’t confer status, so people didn’t want them in their libraries. Commercial circulating libraries were the primary purchasers of novels, because novels were for consumption, not possession (51). And “Because the circulating library supplied a secure and growing demand for reading matter, and because it could make a profit from the loan of books even when the purchase-price was high, the strategy of small print runs as high unit cost was one which satisfied the needs of all parties” (51).

Later chapters of the book discuss of women writers of the late nineteenth century, attempting to articulate a own canon of good/bad women writers. In a concluding chapter, she writes about current-day women in English studies, and how university and college teaching positions are still the preserve of men.

Lovell takes on an impressive number of topics, which means that her book lacks a central unifying argument or purpose. Still, a good read to get a sense of the concerns of early feminist literary critics.… (altro)