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Part IV

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    26443
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    Making meaning, symbolically spreading, the situations in which these characters find themselves resonate with the struggles of identity and self-authorisation the Irish Anglican enclave was also undergoing in the mid-eighteenth century. Although I am suggesting that Sophia is usefully read as in some ways a representation of Ireland, Horatio of Irish Anglican patriotism, and Castilio of English rapacity, this should not be taken to mean that the characters operate in a straightforward allegorical manner. Sophia is not an allegorical Ireland – the meanings with which she is invested symbolically spread out to incorporate Irish national politics and make her a close relation of the Injured Lady and the wronged women of the aisling. Similarly, Horatio is not an allegory of the Irish Anglican patriot enclave, but he does speak its language and his story can be read as providing an oblique commentary on Irish Patriot discourse of the mid-eighteenth century. The stories of Sophia, Horatio and Castilio should be read contiguously with the politics of the time and they operate as ways to think through the kinds of political struggles being waged in the period.

    Fighting for her own survival, Sophia is one of a long line of protagonists of the eighteenth-century novel who have, essentially, to make their own identities in a hostile world which has left them orphans. In Adultery in the Novel (1979), Tony Tanner argues that the eighteenthcentury novel often centres on outsiders such as orphans, prostitutes or adventurers who embody and represent the radical experimental status of the novel itself in its beginnings. These social outsiders carry ‘unstabilized energy’ that threatens ‘directly or implicitly, the organisation of society, whether by the indeterminacy of their origin, the uncertainty of the direction in which they will focus their unbonded energy, or their attitude toward the ties that hold society together and that they may choose to slight or break’.64 Emerging from a marginal space, from a kind of orphaned people, Irish Anglicans, a trouble-making group of Patriots rioting in the streets, demanding rights and institutions commensurate with these rights, making radical gestures towards another marginal group of people (Irish Catholics), searching for identity in a rather indeterminate manner, Sophia Berkley gestures towards some potentially radical solutions to the existential problems being suffered by its initial readers (solutions which would eventually come to fruition in the formation of the United Irelanders).

    Sophia’s literal orphanhood is mirrored by her existential loneliness and the feeling that the world is an unfriendly one, but Irish Anglicans were likewise spending a great deal of time attempting to extricate themselves from parental figures and negotiate an independent identity of their own. For too long had Irish Anglicans depended on the rhetoric of family affection connecting them to the ‘parent’ country, England, only for this affection to be taken advantage of when England routinely acted in self-interest. Samuel Madden in 1738 wrote of England as ‘our true Parent and Protector . . . who must wound herself whenever, through inadvertence she hurts us.’65 This rhetoric of familial harmony was eventually revealed as wishful thinking. The realisation that England would indeed act in self-interest and have no difficulties in wounding Ireland came slowly, but eventually Wood’s halfpenny dropped – owing to a number of factors, including (but not limited to) the Treaty of Limerick, the Woollen Act 1699, the ‘sole rights’ dispute of the 1690s, Annesley v Sherlock 1717–19, the Declaratory Act 1720, the Wood’s Halfpence crisis and, finally, the Money Bill dispute of 1753 – and a spirit of independency and even rebellion began to motivate Irish Anglican patriotic voices. Many realised that the time was ripe to break away from parents and parent figures and embrace adulthood and adult identity.

    As I have explained, Irish Anglican identity was famously confused in the eighteenth century, and many different self-identifying labels were adopted, including: the ‘English of Ireland’, ‘the gentlemen of Ireland’, ‘the Protestant interest’, ‘the whole people of Ireland’, and even ‘Irish’ (enthusiastically, or in resignation). Jim Smyth has called Irish Anglicans ‘amphibious creatures’, two things at once, but this in fact underestimates the degree of confusion involved.66 In realising that the ‘mother land’ had abandoned them, many felt they were now on their own, and this realisation brought a kind of existential crisis to bear. The novel form is one place where such existential crises could be resolved, and for Tanner, that many protagonists of major eighteenth-century novels are orphans allows them to begin the process of self-constitution without always having to look behind them for the permission of their elders. After the death of her parents, and the apparent murder of her fiancé, Sophia is all alone in the world, and it is up to her to establish her own identity. She leaves her home place, ‘where every object recalled to me some past misery’, and ‘determined to go to London . . .’ (40), where she ‘was now exposed to a faithless world, unfriended and alone!’ (42). What she comes to realise, though she never expresses this very clearly, is that she is better off without the parental baggage represented by her father (as Anglican Ireland was coming to realise, in its rejection of union with its ‘parent’ England, that it too was better off without Big Daddy), because her father was so completely useless at his job. Although she speaks of him with affection, the information the reader is provided with concerning him is conclusive in demonstrating his status as a bad father.

    While clearly better off without her father, Sophia does appear at a disadvantage without her mother, although her loss undoubtedly disturbs Sophia, and she mentions it a number of times as a running sore in her life. Of course, the absence of the mother in Gothic fiction became commonplace very quickly. As Ruth Bienstock Anolik points out in her article ‘The Missing Mother’, ‘the mothers of most Gothic heroines are [typically] dead long before the readers meet the daughters’,67 prominent examples being the mothers of Isabella in The Castle of Otranto (1764) and of Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Missing a mother, mother-substitutes are often sought, and Sophia certainly finds them in a number of female characters who assist her, including her friends Isabella, Constantia, Fidelia and, most prominently, Mrs Williams. Carolyn Dever argues that the absence of the mother causes particular problems for fictional daughters, that it ‘creates a mystery for her . . . to solve, motivating time and again the redefinition . . . of female decorum, gender roles, and sexuality’ and that ‘maternal loss prompts anxieties that undermine a protagonist’s efforts to construct an identity’.68 The kinds of existential void into which Sophia seems to be about to fall at times may be partially explained by the haunting absence of the mother, and there is a sense in which, for Sophia’s identity crisis to be brought to a conclusion, the lost mother must be restored and reclaimed (or incorporated) into her self.

    The death of Sophia’s mother is not merely an unfortunate event that happened long before she was born and an event which has traumatised her; it is plainly caused by two men: Sophia’s father and grandfather. Sophia is the product of a highly unsuitable marriage in which her mother was badly treated by both her father and her husband. Sophie’s mother dies ‘before I was a year old’, and she is left in the hands of her father, who has already demonstrated he is not much good at protecting women from disaster. Although her father is ‘a man of strict honour; possessed of many great and excellent qualities’ he is also ‘naturally hasty and impatient of control’ and ‘a little inclined to extravagance’ (6): in other words, he is financially incompetent. He received a ‘considerable’ fortune from his post in the army but ‘this, though not inconsiderable, was hardly sufficient for a man whose ideas were like his’ (7). It is very significant that Sophia’s mother is not simply ‘lost’ through death at the start of the novel but is also lost a second time when Sophia misplaces a watch containing her picture when she loiters on the beach with Horatio. The transition here seems simple enough – Sophia must abandon her mother completely if she is to enter fully into maturity and marry, and therefore the mother is left by the sea (a feminine space anyway) and will be fully left behind when Sophia marries and takes on the mother’s role by becoming pregnant. This second loss of the mother, however, sends Sophia into a panic, and it is when Horatio returns to the beach to retrieve the watch that he is attacked, and apparently murdered.

    Leaving behind and forgetting this mother are dangerous things to do, and this incident perhaps serves as a warning that such marginal women should not be abandoned so easily. Importantly, Horatio returns to Sophia in her dreams and visions as a penetrated and bleeding body whose image terrifies and traumatises her again: ‘if I closed my eyes but an instant, Horatio’s image arose to my imagination all pale and bleeding’ (34). The male body leaking and bleeding is a feminised image connected to the abject body of the dead and absent mother. Indeed, the vision of Horatio, covered with blood and stab wounds evokes the image of the menstruating woman, essentially reminding Sophia of what a marriage with him would bring (childbirth and complete identification with the reviled female).69 The forgotten mother returns, then, in a particularly violent and horrific way, perhaps as a warning of what happens when such women are left on the scrap heap of history.

    Images of the menstruating woman recur later in the plot when Sophia uses menstruation as a way of avoiding sex with Castilio, claiming she is ‘ill’ with (mysterious) pains and therefore cannot possibly have intercourse with him. Drawing such direct attention to her menstruation should, by cultural logic, configure Sophia as polluted and abjected, particularly given that she is still a nineteen-year-old adolescent. As Shelley Stamp Lindsey emphasizes, in Western culture, ‘poised between natural and supernatural realms . . . the menstruating adolescent girl occupies a liminal state, an object of both aversion and desire’.70 However, as for later Gothic heroines such as Carrie White in Stephen King’s first novel (1974) or Ginger Fitzgerald in the film Ginger Snaps (2000; dir. John Fawcett), menstruation actually propels Sophia to heroic stature as she uses it to demonstrate her resistance to the demands of the sexual economy. What is particularly horrifying about Castilio, given the consistent representation of the menstruating girl in Western culture as reviled, is that he doesn’t seem put off by Sophia’s leakage, and still wants to have sex with her – a fact which could partially explain why he is represented in such extreme terms in the novel.

    What Margrit Shildrick calls the ‘leaky body’ of the woman makes female characters monstrous and dangerous to a culture whose central, idealised figure is the whole, clean, differentiated body of the man.71 In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva writes that the abject as a ‘jettisoned object . . . is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses . . . it lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree with a [superego’s] rules of the game’.72 Yet, far from Castilio feeling polluted by touching the menstruating girl, or revolted by her emission, it is the menstruating Sophia who is polluted by his presence, feeling herself ‘contaminated by his touch’ (74). Here, it is the monstrous male who is the contaminator and polluter, and Sophia uses her menstruation to gain time for herself and plot ways of escape. Far from being a disadvantage, menstruation is useful here as a way to empower a woman under the threat of rape.

    Castilio is a monstrous version of the patriarchal order that Sophia has repeatedly encountered in the more benign guise in her father. Both her father and Castilio possess the power to completely destroy women. Castilio, with his insatiable sexual appetite, which extends so far as to include the desire to rape a menstruating woman, is a kind of Phallus Magnus, an absolute version of the man as monster. Linda Williams (in looking at the reaction of men and women to manifestations of the monstrous in horror) has argued that women tend to look more sympathetically at monsters as they see representations of themselves in the monster’s reviled body. According to Williams, where a man can see only ‘a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack’ the woman ‘recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference’. 73 For the woman, the monster is a kind of mirror. This, however, is not at all how Sophia reacts to Castilio, and she feels no sense of identification with him but only an acute awareness of how this monster is an existential threat to her.

    Traditionally, woman-as-monster is primarily represented in relation to her sexuality, with particular emphasis on the abjection of her reproductive organs. Kristeva has defined abjection as that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’.74 In a society founded on the law of the father, where the ‘clean and proper body’ is associated with the supposed ‘wholeness’ of the male, woman’s body, with its threatening ‘leakiness’, comes to represent the unclean, improper body, characterised by its menstrual waste – a source of unease, loathing and disgust.75 Thus, woman’s abjection stands as the key for the preservation of patriarchal order since her monstrosity justifies her destruction and re-establishes the symbolic value of the phallus. That Castilio wants to rape Sophia despite the fact that she may be menstruating is actually an indication of how closely he associates woman with abjection: he may as well be fucking her into oblivion since she will more or less disappear as a person once he has had his way with her. In threatening her with rape, Castilio is indicating to Sophia that he has the power to wipe her out of existence, to erase completely her individual identity and propel her into an existential void. Since she understands this, it is no surprise that Sophia indicates that she would prefer death over rape, because death at least does not involve slavery. Forced union is worse than actual death to her because the former includes a devastating loss of subjectivity and agency. This should be remembered when evaluating why a non-consensual union was considered with such horror by Irish Anglicans in the 1750s.

    To reassert her identity and subjectivity, Sophia is forced to become a version of the vagina dentata as she tries to escape Castilio’s mansion. Wielding a knife and cutting her way with her female accomplice through the walls of her prison, she indicates that the marginalised woman is willing to fight back. She has already astonished Castilio in asserting her independence in her conversations with him, demonstrating she has left behind the fragile femininity of which she was indulgent at the start of the novel. During the most protracted conversation between Castilio and Sophia, she insists, ‘I am prepared for your brutality; but the very moment you attempt to exercise it upon me, I shall make use of the only means left to free myself from your detested power’, upon which declaration ‘Castilio seemed amazed at me’ because ‘he had no opinion of a woman’s courage’ (72). The castrated woman in horror fiction is often identified with the passive, tame, domesticated victim, who is chased and destroyed by the male monster/castrator.76 Obvious examples here are Matilda in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Antonia in Lewis’s The Monk, Amanda in Maria Regina Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796), right up to Mimi in Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the 138 The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction White Worm (1911). Sophia rejects this passive state, and by the light of the moon (which ‘shone very bright’, 77), the symbol of the menstruating woman, and with a phallic pen-knife in hand (69), she hacks her way to freedom, transforming herself in the act into a phallic woman. The powerful woman is often represented in horror fiction as a monstrous figure, a devouring creature, destructive, savage, aggressive, who uses knives or her sharp teeth to incorporate her victims:77 Lucy in Dracula, Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct (1992; dir. Paul Verhoeven), or even Jennifer Hills in I Spit on Your Grave (1978; dir. Meir Zarchi), for example. However, while in misogynistic horror the phallic woman is constructed as a grotesque parody of a man,78 in Sophia Berkley she is celebrated as a heroine. Clair Kahane and Susan Wolstenholme have both read the confined spaces in which Gothic heroines are enclosed as representations of the female body,79 and therefore the supposedly menstruating Sophia’s forced escape from this enclosed space can be seen as a destruction of that suffocating body and her full emergence into individuality. Her friend, another abjected female, acts like a kind of midwife to Sophia’s birth, though she herself is (possibly mortally) injured in the birth.

    Far from abjecting women, this text confers a heroic power on them, understandable coming from a country which had been gendered female and therefore weak for centuries. Far from denigrating the castrating and phallic woman, it suggests that certain men need to be castrated and that women should be the ones to do it. Moreover, the episode where Mademoiselle de Bellville appears disguised as a man becomes meaningful in the context of the struggle against the undermining of the powerful woman in eighteenth-century Irish culture. Horatio is saved from execution by a cross-dressing woman, the Mademoiselle de Bellville (pretending to be a man called Clerimont80), and when her true identity is revealed the crowd become delirious: ‘the people followed us with loud huzzas all the way’ (147). The Mademoiselle de Bellville’s actions demonstrate that women are as brave as men. ‘I would have died for you, Horatio’ (167), she declares, and although she, like Isabella, retires into a convent with a broken heart, she tells him to remember that France is a place populated by such admirable women as herself: ‘Remember, when you are in England, there are women here not unworthy of your esteem – I had almost said your tenderness’ (168). This is daring for a novel published in 1760. In actually making the cross-dressing woman a hero(ine) rather than an object of fear and disgust, the novel again legitimates the powerful woman over the weak man. Having his head cut off would have been the most straightforward act of emasculation the novel could have performed on Horatio, and it stops just short of this by having him saved by a woman dressed as a man, a performance she seems very capable of getting away with.

    There was an obsession with the cross-dressing women in eighteenthcentury culture, and she was most often configured as an individual of threat and danger. As Catherine Craft-Fairchild has emphasised, while factual accounts of cross-dressing women sometimes praised them for their attempt to enter masculine life to earn money for their children, in fiction, the cross-dressing woman was ‘blamed and punished’.81 Notably, one such female cross dresser ‘outed’ herself in 1755 in Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, where she explained how she had passed as a man for years, even to the point of getting married to a woman. Craft-Fairchild outlines that while such real transvestites were treated with relative respect, in a number of important fictional treatments of female cross-dressing, the transgressive woman is the cause of anxiety rather than celebration. For example, in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719–20), when Moletta disguises herself as a page to follow the Count D’Elmont to France, her father contracts a fever. In Mary Davy’s The Accomplished Rake (1727), a cross-dressing woman causes her husband to die. Most famously, in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), Harriet Freke is monstered through and because of her crossdressing, a transgression that links her with revolutionary violence and radical immorality. Darryl Jones explains that Mrs Freke, the ‘sadistic cross-dressing lesbian’, is ‘the pre-eminent 1790s “unsex’d female”, the demonic political woman’.82

    Not so, however, in Sophia Berkley, whose transvestite is celebrated as brave, intelligent and brilliant, or as Horatio says, ‘had not my heart been already fixed for ever, the appearance and manners of Mademoiselle de Bellville would have engaged my whole attention’ (124). ‘She was, I think, the most perfect character I ever knew’ (125). Of course, by the time Horatio has returned to England he has proved himself to be a worthy husband to Sophia, and as different from her father as could be imagined, accepting and admiring of the powerful woman, and completely loyal and true to his first love. If his loud proclamations of his love of liberty should be read as echoing Irish Anglican patriotic opinion, then his reappearance following his apparent death suggests that, although some Patriot leaders like Henry Boyle appeared to have abandoned the Irish cause in the settlement of the Money Bill dispute, this is only an apparent desertion, and (like Horatio) a leader will eventually rise as if from the dead to reclaim his heroine (Ireland).

    Sophia Berkley is what Nancy K. Miller has called a ‘euphoric’ epistolary novel in that the plot leads to its heroine’s redemption through marriage (as opposed to the ‘dysphoric’ plot which sees the heroine disgraced through seduction and/or death),83 but here this heroine must do most of the identity defining work by herself (and for herself) because the men around her are more often than not incompetent as protectors. In its reconstitution of the abjected female as a powerful agent, the novel offers a way out of the Injured Lady’s trap. Swift could never imagine a female figure with the kind of pluck and power of Sophia or Mademoiselle de Bellville and therefore points the Injured Lady towards the Irish Anglican man as a necessary saviour. In this novel, though, the heroine is as powerful as necessary and quite capable of looking after herself. That she ends up with a liberty-loving, slavery-hating male figure is just a companionate bonus.


    This page titled Part IV 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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