“[I]ncoherent, undefinable, unaccountable”: The Opacity of Female Interiority in A Simple Story
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This essay engages the opacity of Miss Milner, the female protagonist of the first half of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791); specifically, it centers on her inexplicability that never yields to perfect transparency and considers the implications of her such penumbral portrayal. I focus on passages in which her circumstantial inability to openly own the truth of her sentiments gives rise to misunderstandings, and bring to view the ways in which what may appear in moments of interpersonal impasse as perplexing intractability can be productively read as markers of a female interiority resistant to intrusion by externally-imposed demands for knowability. Taking seriously the consistent narrative pattern in which Miss Milner’s private self is scrutinized, yet never breached with success, I suggest that such failed attempts point to a recognition of inscrutability as a means of securing the integrity of one’s interiority by thwarting others’ expectations of legibility and, by extension, the will to assert epistemic control. Miss Milner’s opacity presents a source of unease and raises the specter of impotence, of foiled mastery, for the male authority represented by her guardian, Dorriforth/Lord Elmwood, and his tutor, Sandford. In such a reading, Miss Milner’s interiority might be rendered not so much unavailing as generative and meaningful in its opacity.
Abstract
This essay engages the opacity of Miss Milner, the female protagonist of the first half of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791); specifically, it centers on her inexplicability that never yields to perfect transparency and considers the implications of her such penumbral portrayal. I focus on passages in which her circumstantial inability to openly own the truth of her sentiments gives rise to misunderstandings, and bring to view the ways in which what may appear in moments of interpersonal impasse as perplexing intractability can be productively read as markers of a female interiority resistant to intrusion by externally-imposed demands for knowability. Taking seriously the consistent narrative pattern in which Miss Milner’s private self is scrutinized, yet never breached with success, I suggest that such failed attempts point to a recognition of inscrutability as a means of securing the integrity of one’s interiority by thwarting others’ expectations of legibility and, by extension, the will to assert epistemic control. Miss Milner’s opacity presents a source of unease and raises the specter of impotence, of foiled mastery, for the male authority represented by her guardian, Dorriforth/Lord Elmwood, and his tutor, Sandford. In such a reading, Miss Milner’s interiority might be rendered not so much unavailing as generative and meaningful in its opacity.