Romance Self-Fashioning and the Proto-Gothic in Mary Pix's The Inhumane Cardinal

This essay argues that Mary Pix's The Inhumane Cardinal (1696) should be read as a precursor to Gothic fiction, providing a missing link between, on the one hand, medieval and Renaissance romances and, on the other, the late eighteenth-century revival of romance writing in the form of the Gothic novel. The generic self-fashioning of Pix's novel plays out mostly through a focus on the power of narrative, which the novel presents as a means of active manipulation, thus serving as a warning to potential readers not to get fully drawn into the invented worlds of fiction. Notes1Ballaster, Seductive Forms.2Staves; Trotter's novel first appeared anonymously, bearing the title The Adventures of a Young Lady.3Little research has been done on pre-eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, and this despite the fact that all critics seem to agree that Walpole and others drew substantially on earlier forms. One of the first to acknowledge this was Edith Birkhead, whose The Tale of Terror (1921) points to Bunyan, Brown and Burton as examples of how the supernatural played a role in literature and popular culture, but then quickly moves on to Addison's famous Spectator essay (5). Birkhead points out, however, that ghosts disappear from early eighteenth-century novels only to reappear in Otranto (12). See also Punter; and Smith.4That M. G. Lewis was inspired by a number of earlier publications was already held against him by contemporary reviewers, with references to Mary Pix missing, however; see Birkhead (68), who points to the discussion of the book in The Monthly Review (June 1797), which notes that “the great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors” (The Monthly Review, 451).5Cf. Elam and her strange (ab)use of realism.6Pix's critique of romance fiction precedes that by JaneBarker, The Lining to the Patchwork Screen (1726), and Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor (1715); see also Charles Gildon, The Postboy Robb'd of his Mail (1692), on how male suitors should time their attack after the woman had read romances (237); and Delarivier Manley, Atalantis (1709, 67): these and other texts are discussed by Perry, 154–5.7E. J. Clery discusses the Graveyard poets as precursors to Gothic fiction and points out that they, like Pix, were engaged in “a critical balancing act” that oscillated “between the rational beliefs of Protestantism and irrational Catholicism” (28). She furthermore claims that Shakespeare's influence on Gothic romance writing can be explained through his own position “between Gothic and enlightened times” (Clery, 30). On the impact that such generational dislocations had on Renaissance romance writing, see also Das.8The historical figures are discussed by Chadwick, 303; see also Herman. Pix's title figure, the cardinal, is obviously named after Antonio Barberini, a notorious rake (Herman, 84) and nephew to Pope Innocent X's predecessor, Urban VIII (ibid., 74). Innocent's rule of nepotism ended with the scandal surrounding the Pope and his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maidalchini. Pix is not the first English Restoration author to fictionalize Olimpia: Richard Brathwaite's allegorical The History of Moderation (1669) has a Donna Olimpia who is not only a daughter to Moderation's enemy Disobedience but also sister to the prostitute Porne. Olimpia stands out in Brathwaite's work by being almost the only character directly named after a historical figure.9Ros Ballaster has discussed the “complex interplay” between the “two poles of vision and writing” in Behn's narrative fiction, and her analysis applies equally well to Pix's Gothic tale, where the author aims to accommodate both her sense of female agency and the traditional romantic structure of male dominance; see Ballaster, “Pretences of State,” 202.10Pix, 1.11Ibid., 4.12Austen.13Pix, 8–9.14See the letter by Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Rich, dated 20 September 1716, where she writes enthusiastically about women in Vienna being valued for their mind and not their body; Montagu, I:270.15Dale Spender points to a similar inner conflict when she discusses the gendered power structure of the novel (113). However, unlike Spender, I see in Pix's work a more nuanced and critical intervention with these stereotypes.16Kilgour, 6. See also Jean-Michel Ganteau's essay for a cross-historical survey of the romance mode, which shows that a number of its textual features have remained fairly stable across the centuries.17Sonja Villegas López (232) relates this discourse of truth to the origins of the novel, thus following a concept introduced by Michael McKeon.18Pix, 15.19Northrop Frye explicitly links this rhetorical trope to the genre of romance when he argues that “the message of all romance is de te fabula: the story is about you; and it is the reader who is responsible for the way literature functions, both socially and individually” (186).20Pix, 16.21See Dolven for the tradition of didactic writing within the Renaissance romance.22Pix, 28.23Bunyan.24The tension visible in Pix's text thus replicates that between romance and novelistic modes, where “a factor in the dismissal of ancient romance was the association with Catholic superstition” (Clery, 26).25Pix, 78. Late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction will pick up on this theme and frequently have a character who strives to return to his rightful title, having to fight against a usurper: see Otranto or Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron and their discussion by Clery (33–4).26Ballaster, “Pretences of State,” 194; drawing on Felman.27Pix, 79–80.28Ibid., 80.29Sidney.30It is with this feature that Pix moves beyond the kind of anti-romance writing found in Mary Wroth's Urania (1621) and its critical engagement with the trope of male love and devotion. While Wroth's work (in addition to being firmly ensconced in the class-based system of social hierarchies) struggles with the emotional toll caused by an untrue lover, Pix drops all pretenses of love and instead concentrates on how romances support male desire.31Pix, 40.32Late in the novel, one of Barbarino's servants returns, driven by his bad conscience, in order to rescue the poor damsel Melora. Even this relatively minor figure is narrowly based on another historical person, Gualterio Gualtieri, who tired of having to provide sexual services to Barberini and complained in public about his master, which in turn led to him being sent to the front lines and dying a suspicious death (Herman, 84). Barberini is also remembered for hosting, at the Palazzo Barberini in 1642, notorious performances of Luigi Rossi's Il palazzo incantato (The Enchanted Palace), an opera based on Ariosto's Orlando furioso; see the section of Chapter 13 dedicated to this work in Hammond.33Again, one notes the echoes from Sidney's Old Arcadia, which also ends with the arrival of a judge and king, Euarchus, who re-establishes order (see Das, 63–4). The post-Catholic moment of the Glorious Revolution at which Pix writes this novel adds further layers to her conclusion: Sidney's use of rape relies on episodes in Livy's History that serve to condemn the sexual licenses of monarchical rule and presents republicanism as the favourable option. Pix's portrayal of a ruthless Catholic cardinal turns to the romance tradition for political commentary about recent events in London; see also Shuger. For a discussion of Pix's uses of she-tragedy and, particularly, of rape in her play Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks, see Marsden, in particular pages 105–12.34Lara L. Runge has described a similarly conflicted moment of ideological affiliation in the dedication that Pix appended to The Inhumane Cardinal, which praises Princess Anne of Denmark, the daughter of James II who would ascend to the English throne in 1702; see Runge, 370.35Maggie Kilgour provides a useful survey of all the critical voices that have pointed out that the Gothic was frequently confused and inconsistent when it comes to its political and ideological messages.36Parker, 4. Nandini Das has recently argued that Renaissance romance was also caught in such an in-between stage, driven by generational and cultural ruptures (12).37See Villegas López.38See Parker; Fuchs; and Elam, whose equation of the romance mode with the postmodern predicament (problematic as it is in particular due to her inconsistent use of genre concepts) does shed light on why Pix's text can be both proto- and post-Gothic: like postmodern irony it both debunks and aims to intervene critically, revealing a commitment to the project of literature and the importance and power of the arts to affect change. Drawing on earlier criticism, one could also see in Pix's novel a wonderful example of the Bakhtinian force of polyphony in that it leaves equal room for such glaringly disparate world views with respect to the role that women should take, both in their engagements with suitors and in their role as readers. However, whereas Mikhail Bakhtin would prefer such heteroglossia to remain unresolved, Pix clearly takes sides and thus promotes the message in her work.39See Frye; and Jameson.40On the double encoding of postmodern art (conservative and revolutionary), see Foster; and Hutcheon; on the Jameson/Frye debate, see Elam, 20

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