Early Women Writers and Self-Representation

In recent decades, a host of feminists and canon-revisionists have taken up the questions posed by the many neglected and effaced women writers who saturated the early modern marketplace with their work. Ros Ballaster, Jane Spencer, Janet Todd, and Catherine Gallagher are among the most significant of these critics.

In a review of Gallagher's Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1750, Ros Ballaster summarizes her colleague's argument:

Nobody's Story offers a fascinating and complex exploration of the textual strategies adopted by five 'representative' women writers of the Restoration and the eighteenth century in order to produce effective 'imaginary' identities for themselves as authors. Both male and female writers in this period, Gallagher asserts, represent their experience of authorship as one of dispossession, a form of disappearance under the commodification of the book as a product of their alienated labour; however, women sexualize and exaggerate this rhetoric from a gender-specific perspective. The negotiation with a sense of dis-possession, from Aphra Behn's cryptic self-inscription as 'prostitute-nothing' through Frances Burney's youthful construction of the addressee of her journal as female 'nobody' to Maria Edgeworth's expressed anxiety over 'absenteeism', was formative, Gallagher discovers, in the promotion of fiction as a place of self-production for reader and author alike, a century-long process which results in the dominance of the novel form and...pre-eminence of feminized 'virtues' within it.... Manufacturing selves from 'nothing', the anonymity of print culture, the gap between the representation and the real, these are productive mechanisms for these women writers, enabling them to figure power in the marketplace through their acts or re-enactments of vanishing.

In Oroonoko, one of the most notable narrative strategies is the way that Behn parses out the relationship between her narrator and her subject. Hers is but a "Female Pen" (40), telling the story of a "Royal Slave" that bears a striking conceptual resemblance to James II; in the end, she hopes that "the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages" (73). At points, we are confronted with the sneaking suspicion that Oroonoko is really less about this royal slave, however, than the woman writing his story. Given what Gallagher is arguing about the way that women writers play this game of vanishing, how might Behn's narrator be figuring herself as an author? How can we begin to understand the narrator's construction of authorial worth in print?

And finally, considering the ending of "Fantomina," we might very well ask the same thing--how does Haywood seem to use the images of feminine insubstance that haunt her fiction? After all, as Gracie noted in her post, we don't ever know her real name--all we have are her constructions, which themselves emphatically gesture toward an almost performative subjectivity. It is significant, too, that Fantomina's false name is the title of Haywood's text. But even at the end, when we think her body is about to ground her evermore in the real world she so desperately seeks to evade by self-construction, Fantomina disappears into a not-undesirable convent. How might we read the endiing of "Fantomina" in terms of the woman writer's construction of self in a marketplace of print?