1. The Romance of History, or Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, Sometimes

This book is primarily a formal analysis; it focuses on enduring problems of distinguishing and defining form, in this case the English novel, not on the specific and changing historical condi­ tions within which that novel develops . Yet from a feminist per­ spective one of the material problems in women's relation to the definition of form must be the problem of the material. Many femi­ nist literary critics-such as Biddy Martin, Nancy Armstrong, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, or Gayatri Spivak-have argued that we need to give renewed attention to material conditions in order to understand the role of gender within the novelistic tradition-and, along with that, to analyze our cultural situation properly and perhaps also to change it. That attention would take the form of an attention to history and the historical process, which such critics claim might grant some access to the material, perhaps enough to help us modify our conditions. 1 These feminist investigations that attend to material context have been invaluable . In this chapter, however, while not denying or refusing the material, I open up the questions I ask later on by