"HIEROGLIFICK'D" HISTORY IN APHRA BEHN'S "LOVE-LETTERS BETWEEN A NOBLEMAN AND HIS SISTER"

Abstract

Though vigorously challenged by Margaret Anne Doody The True Story of the Novel, the guiding assumption of recent studies of eighteenth century English fiction has been that specific historical conditions contributed to the rise of a genre that was both or novel-and recognized as such by its authors and readers-and peculiarly English its textual inflections.1 In the most persistent version of this argument, ultimately derived from Ian Watt's still influential The Rise of the Novel and magisterially reenunciated Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740, the English novel, after years of (in McKeon's words) categorial instability finally defines itself the 1740s, the agon between Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson.2 As such feminist historians of the novel as Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have argued, this male centered narrative of origins leaves out the crucial role of women the creation and development of this new species of writing-a phrase used by both Fielding and Richardson, their own attempts to occlude their debts to their female predecessors and thus to represent their works as both original and originary.3 For example, when Fielding announces Joseph Andrews that he is writing in Imitation of The Manner of Cervantes, he is not only ostenta? tiously identifying his chosen literary father but also separating himself from the tradition of female fiction he represents as embodied Richardson and immense Romances, or the modern Novel and Atalantis Writers.4 For his part, Richardson appropriates the plot of the fallen woman, the staple of fictions by Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Hay wood, and mor? alizes it, all the time insisting, like Fielding, that he is not writing frivolous romances or novels but instructive histories.5 As John Richetti has warned us, we should resist the temptation of succumbing to such totalizing narratives as Watt' s-or even McKeon' s more