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Article Excerpt
Ellis Cornelia Knight's (1757-1837) Dinarbas: a Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1790) explicitly claims the text of a male author as Knight's inspiration. The title and subtitle of Knight's tale invoke Samuel Johnson's 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Knight responds to Johnson's Rasselas by taking the title of his last chapter, "The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded," as her cue and justification for writing Dinarbas. In her introduction, Knight refers to "Sir John Hawkins [who], in his life of Dr. Johnson, says, 'that the writer had an intention of marrying his hero, and placing him in a state of permanent felicity.'" (1) Knight quotes this statement made by Johnson's biographer in 1787 (2) in order to provide herself with an implicit permission to finish what Johnson had left incomplete:
This passage [Hawkins's] suggested the idea of the continuation now offered, with the greatest diffidence, to the reader, and without any thought of a vain and presumptuous comparison; as every attempt to imitate the energetic stile, strong imagery, and profound knowledge, of the author of Rasselas, would be equally rash with that of the suitors to bend the bow of Ulysses. (9)
Knight justifies her decision to write a more optimistic continuation of Rasselas, the "inimitable tale," (9) by modestly bowing before Johnson's authority and by claiming that she is neither vain nor presumptuous. Knight's invocation of the "want of genius and literary fame of its [Dinarbas's] author" (10) is a move typical for women authors of the time, which enabled them to publish their stories while echoing the contemporary discourse of female propriety and privacy. Flattery of literary authorities and self-belittling gestures are central elements of this strategy. (3) Yet, although Knight claims that the quality of her tale is secondary to that of Rasselas, it soon becomes clear that she has no intention of quietly existing in Johnson's shadow. In this respect, Knight's introduction is a reflection of the larger strategy at work in her 1790 novel. In Dinarbas, Knight employs existing literary and social conventions in ways that allow her to appear nonthreatening to the status quo while, at the same time, carving out a space for divergence at a time when the social fabric of Western Europe was undergoing violent and tumultuous change.
I argue that Knight's adaptation of existing literary and social conventions constitutes an act of "strategic conformism," a phrase which I establish in reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism." Spivak describes this concept as a "strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" in order "to retrieve the subaltern consciousness" (Spivak 205). Knight's strategy of invoking and seemingly conforming to literary and social tradition allows her ultimately to create a space where her "political interest" can be witnessed, namely her expression of an alternative philosophy of life, what Johnson's characters call the "choice of life" (33). She lets a "subaltern," a female voice, speak, one which has frequently been silenced by the dominant discourse of the time. Knight's writing is a constant balancing act; her strategic conformism to contemporary literary genres enables her to critique social structures, gender roles, and political leadership in ways that are "scrupulously visible" at a time during which they are open to radical redefinition.
While Knight's strategic citing of convention was a factor in the novel's success in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, (4) Dinarbas gradually fell into oblivion during the course of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century the novel was obliterated from the writing of literary history and was considered a reactionary novel by a woman author. Only in the past decade has there been a renewed interest in understanding the complexity and ambivalence of Dinarbas. (5) The exclusion of Knight's novel can be ascribed to a double paradox. Dinarbas--like so many novels by women authors of the time--became a victim of what Clifford Siskin has termed the "Great Forgetting that became The Great Tradition" (195), the neglect of every woman author in the period 1700-1830 in Britain except Jane Austen. Yet, when, in the early 1970s, the misogynist hold on literary history was weakened by the advent of feminist criticism, novels such as Dinarbas continued to be excluded and overlooked with embarrassment as the result of a logic that focused on the recovery of women's texts that were either explicitly feminist and socially radical themselves--such as Mary Woll-stonecraft's writings, for example--or that could be placed in the category "domestic novel" established under the umbrella of Jane Austen's fiction. (6) Authors who--like Ellis Cornelia Knight--did not fit into either of those categories because their writing was characterized by a complex mixture of genres and an ambivalent response to social and political changes, caused unease in a newly emerging field still establishing its own bearings and parameters.
The ambivalence of Knight's strategic conformism is a result of the manner in which the author entered the literary sphere. While Knight's mother claimed that Dinarbas was written to entertain her when she was ill (Messenger, "Editor's Introduction" 3), the novel's genesis can also be attributed to the financial situation which Knight and her mother had to confront as a result of the death of their provider, Sir John Knight, a naval officer who had been knighted and promoted to rear admiral of the White (Uphaus 435). Knight's mother applied for a government pension without success and the family was facing difficult times. Knight's decision to publish the novel that her mother claims was merely written for her amusement has to be situated in the context of the late eighteenth century, in which writing was one of the few means for an impoverished woman from the upper middle class to engage in a financially remunerative activity without throwing disrepute on the woman or her family. (7) Even though Knight published her novel anonymously and delegated negotiations with the publisher to a family friend while she was traveling abroad, the identity of the author soon became known. (8) Responding to a popular text by one of the major authors of the period, Johnson, whom she also knew personally, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, writing what she herself called a "continuation" (Knight 7) of Rasselas provided the opportunity for success and financial reward. On the other hand, it was a dangerous undertaking since it invited comparisons to Johnson. As a result, Knight had to be respectful of her model while creating a new tale that would interest readers. In a similar way, Knight needed to address contemporary social and political issues with circumspection. Although she was part of the establishment and socialized with the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Knight was also very much at the mercy of benefactors who could support her socially and financially. After her mother's death, Knight was placed in the care of Sir William Hamilton--British ambassador to the court of Naples--and Lord Nelson, who would become the most celebrated admiral of the French Revolutionary Wars. Later on, she became lady companion to Princess Charlotte of Wales, granddaughter of the Queen of England. All of her life Knight occupied a precarious and ambivalent space in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the late eighteenth century, an ambivalence that her autobiographical and fictional writings reflect. (9)
One of the ways for negotiating her precarious position with respect to literary and social authority was to write a novel that allowed her to appear conformist while subtly voicing criticism of existing social realities. By maintaining the physical displacement of her model--Johnson's tale takes place in the half-real, half-legendary kingdom of Abissinia (10)--Knight achieves two purposes: she pays homage to Johnson's fictional craft while at the same time exploring the possibilities for oblique social commentary presented by the fashionably remote setting. Yet, whereas in Rasselas the Abissinian setting mainly serves as a backdrop for the characters' philosophical discussions about life, in Dinarbas Knight explores the narrative possibilities of the exotic terrain to create a story that, as Ann Messenger puts it, is a "much busier book than Rasselas, with battles, treachery, politics, love affairs, and other adventures" (His and Hers 201). While it is as difficult to classify Knight's text generically as it is to categorize Johnson's Rasselas, Dinarbas bears elements that make it akin to the genre of the romance. Two aspects trigger this resemblance and both of them differentiate Knight's novel from Rasselas. The characters in Dinarbas undergo a series of adventures, encounter obstacles, and engage in battles to prove their honor, all of which allow Knight to obliquely discuss leadership and social class. In addition, the characters' amorous quests thematize the relation between the sexes and the connection between love and marriage. In Knight's text, the characters explore these issues through their actions, whereas in Rasselas they merely discuss and philosophize about them. By loosely following the genre of the romance, Knight thematizes two elements simultaneously, an individual's public role in society and his/her private identity, of which the domestic forms only one, though an important, part. At the same time that her novel is a reflection of this discursive binary, it is also an acknowledgment of the limitations of this construct since her characters' actions repeatedly demonstrate the interdependence of the public and the private spheres. Knight explores the tensions, paradoxes, and ambiguities that shape an individual's public and private roles. Dinarbas therefore forces readers to rethink the Habermasian binary (11) and to question simplifying receptions of Habermas's theories, which equate "private" with "domestic" and gloss over the fact that Habermas himself argues that the "private sphere" is a complex construct which cannot be limited to the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (Structural 51) because the private connects the domestic to the public in a variety of ways. (12) In her strategic conformism to ideological constructs, Knight...
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