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Part III

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    26442
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    The plot of The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley charts what will become a commonplace course for later Irish national novels: projected (happy) marriage disrupted by Gothic disasters such as the horrific attack on Horatio which causes all the trouble, followed by the constant and improbable plot coincidences which keep the loving couple separated, especially Sophia’s abduction by a perverted villain and imprisonment in a aristocratic mansion. The novel never really reaches the ‘schizophrenic’ levels traced by Kate Trumpener in her analysis of the national tales of the 1810s (as the historical novel begins to take shape), a schizophrenia which disrupts the closed Burkean family dynamics which links harmonious marriages to harmonious national politics in the genre.57 However, Sophia Berkley certainly prefigures this schizophrenia in the near-hysteria to which the heroine is constantly reduced by the early events of the novel. Indeed, Sophia is prone to a heightened and excessive sentimentality at the start of the novel, is often to be found in tears and is easily manipulated by nefarious enemies because of her emotional fragility. However, eventually Sophia demonstrates that she is a plucky figure able to withstand a great deal of physical and psychological stress and strain – unlike, say, Swift’s Injured Lady.

    In later novels, the Gothic marriage plot, or the abduction plot, causes its heroine to go mad or to behave increasingly irrationally, and sometimes madness results from any attempt on the heroine’s virtue. Female madness is a significant feature of the Gothic genre as a whole, prominent examples of which are the imprisoned Agnes in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). However, here, Sophia starts off as a very fragile and vulnerable figure who is easily disturbed psychologically, but by the time of her abduction by Castilio she has become a robust and powerful woman who is able to pull a wall to bits to escape from her abductor, climb and leap down from large walls, walk incredible distances and resist even the overtures of a good man to maintain loyalty to her first love. This is a novel, in other words, which has little time for the kind of weakness displayed by the Injured Lady, who can’t make up her own mind and needs advice. Sophia, too, writes letters, but only to inform Constantia of what she has already decided to do.

    Although appealing to the language of sensibility at the start of the novel, Sophia quickly becomes convinced of the dangers of both appearing emotionally weak and succumbing to emotional convulsions, and even in her love life she is guided by reason rather than reaction, having learned the lesson of her mother who was, it seems, too much led by her feelings. With her parents, ‘their affection for each other did not allow them to consult the rules of prudence’ (8), and they stupidly eloped, after which Sophie’s grandfather wrote his daughter out of his will and refused to ‘soften’ in his resolution against the marriage (8). He may have been right to oppose the marriage because Sophia’s father turns out to be a disaster when it comes to economic management; the family soon finds itself in financial difficulties, and by the time he dies, his estate is heavily indebted. Before his death, Sophia’s father admits, ‘I am justly punished for my extravagance!’ (38). It is notable that Sophia’s choice in marriage is rich enough to ensure her future happiness. Horatio has an estate of his own nearby and ‘my lover’s rank, person and fortune, gave him a sufficient title to any woman’ (19). Sophia recognises that ‘the only obstacle . . . was my friendship for Isabella’ (19), who had fallen for Horatio first, but in proper rational fashion, she overcomes her concerns about this prior attachment. Sophia accuses herself of being ‘guilty of the most unpardonable breach of friendship’, which leaves her ‘ashamed and confused’ (16), though, notably, not prepared to actually give up Horatio. Although Sophia counts herself as carrying exalted ideas of female friendship, she admits that Isabella, in her self-sacrificing behaviour, ‘went beyond’ her (19). The emotions take second place to Sophia’s reasonable and calculated assessment of her future prospects and her obvious determination to avoid the mistakes made by her own mother.

    What all this indicates is that Sophia is driven more by prudence and rationality than by susceptibility to emotional breakdown. Indeed, she constantly shows she is stronger than those who surround her, including her father. While he goes into ‘violent’ convulsions brought on by his distress over Horatio’s apparent death, she, despite being left destitute by events and feeling that the ‘whole universe is indifferent’ to her (36), holds up well. Another character, Mrs Williams, insists that ‘the true philosophy of soul . . . consists in governing the passions; not in superciliously pretending to be without them’ (47), and Sophia seems to have taken this to heart. Avoiding the madness suffered by her Gothic inheritors, Sophia maintains both her virtue – and her sanity. She is much stronger than the reader is led to believe at the start, and she demonstrates this strength in a number of ways.

    Moreover, like her fiancé, Sophia is rather addicted to the language of liberty and slavery, and she is willing to commit suicide rather than submit to the sexual tyranny of Castilio. It is clearly tempting to the destitute Sophia to yield to Castilio’s seduction. He promises her an easy life and shows that many other women have succumbed to his charms. Like her true lover, Horatio, Sophia recognises that this would be to accede to slavery. Were she to submit to the abduction and rape then she would be reduced to chattel status and would have submitted to an act of pathological violence (pathological given that her abductor seems to make a habit of it). Sophia, however, does not submit, and indeed will not be bribed or cajoled into a sexual relationship outside that with her one true love. Unlike the Injured Lady, who was talked into premarital sex, Sophia sees through the excessive rhetoric of her would be lover, and stays faithful. Like the gentleman who managed to secure the Injured Lady’s submission, Castilio talks about love and marriage quite a lot. However, the hollowness of the rhetoric of marriage and union is completely exposed during the discussions between Sophia and Castilio and Sophia and Fidelia.

    Castilio at first maintains a fiction that he intends to marry Sophia and that he will legitimate their sexual relationship once he has had his way with her. He later admits that he really just wants her as his mistress, to make sure he has constant access to her body, but he does concede to her clear distress that she can pretend that she is his wife if she really wants to: ‘if you will consent to make me happy, my whole fortune shall be your’s; if you desire it you shall take my name and appear to the world as my wife; can I do more?’ (73). Castilio certainly tells others that Sophia is his wife in order to allow him to get away with abducting her (as Fidelia first tells her, ‘I thought you had been his wife!’ 57), and, bizarrely, he tells her that she will ‘meet with nothing but the strictest honour’ from him (58). In these scenes, the language of love and marriage is exposed as merely a rhetorical disguise for force and rape, and Castilio’s outward appearance as an honest gentleman is shown in fact to be the disguise of a monster. Sophia at one stage protests about ‘the horror he inspired me with’ (67) and explains how ‘he was deaf to everything but his own brutal appetites’ (74). If Swift rather played down the more horrific elements of the partial seduction, partial rape of the Injured Lady, the author of Sophia Berkley effectively Gothicises Swift’s plot and highlights the full misery of the abduction, threats and nearrape of the dependent female once she has no male to turn to for help.

    Like Swift’s gentleman, Castilio, then, talks of marriage and being honest, and for both this is nothing but a melodramatic ploy to ensure sexual satisfaction. Sophia does not fall for such nonsense but sees behind it to the naked power of the aristocratic male and determines to do something about it. Pretending that Sophia is his wife is the way Castilio covers up for his intended crime of rape. The novel works very hard to expose the language of marriage and love as a cover for abuse. Anglican Patriots too had seen through the metaphor of marriage in the discussion of a political union. In Patriot Queries, Occasioned by a Late Libel, Entitled, Queries to the People of Ireland; to which is added, A Letter to the Author of Them, by Another Hand ([1754]), the unidentified author asks of Primate George Stone, a proponent of political union, ‘whether if . . . [he] had been suffered to go on for a while in his own way, he would not have destroyed all the private Virtue we have among us, and unpeopled the Nation, by substituting something else in the Place of Wedlock’.58 That ‘something else’ is clearly an illegitimate sexual relationship, rather like the one proposed to Sophia by Castilio, something that looks to the outside world like a marriage but which both parties to the contract know is actually a fiction based on threat and a misuse of power. Likewise, Liberty and Common-Sense to the People of Ireland, Greeting (1760) (probably by Henry Brooke) insists that for all the rhetoric of political union as marriage everyone knows that no true marriage can take place between Ireland and Great Britain: ‘When a Marriage is proposed between Nations, Princes, or Potentates, the Advance is always made from the Stronger to the Weaker; from the Greater to the Less; for, otherwise, Contempt and Refusal might evidently ensue. But when did England address Ireland on this subject?’59 Though the writer of this pamphlet is appalled by the riots against the union, he is also completely opposed to the notion of a union as well and insists that ‘The dreaded UNION cannot possibly be brought to pass. The Parties neither are agreed, nor ever were agreed, nor ever will be agreed, on the said Bands of Matrimony, to the End of Time’ (27).

    That Sophia Berkley’s plot of sexual intrigue is to be read as to some extent an intervention in the national question is suggested in many ways. Of course, the language of abduction and rape participates in the kind of discussion about the possible union between Britain and Ireland that caused the 1759 riot in the first place, but more than this, Sophia frames her refusal to submit to Castilio in terms of a withholding of ‘consent’, a politically charged word in Irish politics of the 1750s. For the Irish Anglican Patriots it was consent, or rather the lack of it, which explains Ireland’s treatment by Britain. The term ‘consent’ had been a controversial one during the Money Bill dispute of the 1750s, which was triggered in part by a failure by the Irish House of Commons to agree on whether an acknowledgement of the king’s consent should be accepted as part of a money bill in November 1751.60 Originally, when the application to use the treasury surplus was made, the term ‘gracious recommendation’ was placed in the preamble to the heads of bill to refer to the king’s review of the request. But, by the time it arrived back in December 1751, the term ‘recommendation’ had been replaced with the much more contentious term ‘consent’, indicating the level of control the British parliament was trying to assert over Irish affairs. The king was ‘consenting’ to the decisions of the Irish parliament, which suggested that consent could just as easily be withheld. Even the Chief Secretary Sackville was surprised by this change, opining that ‘the word consent was not left out accidentally and a debate about the power of the Crown over the surplus of His Majesty’s revenue would not be very eligible.’61

    More importantly, in the pamphlet war which followed the start of the Money Bill dispute, consent was fetishistically referenced in discussions of national politics in the context of rape, legalised prostitution and abduction. For example, in Common Sense: in a Letter to a Friend (1755), the author complains about his ‘poor, poor Country! formidably attacked from without, betrayed from within, and, at the same Time, pregnant with Swarms who are eager to prostitute, each his Share of Talents, to the Disguise of the most vital Truths, and Recommendation of the most fatal Measures’, all because of the attempt to pass off ‘previous consent’ as a genuine political truth, ‘a Doctrine, now almost as notorious as Transubstantiation; vindicated by the same Species of Reasoning, with as much Zeal, and pretty equal Success’.62

    In this context it is understandable why The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley places such an emphasis on the necessity of obtaining consent in all matters of sexual union, and this emphasis interestingly pushes the novel towards a kind of proto-feminist vindication of women’s right to choose and a colonial nationalist refusal to submit to imperial power. Sophia’s father insists that ‘I will never desire you to marry against your own consent’, and ‘he had taken a resolution never to force my inclinations’ (21), a promise respected by Horatio who announces that ‘he would sooner renounce me for ever, than owe his happiness to any motive but my affection for him, which he flattered himself he might in time deserve, by the truth and delicacy of his love for me’ (22). Swift’s Injured Lady was still desperate for a union to be formalised between herself and the abusive gentleman lover, despite his mistreatment of her. Sophia Berkley, contrariwise, is desperate to extricate herself from the home in which her supposed seducer has imprisoned her – a stance that reflects the political difference between the early and middle years of the eighteenth century, since where union was once desired by Irish Anglicans, it was now being openly and aggressively rejected by Patriots. If political discourse was to constantly resort to the tropes and themes of contemporary fiction then novels too could be one of the ways in which political war could be fought for the future of the Irish Anglican nation.

    Sophia learns an important lesson about her abductor very quickly: appealing to his sense of decency will not work. Whereas the Injured Lady’s male correspondent believed that ‘an improvement in Ireland’s fortunes depends on a change of heart in England’,63 by the time of Sophia Berkley, Irish Anglican Patriots had realised that this was a pipe dream and had to be abandoned. Appealing to England’s sense of decency did not work for the Injured Lady; looking to Castilio’s sense of honour fails to work for Sophia and she soon concludes that God helps those who help themselves. Sophia makes her own future rather than wait around for someone to save her. She indeed accepts help from others, but essentially she looks after herself. At times this leads her to behave in ways slightly less than respectable in order to obtain what she wants, but she appears to have learned that being behind about going forward is not the way to ensure her own safety or financial security. In many ways, her female assistant Fidelia is a good example of where behaving like the Injured Lady will get you. Fidelia’s family are Castilio’s tenants, and after he came across her he became infatuated and determined to possess her sexually. While her father ‘refused at first to comply’ with Castilio’s demands, he eventually capitulated ‘lest Castilio, in whose power he was, should turn him out of his farm’ (61). Castilio did not rape Fidelia but seduced her by promising marriage and then, as soon as they had sex, protested about the impossible situation in which he found himself, as a landlord could not possibly marry the daughter of one of his tenants (62). Sophia avoids the fate of the Injured Lady and fights for her survival in a world that seems pitted against her, maintaining her right to exercise her consent as a necessary precondition for sex and marriage. In this she acts as an example of self-sufficiency and self-authorisation to the initial readers of the novel.


    This page titled Part III is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jarlath Killeen via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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