Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812

Lisa Vargo is an associate professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Empowering the Feminine is a continuation of Ty’s first monograph,
Unsex’d Revolutionaries (1993), a study of five radical women
novelists of the 1790s. Her intention is to broaden her previous focus
by considering three writers from different social and ideological
backgrounds who don’t espouse feminist sentiments: Mary Robinson, an
actress, poet, and novelist; Jane West, who wrote poetry, plays, and
didactic fiction to support her family; and novelist Amelia Opie, who
eventually became a Quaker. Their works belong to a period of
conservative response toward the radicalism of the French Revolution,
when the clarion call of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the
Rights of Woman was silenced by her death.

Rather than dismiss these writers as retrograde, Ty demonstrates their
relevance to our knowledge of the period and to our own understanding of
notions of gender and identity, female selfhood, domesticity, and the
power of the maternal. “Empowering the feminine” is Ty’s phrase
for the way Robinson, West, and Opie challenge notions of female
inferiority by valorizing positive female qualities. But this is a
double-edged gesture. Their strategies of making what appear to be
female weaknesses into forces for social change have the effect of
simultaneously reinforcing the very limitations placed on women by
society.

In tracing how the writers empower women through the feminine
attributes of docility, maternal feeling, and sensibility, Ty organizes
her study into an introduction, a three- or four-chapter section on each
writer, and an afterword. She employs close analysis; attention to
historical, literary, and social contexts; biography; and feminist and
poststructuralist literary theory to examine notions of gender,
identity, and female selfhood in narratives about marriage, motherhood,
and the family. The result is a readable and illuminating study of three
women writers who, celebrated in their own times, have been subsequently
ignored by literary history. It is Ty’s intention in this
groundbreaking work to be exploratory and rehabilitative so as to
encourage alternative readings of their works.