Fiction: Growing Down in Edgeworth and Opie’s Novels

The study of Romantic fiction has been dominated by the Bildungsroman. In this chapter, I consider two Romantic novels, Maria Edgeworth’s Vivian (1812) and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805), that frustrate the conventions of the Bildungsroman and present a different view of realist fiction in the Romantic period. The Bildungsroman has dominated the study of Romantic fiction because it expresses the necessary self. The hero of the Bildungsroman perfects their will in society, uniting their individual freedom with their social role and necessitating their actions. Vivian and Adeline Mowbray are ‘network novels’, which present a darker picture of social life and are sceptical of free will. Until recently, it was believed that the ‘network novel’ was rare outside of the United States, but I show that it was a central form of fiction in Romantic Britain and Ireland. I use digital methods to study networks of words in Vivian and Adeline Mowbray, to build a picture of the moral vocabulary Edgeworth and Opie use to describe their network-protagonists. In Sect. 3.1, I consider the characterisation of Edgeworth and Opie’s novels, showing how they problematise the central theme of ‘self-love’ and ‘self-command’ in Romantic fiction. In Sect. 3.2, I consider the plots of Edgeworth and Opie’s novels, using association analysis to show how they combine elements of the marriage-plot and the seduction-plot to create open-ended ‘real life’ narratives. In Sect. 3.3, I consider the language of the two novels, showing how the novels undermine the transparency of language and prevent the reader from extracting a single or authoritative perspective. In sum, Vivian portrays its protagonist as a multiplicity enmeshed in a web of words, while Adeline Mowbray portrays its protagonist as a monster whose will shatters social conventions and distinctions. Throughout the analysis, I rely on a corpus of 40 Romantic novels to provide context for Edgeworth and Opie’s artistic choices.