Gender and memory in post-Revolutionary women’s writing

In the aftermath of the French Revolution crisis many women writers in Britain and elsewhere exploited conventional models of femininity and domesticity. They did so partly to avoid the opprobrium and defeminization that had attached to womens writing on public and political issues during the Revolution debate of the 1790s. ¹ They also did so, however, to sustain the kinds of intervention in the public, political sphere that women writers had achieved through the oppositional, pre-Revolutionary literature of Sensibility and in the Revolution debate. Post-Revolutionary women writers sustained or subsumed these achievements — paradoxically it may seem — by working largely within the re-emphasis on the domestic ideology that was a leading concern and characteristic of the Revolutionary aftermath. ² These writers did so by representing themselves and the role of women as social mediators, political reconcilers, and reproducers and custodians of cultural continuity. These were vital cultural roles and issues after a prolonged Revolutionary cataclysm that seemed to many to have radically undermined confidence in continuity and identity of all kinds - personal and social, cultural and temporal, national and imperial. In the Revolutionary aftermath the restoration of such confidence became a pressing and widespread concern in cultural production. The theme of memory proved especially useful during this restoration for developing a discourse of personal, social, cultural, historical, and national identity and continuity. Memory of various kinds became a focus both for a horrified fascination with ruptures in discourse and for a fervent quest for reparatory and therapeutic practices in subjectivity, society, culture, and politics.