ABSTRACT
Around the mid-eighteenth century, several women-Teresia Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and Frances Anne, Viscountess Vane-published vindicatory texts. Their place in literary history where it has figured at all has been that given them by Samuel Richardson, who reviled them as a ‘Set of Wretches, wishing to perpetuate their Infamy’.1 Recent critics, however, have declined to see them as moral scarecrows and have looked instead for more productive ways of reading them. Chief among these is Felicity Nussbaum who analyses how ‘women’s representation escapes its policing to threaten patriarchal relations as the scandalous memoirs negotiate the culture’s clashes over character, class and gender in published texts’.2 Janet Todd treats them briefly as examples of female nonconformity whose attempts at rebellion failed because of their inability to respond to a historically rising tide of sentiment and moralizing which then swept them away.3 Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a helpful frame by which to read them in her investigation of gossip as a significant and pejoratively gendered eighteenth-century discourse.4 The increasingly accepted designation of these texts as ‘scandalous memoirs’ seems to represent a current consensus on their engagement with transgressive discourse (scandalous) and their generic role of producing a self in historical relation to society (memoirs). The interpretation I wish to put forward in this chapter takes up both these concerns but develops them to explore the ways in which self-representations compete with social productions
of identity, and how both relate in some surprising ways to the law as a regulating discourse. Agreeing with Nussbaum that the construction of a subject in these texts is more a matter of process than product, my focus is not only on gendered subjects and subjects in gender relations, but also on the interlocking and competing discourses within which subject positions are negotiated. This involves taking a fresh look at what might be meant by scandal, and comparing it to the law as a mechanism of definition and control.
