The Moral of Exemplar History and the Predicaments of the Domestic Individual in Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison
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This essay reads Sara Scott’s “exemplar novel,” The History of Sir George Ellison, in the context of her revisionist approaches to dominant historiography employed in her translations of foreign histories including The History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden, The Life of Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, and The History of Mecklenburgh. In examining the aesthetic continuity and discontinuity between the novel and Scott’s translative projects, this article explores how the fictional life-writing evolved from her historiographical practices adopted in the translations of foreign histories. The comparative perspective, on the one hand, will reveal a parallel development in narratological strategies and generic protocol. Scott’s novelistic and historiographical formulations all attempt to integrate and foreground what has been conventionally regarded as feminine narratives, presupposing the interpenetration between private and public in the question of virtue. But to read the moral and aesthetic complexions of Sir George Ellison in terms of its departure from her own historiography will also unveil its distinctive moral contours. This new utopian life-writing appropriates revisionist approaches to classical history-writing that are adopted in the translations for envisioning new social virtue, but its novelistic aesthetic complicates the generic indeterminacy of her feminized historiography, deepening Scott’s own ambivalence about the feminization of morality. Although Scott’s actively revises the prevalent historiographical assumptions about the political-domestic divide with her projection of “the domestic individual” as a new cultural model for morals at once private and public, Scott is also deeply conflicted about the practical implications of her experimental take, as is clearly visible in her dependence on a male authority for undoing the separate spheres thesis in her fiction. Scott wrote in an age when women’s public engagement was still seriously limited, and thus she needed Ellison as a mouthpiece for feminine morals even as his presence itself fragments her own authorship−an authoritative gentleman whose gaze scrutinizes and assesses the female virtue hitherto concealed in Millenium Hall for their potential in public life, and who in the sequel puts into practice in actual local governance the feminist ideal fomented in the sequestered feminine utopia.
Abstract
This essay reads Sara Scott’s “exemplar novel,” The History of Sir George Ellison, in the context of her revisionist approaches to dominant historiography employed in her translations of foreign histories including The History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden, The Life of Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, and The History of Mecklenburgh. In examining the aesthetic continuity and discontinuity between the novel and Scott’s translative projects, this article explores how the fictional life-writing evolved from her historiographical practices adopted in the translations of foreign histories. The comparative perspective, on the one hand, will reveal a parallel development in narratological strategies and generic protocol. Scott’s novelistic and historiographical formulations all attempt to integrate and foreground what has been conventionally regarded as feminine narratives, presupposing the interpenetration between private and public in the question of virtue. But to read the moral and aesthetic complexions of Sir George Ellison in terms of its departure from her own historiography will also unveil its distinctive moral contours. This new utopian life-writing appropriates revisionist approaches to classical history-writing that are adopted in the translations for envisioning new social virtue, but its novelistic aesthetic complicates the generic indeterminacy of her feminized historiography, deepening Scott’s own ambivalence about the feminization of morality. Although Scott’s actively revises the prevalent historiographical assumptions about the political-domestic divide with her projection of “the domestic individual” as a new cultural model for morals at once private and public, Scott is also deeply conflicted about the practical implications of her experimental take, as is clearly visible in her dependence on a male authority for undoing the separate spheres thesis in her fiction. Scott wrote in an age when women’s public engagement was still seriously limited, and thus she needed Ellison as a mouthpiece for feminine morals even as his presence itself fragments her own authorship−an authoritative gentleman whose gaze scrutinizes and assesses the female virtue hitherto concealed in Millenium Hall for their potential in public life, and who in the sequel puts into practice in actual local governance the feminist ideal fomented in the sequestered feminine utopia.
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