I find it interesting how Manley manages to ‘life-write’ through unconventional means. The “Adventures of Rivella” are told not by Rivella [DM] herself*, but rather by Lovemore–a former admirer to boot. Bravo madame! What an effective design if her goal is to paint a flattering self-portrait. Though DM is materially responsible for the text, the narrative frame she sets up absolves her of this direct responsibility. Implied (in this structure or mechanism of delivery) is some hidden authority in the reportage, or accounts, of others. The rumor mill, however, also wrecks her reputation, as Lovemore aptly describes. This frame occurs alongside a condensing of that psychologial probity that we saw earlier in Bunyan and Defoe. Lovemore is not omniscient, nor is he the heroine; in reading her life-story, we do so by his selective principle. So far this is pageturner for me…so much happens w/in one page. Events are truncated in this account (exactly how remains TBD), unlike the narrative turn we’ve witnessed in the self-penned, ‘conversion’ texts.
*well, at least as far as I’ve read
–Nancy Derbyshire
Caron K said
Random “Rivella” thoughts:
The last line of “The Adventures of Rivella”-
“…that it would have been a Fault in her, not to have been Faulty,” brought to mind something R.D. Laing said in, I think, “The Politics of Experience,” (something I thought at the time I read it must have been inspired by my ex-husband), “There must be something the matter with him because he thinks there’s nothing the matter with him.”
On authentic desire – wanting someone only when others want them – this must be hard-wired. Have you ever seen small children playing with lots of toys around, and when one child picks up a toy that had hitherto been neglected, it’s suddenly a very in-demand plaything, and they start to fight over it? I have…
Candice’s edition of “Rivella” had another narrative in it by Ambrose Evans or Alex Vendchurch, the title of which was something like, “”Adventures and Surprizes of James Duboundieu and His Wife”…I’m going to see if I can find out anything more about it, and will post…
Caron K said
A Dream Collection for Wealthy Utopians.
Gregory Claeys, ed. Modern British Utopias 1700-1850. 8 vols. Pickering and Chatto (fax: +44-0-171-405-6216), 1997. 4128 pp. £550 (approx. $880) cloth.
There is something disconcertingly ironic in the marketing of a multi-volume set of utopias that only the rich can afford—and especially when it comes from an academic publishing house whose logo features a laurel wreath encircling the words “Mundus Intellectualis.” But, be that as it may, this very handsome set of British utopian works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must be seen as a major publishing breakthough. For the first time, to my knowledge, a wide variety of utopian and anti-utopian texts from this period—the famous, the infamous, and the virtually unknown—have been assembled into one series and made accessible to the (library-going) public. For the eighteenth-century literary scholar or historian, these tomes constitute a veritable treasure-trove of primary materials, including:
Annus Sophiae Jubilaeus. The Sophick Constitution: or, the Evil Customs of the World Reformed (1700)
[Ambrose Evans]. The Adventures and Surprising Deliverances of James Dubourdieu (1719)
[Ambrose Evans]. The Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch (1719)