The loss of the female reader: The representation of the female reader in the early eighteenth-century British novel

This dissertation examines the representation of the female reader in the early eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the progress of the novel charts the disappearance of the female reader and the emergence of a generic, essentially male, reader. Moreover, it suggests that Samuel Richardson plays a pivotal role in this transition. Before Clarissa, the female addressee largely served as a sympathetic audience whose express partiality toward the represented female writer enabled her free, and rather scandalous, self-expression. Yet Richardson introduces a much less sympathetic female reader, one who serves to regulate rather than sanction the emotions and expressions of the represented female writer. Indeed, after Clarissa, the sympathetic female reader will cease to be the primary audience of the heroine's tale; instead she will be replaced by a reader sympathetic to the heroine 's story, yet too removed to be considered overly subjective.;In fact, in later works by women writers such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft, the female relationships represented as most sustaining and beneficial to both parties will be those that operate across differences in class or through the auspices of a much-devoted mother. Both of these relationships will be viewed as largely regulatory: they will represent the benevolent exercise of a sympathy which assumes the moral superiority of the bestower. Female relationships will become newly aligned with asymmetrical and hierarchical arrangements. The sympathetic female reader will, in effect, be lost.;Moreover, this dissertation argues that this change in the representation of the female reader has significant consequences for the structure of contemporary sympathetic alliances between women, including attempts to forge politically and personally powerful connections with other women. If the sympathetic female reader is largely written out of a history of reading, then feminist attempts to posit a sympathetic female community are likely to end either in frustration or to reproduce the hierarchical male paradigms which successfully replaced this earlier structure of female alliance.