Janyce Marson

One of Harold Bloom’s “Period Studies,” this collection of essays concerning the eighteenth-century novel is flawed by its emphasis on male authors, which conforms too closely to Bloom’s prejudices and preferences, reflecting his gender, age, and hubris. One particular line which made my gorge rise is the following included in the “Editor’s Note”: “David E. Hoegberg salutes Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, which our current political correctness insists is a canonical work” (vii). God forbid that the canon be revised to reflect those who are not white and male. In that vain, Bloom’s introduction shows that he responds to the novels which he was trained to respond to, as he admits, “Since I cannot read a novel other than the way that [his Cornell undergraduate professor and mentor William] Sale taught me [in the late 1940s]…” (18). Scary thought--reading novels in the same manner for almost 70 years!

Notwithstanding the taint cast over this collection by Harold Bloom, I profited from reading Margaret Anne Doody’s “Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters,” which investigates how and uncovers why eighteenth-century men despised dreams (partly because of its association with madness) and then shows how women writers in the eighteenth century (and there were many great ones, no matter what Bloom might say) developed methods of articulating dreams and nightmares into their fiction. Doody shows how this process developed the Gothic novel, which explores feelings of “rage and unspecified (and unspecifiable) guilt,” and emotions of “fear, anxiety, loneliness—which are unstable, powerful, and unpleasantly associated with helplessness and with some kind of sense of inferiority” (93). Doody brings to the modern reader’s awareness women writers who have been denigrated by men like Harold Bloom for two centuries, including Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Haywood, Fanny Burney, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Sophia Lee.

The other very valuable essay in this collection is Lois Bueler’s “The Tested Woman Plot,” in which Bueler argues that “women are favorite objects of moral tests throughout Western literature” and that “always these tests involve obedience” (294-5). This thesis in itself is worth a book-length study; however, Bueler packs a great deal of thought-provoking argument into fewer than sixteen pages.

These two essays in themselves make this collection worth reading—just bring a skeptical eye with you when reading Harold Bloom.… (mere)