"Stop a Moment at this Preface": The Gendered Paratexts of Fielding, Barker, and Haywood

Abstract

"Stop a Moment at this Preface": The Gendered Paratexts of Fielding, Barker, and Haywood Cheryl L. Nixon Sarah Fielding's didactic novel, The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749), opens with a preface that calls attention to itself as a space worthy of the reader's consideration.1 It pleads, "Before you begin the following Sheets, I beg you will stop a Moment at this Preface, to consider with me, what is the true Use of Reading" (vii). The preface continues in an instructive vein, arguing that the "true use of reading" a fictional text written by a woman author, about female characters, for a female audience, can be located in the story's ability to make its readers "wiser and better" by combining "Profit and Pleasure" (vii). While she overtly discusses her work's utility for the eighteenth-century reader, Fielding's preface raises questions concerning the "true use" of the preface for the woman author of eighteenth-century fiction. A close examination of her preface reveals how this marginal space encourages self-definition that blurs the distinction between author and character, fact and fiction, and text and pre-text. The formal strategies used to construct the character of the woman author within the preface are used to construct the female characters within the text and, it is implied, should be used by the reader to construct herself outside the text. While the utility of these mechanisms of self-definition are often not questioned within the body of the text, the preface reveals the conflicts that arise from the author's attempt to enact fictional strategies of selfJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 32.2 (Summer 2002): 123-153. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 124 ] N T definition in a non-fictional space. Today's readers should "stop" at these early prefaces, all too easily labeled formulaic apologias, and read the strategies of character-creation employed within the pre-text as a commentary on the project of female definition taking place within the fictional text itself. The early eighteenth-century text written by a woman demanded a preface—most typically a preface in which the author could provide both an apology for the unfeminine action of picking up the pen and an explanation of why her inherently transgressive work merited serious attention. The preface becomes synonymous with modest authorial self-construction .2 In her survey of prefaces written by woman poets, Rebecca Gould Gibson discovers that in a "sample of thirty-three titles between 1667 and 1750, twenty-five include prefatory material, a third of which make overt apologies for the poet's gender" and concludes that "at least half my sample prefaces between 1667 and 1750" follow the formula of the "modest apology" (79-80). The woman author uses the apologetic preface to ward off criticism from her reading public by, variously, admitting that her writing is an artless diversion not to be taken seriously, acknowledging that her sex's writing is naturally inferior to that of the male sex, emphasizing her lack of a formal education, and claiming that the primary purpose of her writing is to instill the ideal of virtue in the minds of her female readers . This formula remains in use in the latter half of the century. Exploring Frances Burney's dedication to Evelina, Gina Campbell proves that Burney uses this prefatory "tradition of feminine purity" to address her male critics and guard against acts of misreading (558). Campbell provides a concise critical overview of the eighteenth-century woman author's need to label her work "virtuous," emphasizing the "catch-22 built into the virtuous tradition" in which an author proves herself to be immodest simply by writing the work she claims to be modest (559). The eighteenth-century woman author's attempts to define her work and her relationship with her public seem to be neatly contained within this virtuous tradition and the apologia's conflicted trope of modesty. And yet, by Gibson's calculations, only a half of the prefaces written by women follow the form of the apologia . How can the other prefaces from this time period be accounted for? Non-apologetic authorial construction happens within overtly "immodest...