The Gulf Between Heroine and Woman: How The Cry's Oppositional Double Structure Challenges and Educates Readers

• Published in: Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 718 - 735
• Main Author: Litt, Veronica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.10.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 18th century; didacticism; Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768); Jane Collier; Novels; repetition; Sarah Fielding; temporality; womanhood
• ISSN: 0969-9082; 1747-5848
• DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2024.2375894

This article argues that the key to the experimental novel The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier lies in the contrasting temporalities of the text's two genres: the endless debate in the frame narrative and the resolved marriage plot narrated by the heroine Portia. By placing repetition and progression side by side, Fielding and Collier emphasize the gulf between the pain of lived experience and the illusory comfort provided by fictional convention. Amid eighteenth-century literary debates on whether didactic texts should favor realism or idealism, The Cry insists that truly educational novels must represent womanhood pragmatically - as rife with oppression, frustration, and repetition. Through formal features, the co-authors use pace and duration to force their audience to experience the pain of womanhood in real time, then propose a way forward through their heroine's progressive neologisms. Drawing on Sarah Fielding's literary criticism, responses to The Cry by eighteenth-century readers, and feminist theory, this essay examines how the novel critiqued the social utility of conventional domestic fiction and exposed the true experience of womanhood.