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Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson’s (Re)Presentations of the Self

1995; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1995.0002

1913-4835

Eleanor Ty,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

ENGENDERING A FEMALE SUBJECT: MARY ROBINSON’S (RE)PRESENTATIONS OF THE SELF ELEANOR TY Wilfrid, Laurier University What a creature is woman! How wildly inconsistent! How daring, yet how timid! We are at once the most ambitious tyrants, and the most abject slaves . . . . We boast a resisting power formed on the basis of stern and frigid virtue; we axe philosophers in precept, — but how often are we women in example! (Robinson, The False Friend 2: 92-94) M ary Darby Robinson (1758-1800), actress, poet, novelist, playwright, and autobiographer, published at least six volumes of poetry and eight nov­ els, and produced two plays (Kelly, Fiction 314; Lonsdale 468-70; Steen 233; Blain et al. 916; Todd 270-72), between 1775 and 1800.1 Until very recently, however, she was best known as “Perdita,” the beautiful actress who attracted the attention of George, Prince of Wales (later George iv), in a performance of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane in 1779. The already married Perdita’s short-lived but flamboyant affair the follow­ ing year with the Prince, or “Florizel,” as he called himself, made her the subject of a number of biographies and pseudo-biographical narratives (see Barrington, Bass, Green, Makower, Steen) and the target of numerous pam­ phlets and caricatures, which criticized her profligacy and her extravagance, especially after the end of the liaison in 1781-82. Her Memoirs, published posthumously in 1801, went into many editions and was frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century.2 Among art historians, Robinson’s name is mentioned as one of the beautiful women painted by the leading portrait artists of the day, such as George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.3 During her lifetime, she was a public personage whose comings and goings were reported in the daily press.4 Toward the end of her life, Robinson managed to turn around the rather infamous and scandalous reputation of her early years. In the last decade of her career, she succeeded in establishing herself as a respected poet, editor, and novelist.5 After reading her poem “Jasper,” which appeared in the Annual Anthology (1800), Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Robinson: “She is a woman of undoubted Genius. ... She overloads every thing; but I never knew a human Being with so full a mind — bad, good, & indifferent, ... but full, & overflowing” (562). By all accounts, he appeared to have admired English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , 2 1 , 4, December 1995 her greatly. He corresponded with her, and wrote “A Stranger Minstrel” to her a few weeks before she died.6 In the early 1790s, she became an active member of the circle of English radicals that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza and John Fenwick, and Robert Southey (Luria, Introduction, Walsingham by Robinson, 1: 7). Her involvement with politics caused the Reverend Richard Polwhele to cite her as one of the “Gallic freaks” and “ Unsex’d Females” in his satiric poem of 1798 (7). In this paper, I want to explore the ways in which Robinson constructs herself as a subject, focussing on three of her final works: her Memoirs, begun in January 1798, but completed by her daughter Maria; her treatise, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subor­ dination (1799); and her penultimate novel, The False Friend (1799). I want to argue that these three works, in three genres, present and represent differ­ ent aspects of the bios of Robinson’s life. They work to counter the pictorial and “gossipy” representations of her that were created by others in public venues, especially during her younger days. Robinson engenders herself in these texts mediated through cultural expectations of what a woman ought to be, and through literary conventions of the essay, the novel, and the mem­ oir. She manipulates facts, fiction, illustrations, and rhetorical conventions, but is, in turn, manipulated by her implied readers and the public, so that the narratives, though compelling, become fictions of her female selfhood. Her works reveal her “multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory iden­ tity,” and demonstrate how she becomes, in Teresa de Lauretis’s terms, “a subject that is not divided in...