170

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

staney. Falling on his knees he swears he "would not travel to Brussels, unless Eliza went along with me, did the road lead towards heaven," then wryly adds, "In transports of this kind the heart, in spite of the understanding, will always say too much." His fidelity reasserted, Yorick writes gallantly to the lady and hastens on to Paris to expose, risk, and lessen his affections with the beautiful grisset, the fille de chambre, the Marquisina di Fagnani by interpolation, Maria at Moulines, and the lady who shared his room in the Bourbonnois. In the "Business of sentimental writing" Sterne used Eliza as the symbol of delicate, oisinterested, romantic love. In the semiprivate comedy that made him laugh Eliza provides a standard to measure the vagaries of Yorick's heart. Priesthood was a fortunate accident in the career of Laurence Sterne. Most of the materials for his fiction carne from his own far from exemplary life. Yet if he did not practice, he believed sincerely what he preached. Thus his clerical vocation gave him the absolute ethical code that made possible the dispassionate judgment comedy requires. His own behavior after his residence in France in 1762 often resembled Yorick's; his literary account of it is the self-mockery of A Sentimental Journey. The disparity between his practice and his professions enriched Tristram Shandy in another, less tangible way. Only from the knowledge of his own trials and failures could have come his humorous pity for the frailties of other men. Sterne cannot have added a cubit to the spiritual stature of the Church of England. By making him take thought it added many to his greatness as a writer.

FANNY BURNEY'S EVELINA Edwine Montague and Louis L. Martz

A. It's a disturbing experienceto reread Evelina like this, just after finishing All the King's Men. Two popular novels, each fairly representative of the better writing of its time, but see what they represent. Here's Warren's book, concerned, at one level, with the problems of political action,and at a deeper level obsessedwith the rediscovery of evil-original sin-the necessity for spiritual rebirth; violent passion, violent death, violent language, all probing into the anxieties of modern secularized man. Then there's Evelina, .filled with these agonies: to be forced to admit to a lord that one lives-"in Holborn"; to have a baronet hear a silversmith's daughter call one" cousin"; to have to go up "two pair of stairs" to dine; to violate the rules of a ball; to be forced to sit in the upper gallery in "pit" dress ... I wonder. Does Evelina really deserve its fame? Did it ever really live in its own right? B. How can you doubt it? That edition you're reading ought to prove that the book's a "classic." The Clarendon Press wouldn't have asked MacKinnon to provide those elaborate notes if the novel hadn't proved its worth through 150 years. A. This edition has a perversely opposite effect on me. I have a feeling that MacKinnon mistrusts the book, and is providing crutches to help it along. He practically admits that he's using it as a series of pegs to hang a commentary on, and he says flatly here in the preface: "the interest of the book lies not in the story, and the drawing of character, but in the picture it affords of contemporary life and manners." That doesn't sound to me like a declaration of literary merit-though it may be true that the book is useful to a social historian. ... B. It has literary importance, though, as a link between Humphry Clinker and Sense and Sensibility; certainly it's the best English novel to appear between those two. Don't you think she's using Humphry Clinker as a base for operations in the direction of Jane Austen?

172

THE

AGE OF JOHNSON

A. You might say something of the sort, though her epistolary method is really a blend of Richardson and Smollett. Still, she does seem to follow Humphry Clinker in giving satirical views of social life at London and the "Hotwells," and also in trying to distinguish her correspondents by giving the letters different tones. But that's one trouble; she can't carry it off. The only letters that have a stamp of character are Evelina's; Mr. Villars' rhapsodies are only embarrassing. It might as well be written entirely in Pamela's way: everything that counts is given through Evelina. B. True-you don't get the complexity and variety of Humphry Clinker, but you do get a single, focused view-a sensitive, feminine view-of the problems raised in a small social circle, and that seems to me to lead the way toward Jane Austen. A. Oh, I'll grant the book its place in literary history. But isn't that rather like granting the usefulness of knowing about Kyd or Davenant or Cowley? B. But Evelina's never stopped having its readers. My Everyman edition shows eight printings between 1909 and 1931, and there were at least two dozen nineteenth-century editions. I don't think it's just a book for graduate students of the novel or the Age of Johnson. There's something essentially good about the book that has drawn out all those editions. A. Don't you think a lot of people read the book-or start to read it-simply because Fanny Burney wrote it? Evelina has a good deal in common with the young Fanny Burney; people who enjoy the Diary enjoy finding Fanny Burney in the novel too; and so the book becomes a kind of appendix to the Diary. B. Right there you're finding more power in the book than you've admitted so far. You're admitting that the book creates, or conveys, a certain personality. Whether you call her Fanny Burney, or Evelina-the personality is there-the Young Lady entering the World. And don't deny me the pleasure of reading one work in the light of another by the same author. I enjoy feeling the typical Burney phrasing and point of view in Evelina's letters; the parallels place the novel in a concrete setting in my mind-the world I know from Fanny Burney's Diary. A. But-

173 B. Oh, I know, you're going to say the novel ought to create its own world. It does. What we know about Fanny Burney simply extends the significance of the things we find in the book itself. MacKinnon's notes work the same way, if you'd take the trouble to read them. A. Sometime I will: I'd like to know about Cox's Museum. But the rather surprising fact is that that's the only place where I've really felt the need of a note (up to p. 283, at least, where Mr. Macartney's "affecting letter" has stopped me dead). Not that I know so much about Ranelagh or Vauxhall or the Pantheonbut where you absolutely have to know a detail to interpret'1:he action properly, Fanny Burney gives it to you, almost as if she were thinking of posterity-or a French translation. Take that incident where the girls are having their troubles in the dark alleys of Vauxhall. Burney sets down the one essential aspect of the scene in Evelina's first comment on Vauxhall: "The Garden is very pretty, but too formal; I should have been better pleased, had it consisted less of strait walks, where 'Grove nods at grove, each alley has its brother.' " Pope's line neatly gives us all we need to know to follow the incident. B. True-but later, when they're looking at the Hayman paintings in the room off the Rotunda, you can't get the full humor of Mr. Smith's display of ignorance unless you realize that the paintings deal with British military and naval victories. A. So that's why there's so much talk about generals? Still, the text itself makes the main point clear: Mr. Smith can't tell Neptune from a general. And the same thing's true of social customs. You always know when a custom has been breached, and usually you're told exactly what that custom was. B. That's certainly true of Evelina's first faux pas: refusing the dance with Lovel, and then accepting a <lance with Lord Orville later on. Evelina explains the whole thing to herself near the end of that letter: "A confused idea now for the first time entered my head, of something I had heard of the rules of an assembly; but I was never at one before,-I have only danced at school,-and so giddy and heedless I was, that I had not once considered the impropriety of refusing one partner, and afterwards accepting

FANNY BURNEY'S

EVELINA

FANNY .BURNEY'S EVELINA

175

174 another. I was thunderstruck at the recollection." So her character and situation are clearly defined at the outset; and she never stops such rash actions and informative repentances. A. I suppose Fanny Burney liked to explain such matters very clearly in order to provide a kind of guide for the proper behavior of yoting ladies entering the world? B. That's one benefit, then, of the didactic novel: you always know where a character stands. Yet her didacticism never gets out of hand in Evelina's letters (I admit that Villars is unbearable). The "lessons" arise quite naturally out of Evelina's repentant ruminations over the incidents. A. Next you'll be arguing that the incidents "arise quite naturally" out of the plot! B. I won't say a thing for the plot-except that it's no worse than most of Dickens' plots, and might be charitably overlooked for somewhat the same reasons that let us forgive his plots. Because the novel has unity and design, of a kind not dependent on the plot. A. "Spatial form," I suppose. B. Much simpler than that: if you put aside the introductory and concluding portions dealing with the matter of Evelina's parentage, you can see that the book falls into three well-defined sections, of almost exactly the same length, separated by two equally welldefined interludes. The early editions, in three volumes, make the arrangement obvious. Section I you might call "Introduction to London"-her visit there with the Mirvans, her first glimpsesrather distant-of high society, and her first meetings with her "low" relatives. Then follows an interlude in the country, at Howard Grove, where the Captain's horseplay (dull reading, I admit) serves to set off the high life preceding it. Then follows Section II: the contrasting "low" visit in London with Madame Duval and the Branghtons. Next comes another interlude in the country, this time at Berry Hill, lasting just long enough to rest us and prepare us for Section III, at the "Hotwells," the last, the most complicated, the best-written part of the book-and the highest point of the social scale: Evelina rockets from the Branghtons to the pinnacle of society-the inner sanctum of earls. I think, too, I could show that each of the three sections rises to a climax within

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

its own" area: Section I with the horrifying scene of the opera; Section II with the vile use of Lord Orville's coach in Evelina's name, and the dreadful consequences, including the letter that Evelina rashly, and improperly, writes to Orville; and Section III, of course, with the complications immediately preceding the mutual admission of love between Orville and Evelina. I think I could show you that each of these big incidents is very tightly built upon the preceding smaller events of each section. The whole arrangement is very deft. Each section begins with fairly simple embarrassments, to establish the new situation, and then the incidents grow in complexity until the climax is reached. The second climax is much more intricate and painful than the first; and the third is by far the most complex of the three, because of the way in which Orville is led to fear that her "sudden reserve" toward him is due to the arrival of Sir Clement. A. You don't agree, then, with the critics ~ho praise the book for giving something like "a direct transcript of life" ? You know it's been praised for simply "transferring reality" into a book with a minimum of artistic modification. Like Thackeray's idea that Smollett "did not invent much, but described what he saw." B. Yes, and just as unsatisfactory. Her handling of the characters alone ought to show the opposite: there isn't a character in the book who isn't a carefully designed caricature. Lord Orville is Gentility Incarnate; Lovel is the Rude Fop; Sir Clement, the Unscrupulous Beau; Captain Mirvan, the stock seagoing ruffian (duller than most); Du Bois, the stock Frenchman; the Branghtons, types of vulgarity, and so on. They're all types, remarkably singleminded types-like something out of Ben Jonson or Congreve. A. You have a point there. I was just reading that scene in the theater where they are seeing Love for Love. The Captain suggests that Lovel ought to have "taken some notice of one Mr. Tattle" in the play. Lovel retorts by asking twhat the Captain thinks of "one Mr. Ben]' and next insults Evelina by asking her what she thinks of "the country young lady, Miss Prue." Then Orville tactfully shifts the discussion to the character of Angelica. Certainly you have there a key to where Fanny Burney learned her methods of presenting character.

I76

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

FANNY BURNEY'S

EVELINA

177

R Except for Evelina: it's strange how hard it is to consider her a "character." She's really a sort of "setting," or a stage, for the "characters" proper to play upon. Or perhaps it's better to call her a central point of view. A. -which is brought out by being played against various aspects of life, represented singly in all the other characters? R Yes, so that a given character is of no importance except in so far as he sets up a vibration in that sensitive central personality called Evelina. It's the vibration that counts, not the Lovels or the Orvilles in themselves. That's why the "characters" never get out of control, except for Captain Mirvan, now and then; they all have carefully defined functions. Take Du Bois, for instance: he's not there just to give an opportunity for irrelevant ridicule of the French: he has at least three important functions. His fine manners are a constant foil to the vulgar behavior that surrounds him; his attendance on Madame Duval emphasizes her dubious character and reputation; and finally, his infatuation with Evelina is very neatly contrived to break up Madame Duval's interest in holding fast to such an attractive granddaughter. A. But what about Macartney? Isn't he a rather sad adventure in the sentimental fashion? B. Very sad indeed. But you can see plainly why the plot needs him: something humane has to be done for that poor girl, the nurse's daughter, who's been reared as Miss Belmont. Macartney is there to provide the "little impostor" with a decent place in life, after Evelina takes the post of heiress. Macartney in himself is badly conceived, and yet I think Burney makes very artful use of him in the last section, where he has those furtive and mysterious meetings with Evelina. You remember how those meetings worry the admirable Orville and distress Evelina because she can't explain them to him. A. True enough. I've never denied that the book is artfully done. I've been noticing the economy of her phrasing: how she manages to make every word count, even while she maintains the illusion of seventeen-year-old garrulity-and "vibration." It's not a lack of art that bothers me-it's a question of substance. What do all the little shocks and tremors add up to after all? What's the stand-

ard of values in the book? Evelina objects to her cousins simply because they are "low" and ill-bred, and she's overwhelmed with shame when Sir Clement discovers her relation to them-yet Sir Clement is plainly "unprincipled" and the cousins are perfectly decent people. How can a book survive such triviality? R But Fanny Burney takes full account of that conflict between snobbery and virtue. Remember the scene where Sir Clement boldly visits Evelina and Madame Duval, when the Branghtons are present; he's finally put out of countenance-and out of doors-by the blatant rudeness of the group. Evelina's feelings are quite mixed there: she's ashamed of her relatives-yes'-yet gratified that Sir Clement has been cut down; she despises his character, yet she can't overcome her awe at his position and breeding. A nice dilemma, and one that runs throughout the book. A. I see, you're goirrg to say that the book is "delightful for its naive picture of unconscious snobbery." B. I shouldn't make a statement as brash as that, but there's something in it. Don't forget that Fanny Burney said she was not pretending to show the world "what it actually is, but what it appears to a girl of seventeen." Well, to a girl of seventeen the problems of the world are mainly matters of form, manners, appearances. Evelina comes out of her childhood to discover that the world is a place where one has to know the established modes of behavior, or it becomes a mighty unpleasant spot. That's a universal discovery-accentuated by the situation of Evelina. She's neither upper classnor lower class-a girl of no position. Sheknows too much of good breeding to be happy with Madame Duval and the Branghtons, and too little to be happy with the "quality" of London and Bristol Hotwells. She goes through the universal sufferings of the person who hasn't yet learned-and often he never does learn-where he "belongs," and how to "belong." I shouldn't call that a trivial subject. .... A. I SUpposeit all depends on how the subject is handled. It's probably large enough for successful comedy, if the author can develop it to show how deeply forms and manners can affect one's existence. B. And Fanny Burney does. The causes of Evelina's miseries may

178

THE

AGE OF JOHNSON

be trivial-but the results are not. You might even argue that the results are all the more painful just because of the trivial nature of the causes. But let me try to show you what I mean. Look at that opera scene closely. The causes of it are introduced as soon as Letter XXI begins: "In the afternoon,-at Berry Hill, I should have said the evening, for it was almost six o'clock ... " (Notice how Burney keeps the difference between town and country before us.)
... while Miss Mirvan and I were dressing for the opera, and in high spirits, from the expectation of great entertainment and pleasure, we heard a carriage stop at the door, and concluded that Sir Clement Willoughby, with his usual assiduity, was come to attend us to the Haymarket; but, in a few moments, what was our surprise, to see our chamber-door flung open, and the two Miss Branghtons enter the room! They advanced to me with great familiarity, saying, "How do you do, cousin?-so we've caught you at the glass!-well, I'm determined I'll tell my brother of that!"

FANNY BURNEY'S EVELINA

179

"too much chagrined to laugh," she would have been "extremely diverted at their ignorance of whatever belongs to an opera." A. That's tather'too much like Lovel's attitude toward her. B. Then, in the midst of these miseries, after the haggling over tickets, the arrival in the upper gallery, the crude comments of the Vulgar on the opera, we are allowed a single, controIIed glimpse of paradise in the pit:
I was then able to distinguish the happy party I had left; and I saw that Lord Orville had seated himself next to Mrs. Mirvan. Sir Clement had his eyes perpetually cast towards the five-shilling gallery, where I suppose he concluded that we were seated; however, before the Opera was over, I have reason to believe that he had discovered me, high and distant as I Was'from him. Probably he distinguished me by my head-dress.

A. That last sentence is a nice touch. B. Yes-it explains in a word why she is appaIIed to see Sir Clement approaching her in the gallery, why she rashly joins him to "avoid immediate humiliation," why, hearing Madame Duval's voice as the old lady descends from the gallery, she flees into Sir Clement's carriage, even though Lord Orville is standing there to see her. The possible results (which COIne close to occurring) are: loss of reputation, if not loss of virginity, together with the loss of Orville's interest in her. So, it seems, the combination of innocence and snobbery can produce disastrous results for a person who doesn't quite "belong." A. You're pushing it rather hard to make me feel a moral issue there; but I suppose there is one, of a sort. The helplessness of Evelina makes you feel some mild sense of the world's injustice, the tyranny of forms. H. Wait until you reread the last part, at Bristol Hotwells j I don't think you'll call it mild at the end. There's a viciousness and savagery in the satire there that's almost Swiftian in places. Do you remember the scene where the men of quality, after pages of haggling over an "important bet"-the prime interest of their liveS-finally settle it by having two wretched old women run a race for them? The "poor creatures, feeble and frightened," run against each other and fall, but despite their bruises, the gentlemen (who have been drinking freely) insist that the women hobble

Two discordant elements are introduced at once: discordant with the expected pleasure of the opera, and with each other: Sir Clement's "assiduity" (the word runs throughout the novel); and the Branghtons' vulgarity, which later makes Evelina take refuge in the hitherto unwelcome attentions of Sir Clement. The Branghtons call her "cousin" at once-the fear that Sir Clement-and Lord Orville-will discover her relationship to these creatures lies at the bottom of her actions during the incident. Every word and action of her cousins betrays their ignorance of the "laws and customs a-la-mode"-to such an extent that Evelina soon displays some rather complicated feelings:
I was extremely disconcerted at this forward and ignorant behaviour, and yet their rudeness very much lessened my concern at refusing them. Indeed, their dress was such as would have rendered their scheme of accompanying our party impracticable, even if I had desired it; and this, as they did not themselves find out, I was obliged, in terms the least mortifying I could think of, to tell them.

A. A kind of comic hubris? B. Yes, and also later on, when they arrive at the opera house and she is the only one who knows anything about the place. She's much too proudly conscious of the fact that her dress is "very improper for my company," and she says that if she had not been

180

THE

AGE

OF JOHNSON FANNY BURNEY'S

EVELINA

181

along, stumble, and totter, "to the inexpressible diversion of the company," A. I remember-it seems almost symbolic of the attitude of Sir Clement, Lord Merton, and Lovel toward Evelina: they try to use her-and do use her as far as they can-for their own "diversion." Fanny Burney certainly doesn't play favorites in class: the "quality," except for Orville and the Mirvan ladies, don't come off any better than the tradesmen-perhaps not quite as well. Still, I have a feeling that Evelina would rather be in Mrs. Beaumont's house for all the snubs and worries there, than go back to that ((Hosier's in High Holborn."1 B. Surely: that's essential to the nature of snobbery. Evelina snubs the Branghtons, yet resents being snubbed by Lady Louisa and wants to asserther equality. Just so, the Branghtons resent Evelina's attitude toward them, but they court her company because of her superior friends and try to show that they are her equals. It's all painfully true to human experience. But there's more than that involved. The book doesn't condemn Evelina for being anxious to measure up to the manners of the class to which she rightly belongs. Quite the contrary: the whole novel seems to insist that the standards and demands of manners must be and should be met. The book seems to be built on the assumption that a society-I mean a whole social order-stands or falls by its ability to express and maintain a code of manners. The Branghton group is ridiculed because it is trying to go beyond the manners proper to its class, while the satire of upper-class arrogance and brutality is merciless becausethese people are supposed to be the warders of the code. That code becomes tyrannical only when it's abused-willfully or ignorantly. Innocence itself can't escape the results of its offenses against the establishment: it's a pity, but the rules are inexorable. A. I know Samuel Johnson would agree with that point of view. But in an age such as ours, can we help feeling that such "codes" are something less than all-important? B. That's a rather large question for a small evening, but it looms over everything we've been saying. Before we try to settle it, though, I think you ought to read a remarkable article by Lionel

Trilling in the Kenyon Review called "Manners, Morals, and the Novel." You may nd it rather elusive and not quite cogent, but the main points, I think, strike right at your whole question about the representative differences between All the King's Men and Evelina. Trilling suggests that our peculiar modern definition of "reality" makes it hard for Usto feel the importance of manners; and yet he insists that for the novels of the past the study of manners has been the main tool in their exploration of the nature of reality. I can't possibly summarize his points; but read the article and you'll see that he's talking about Evelina, though he doesn't mention it. A. I will, 1 will: but rst-I think I'd better stay up late and "try to finish reading Evelina.

24 The Works of John Dryden, ed. J. H. Smith, et aI., 19 vols, (Berkeley. t California Press, 1962), 8:21. A similar situation obtains in Sedley's The '" ~'" Garden (1668) where the daughter of the collaborator Sir Samuel Forec~\t. disqualified as a suitable mate for the noble Eugenio. 11 25 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Univ, Press, 1987), 156. 26 The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1:181. . 27 Poems on Affairs of State, ed. William J. Cameron, Univ. Press, 1971), 5:131-32.

.;\\D THE

J{ITING HOME: EVELINA, THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL PARADOX OF PROPERTY

7 vols. (New Havt-Ii

(till!

,g!:\E TUCKER

Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of AuthOrity in the Restoration Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), 111-17.
29 30

28 Susan

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19J4 V. G. Kiernan argues that "the duel was the sign and seal of a mystic "'1" between higher and lower, a fraternal bond uniting the whole multifarious cia" Duel in European History [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988J, 52). 31 Michael Alssid, Thomas Shadwell (New York: Twayns, 1967), 162-63. 32 In D'Urfey's Love for Money (note 6), Queen Mary also is used as an erul.l.. the perfect lover. The inconstant JiltaII is implicitly contrasted with the faithful \! when [iltall sings, Why did my Fate Exalt me so high, If fading state must deprive me of Joy? Since Willy is gone, Ah! how vainly shines the Sun 'Till Fates decree, the Winds and Sea Waft, waft him to me. (50)

,-.

June 4, 1741, Alexander Pope filed suit against Edmund Curll, pr,)minentLondon bookseller who had just published Dean SWift's 1;I. nltlj Correspondence> for Twenty- Four Years, a volume comprised , .)..ttt'rswritten by Pope as well as those he received from such literary "llillaries as Swift, Gay and Bolingbroke.' Pope claimed rights over , .~ olll\'his own letters, but also over the letters he had received from , 'ift. ;md, on the basis of this claim, sought to prevent CurU from .tllluingto sell the book. Because he had never relinquished his to his writing, authorial rights established thirty years earlier tilt' 1710 Statute of Anne, Pope argued that his rights as author I licen violated by Curll's failure to get permission to publish the '1'I'S.2 For his part, CurU maintained he had received the letters I,led in the volume from "the.several Persons by whom & to whom , ,'\ severally Purport to have been written & addressed," and argued It. as a result, "the Complainant is not to be Considered as [both] , , Author & proprietor of all or any of the said letters."3 III his decision, handed down two weeks later on June 17, Lord l.mcellor Hardwicke ordered Curll to halt sale of the book, partially holdingPope's claim to the letters. In awarding Pope control over II the letters the poet himself had written, Hardwicke rejected : r II's contention that a letter constitutes a gift from sender to receiver. "111. the strange quality of Hardwicke's ruling, which awarded the ipient control over the material contents of the letter-the ink and paper written on-while giving the author control over the intan,II' ideas and expression contained within, strikingly highlights cer'ill contradictions implicit within the liberal notion of property that 'tll'lwiseescape notice. Hardwicke writes, "It is only a special prop.h in the receiver, possibly the property of the paper may belong to 'ill: but this does not give a licence to any person whatsoever to l.lish them to the world, for at most the receiver has only a joint ll)pertywith the writer.":' What Mark Rose argues, persuasively to 1\ mind, is that the Hardwicke decision, through its deliberate split'1!1l; of the material and ideal qualities of the letter, marks the creation ! d newform ofproperty-immaterial; intellectual property. The force
()n

t,

418
Shadwell's

The Volunteer-

1.11 GO(1993) 419-439 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University

Press

419

~,

\ ...

-.

24 The Works of John Dryden, ed. J. H. Smith, et al., 19 vols. (Berkeley; t" California Press, 1962), 8:21. A similar situation obtains in Sedley's The I", Garden (1668) where the daughter of the collaborator Sir Samuel Forecast disqualified as a suitable mate for the noble Eugenio. II 25 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Univ. Press, 1987), 156. 26 The Works of Thomas Southerne, ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1:181. . 27 Poems on Affairs of State, ed. William J. Cameron, 7 vols. (New Ha\"f"H Univ. Press, 1971), 5:131-32. 28 Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration Il,,, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), 111-17. 29 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19-1', 30 V. C. Kiernan argues that "the duel was the sign and seal of a mystic 1"1'. between higher and lower, a fraternal bond uniting the whole multifarious cla\, Duel in European History [Oxford: Oxford Univ, Press, 1988], 52). 31 Michael Alssid, Thomas Shadwell (New York: Twayne, 1967), 162-63. 32 In D'Urfey's Love for Money (note 6), Queen Mary also is used as an erul.l. the perfect lover. The inconstant jiltall is implicitly contrasted with the faithful I' when Jiltall sings,

lUTING HOME: EVELINA, THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL A\[) THE PARADOX OF PROPERTY
;h!,'E TUCKER

Why did my Fate Exalt me so high, If fading state must deprive me of Joy? Since Willy is gone, Ah! how vainly shines the Sun 'Till Fates decree, the Winds and Sea Waft, waft him to me. (50)

June 4, 1741, Alexander Pope filed suit against Edmund Curll, 'llominent London bookseller who had just published Dean SWift's l;''':'ory Correspondence,for Twenty-Four Years, a volume comprised dters written by Pope as well as those he received from such literary dlllaries as Swift, Gay and Bolingbroke;' Pope claimed rights over ,', .nlv his own letters, but also over the letters he had received from : :It ;lI1d, on the basis of this claim, sought to prevent co-n from .nnuing to sell the book. Because he had never relinquished his to his writing, authorial rights established thirty years earlier the 1710 Statute of Anne, Pope argued that his rights as author ! hcen violated by Curll's failure to get permission to publish the ".f\.2 For his part, Curll maintained he had received the letters '!lIed in the volume from "the several Persons by whom & to whom "'yerally Purport to have been written & addressed," and argued as a result, "the Complainant is not to be Considered as [both] vuthor & proprietor of all or any of the said letters."3 h his decision, handed down two weeks later on June 17, Lord dll't'llor Hardwicke ordered Curll to halt sale of the book, partially ,Iding Pope's claim to the letters. In awarding Pope control over the letters the poet himself had written, Hardwicke rejected .!I', contention that a letter constitutes a gift from sender to receiver. the strange quality of Hardwicke's ruling, which awarded the pi<'nt control over the material contents of the letter-the ink and i'.lper written on-while giving the author control over the intan:, ideas and expression contained within, strikingly highlights cer, voutradictions implicit within the liberal notion of property that . rwise escape notice. Hardwicke writes, "It is only a special prop. ill the receiver, possibly the property of the paper may belong to hut this does not give a licence to any person whatsoever to ,ii,h them to the world, for at most the receiver has only a joint P'Tty with the writer.'?' What Mark Rose argues, persuasively to mind, is that the Hardwicke decision, through its deliberate split~ ,)f the material and ideal qualities of the letter, marks the creation 11,'1\' form of property-immaterial, intellectual property. The force
i)n

418

Shadwell's The VoluIlt<, .

,,0(1993) 419-439 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University

Press

419

of the ruling not only invests Pope with the right to control the fate of his writing, but, in separating the author's ideal "text" from its material manifestation as a particular "manuscript," the Hardwicke decision delineates the otherwise obscure relations of the concept of copyright by creating the legal and ontological justification for the mass production and circulation of a potentially infinite number of these manuscripts. 5 But, paradoxically, this material/ideal bifurcation threatens to subvert the very notion of property it is designed to shore up. If the material and the ideal can be separated from one another, then the possibility of acting willfully to change the material world-a possibility central to the liberal conception of property, as I will explainis revealed to be contingent; a text happens to appear in the form of a manuscript, but need not necessarily do SO.6 In attempting to secure property by freeing it from the limitations of its materiality, the concept of intellectual property created by the Hardwicke ruling opens up the terrifying possibility latent in all forms of liberal property -that actions performed, when not limited by the material world, are finally and fundamentally irrelevant to that world. The natural rights personality theory of property set out by Locke in The Second Treatise of Civil Government has long served as the theoretical basis of liberal thought. According to Locke's formulation, individuals' rights to property are based upon their natural and inalienable right to their own person. Humans gain rights over materials outside the boundaries of their individual bodies by virtue of this selfownership, since by acting on nature with the labor of one's body, one changes nature, and, in so changing it, one effectively produces this newly-reborn nature into an extension of oneself: The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others." Locke here posits a model of property in which the self represents itself in the form of its productions and then owns these productions. Property is thus an extension of the self and the right to property is figured as being just as "natural" and "inalienable" as the right to own one's self. 420 Writing Horne

Locke seizes upon the peculiar, part-literal, part-figurative quality of metonymy in order to develop his argument here. The central metonym of the passage, that relating labor to the body, enables Locke to move from the material to the ideal and back to the material-s- from the body that is owned by the self to the labor that is "mixed" (but only figuratively) with the material world back to the material world having been transformed by labor (and hence "owned")-while eliding the oscillation between literal. and figurative, between material and ideal. But since the possibility of acting upon nature with one's labor presupposes the separation of that nature from oneself, property marks not only the extension of the self but its limits as well. One asserts control over property by sending it away; the potential alienability of property paradoxically becomes the only possible proof of the inalienability of the right to it." Viewed within the Lockean context, the 1741 debate over the ownership of letters seems particularly scandalous precisely because it threatens to expose the paradox implicit in the natural rights conception ofall property. If property not only serves as self-representation/selfproduction but also marks what is not the self, then the paradox of the ownership of letters serves as a dramatic literalization of the paradox ofproperty. Pope's fascination with the possibility that he might lose property rights over his letters by sending them away from himself dramatizes the compelling irresolvability of the natural rights model of property, a model in which the moment of self-representation is simultaneously the moment of self-loss. Frances Burney published her epistolary novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World in January 1778, thirty-seven years after Hardwicke rendered his decision in Pope v. Curll, Insofar as Hardwicke's verdict had been simply a restatement of, rather than a solution to, the paradox of property, the question of the ownership of letters seems to have remained a source of considerable interest. In choosing the form of the epistolary novel to tell the story of Evelina, Burney generalizes the paradox of owning letters into a paradox about property, representation and, ultimately, the nature of the self. Burney, in offering the story of a young, half-orphaned, incompletely owned woman who leaves her guardian in the provinces to go out into the world, seizes upon these very paradoxes as instruments for delaying the inevitable closure of the marriage plot she nonetheless feels compelled to weave." Moreover, Burney, who published the novel anonymously, refigures her relationship as author to
Irene Tucker

421

her own artistic production and to the audience that would receive it in ways that generalize the particular vulnerabilities of her position as a woman writer into a critique of the liberal notion of property. If the relationships among the writing self, the letter and the recipient ofthe letter are complex, the complexities of those relationships multiply exponentially when the selves and the letters in question are part of an epistolary novel. In his introduction to a special edition of Yale French Studies on literary letters entitled, "Men/Women of Letters," Charles Porter analyzes the components of a letter that characterize it as letter. 10 While Porter's analysis is an attempt to describe actual letters as opposed to letters within an epistolary novel, it nonetheless offers a detailed structure from which to begin to analyze both the particular representational paradoxes of the letter form and the ways in which these paradoxes are complicated by being placed within the frame of a novel: 1) The letter has an author known to and readily identifiable (even if vaguely) by the intended reader. Likewise the letter is addressed by that author (even if at times only implicitly) to an identifiable person or collectivity, sometimes well-known to the author, and is usually addressed only to that person or collectivity. Porter contrasts the letter with its related forms, the diary, which is normally addressed only to its author, and the autobiography, which does not have a single, identifiable addressee. The epistolary novel departs most strikingly from its "real-life"counterpart with regard to the identities of author and reader. The form of the epistolary novel is characterized by an implicit doubleness of both, since along with the writer and addressee of any given letter within the novel there exists a second writer and addressee - the author of the novel and the novel's readers ,II If we recall the ways in which the presence ofa letter's recipient within the representational economy ofthe letter draws attention to the paradoxes and limitations of property as a form of representation, then the presence of a second writer and a second, largely undefined audience within the epistolary novel makes the representative relationship between writing self and letter even less tenable. Within the epistolary frame, the letter is limited as an act of self-representation of its author within the text not only because it must be received and read before it can effectively represent, but also because it is literally the representation of another author-the author of the novel. 2) The letter is written out of its author's experiences or wishes or

aspiratiQns.''1'' refers to the author, even if it is not fully identifiable with that author. Within the epistolary novel, the fictionality of subject positionis both emphasized and complicated by the fact that the person behind the "I" is a fictional construction of the novel's author. Furthermore, the novel most often boasts a variety of "I'' 's within its implicit wholeness, simultaneously depending upon and subverting the identification between letter and writing self. 3)Letters are dated or presumably datable. While the dates of actual letters are intended to identify the time of composition and, in so doing, emphasize and implicitly privilege the act of writing, dates in epistolary novels, when they are present, serve primarily as an ordering device. Dates also serve to ally the narrative movement of the story with a certain inexorability associated with the passage of time. At the same time the dates within an epistolary novel draw attention to the coincidence of a "natural" passage of time and the novel's narrative motion, however, the juxtaposition of the two time frames also accentuates the differences between the two. The temporal disjunctions created by the epistolary form suggest the extent to which human action (and the [autobiographical] representation of that action) depends upon the disruption of the "natural" passage of time, or, further, the way in which that passage of time only gains meaning through its disruption. In apparently privileging the moment of writing, the presence of the date hides the temporal doubleness of any letter-the gap between the time a letter is written and the time it is read. If a letter is an act of self-representation, at what time precisely can that act of self-representation be said to occur? The temporal gap opened up by the act of transmitting the letter is the paradox of property converted into narrative terms, the function of property as both extension and limitation ofthe self mapped across time. The temporal doubleness implicit in the form of the letter is further complicated by the doubleness of the epistolary novel's author/reader structure. As readers of the novel, we can never be certain whether we are reading the letters as they are written, as they are being read by their recipient within the novel, or at some moment entirely independent of either of the two events. 12 4) A series of actual letters is written "forward," but the author of the letters lacks certainty about the future. These letters are thus unable to forecast or trace out a destiny, making them by nature discontinuous, multi-directional, fragmented. Porter contrasts the discontinuity of a series of letters with the implicit continuity of diary

422

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

423

entries, arguing that while each letter is designed as an independent entity, created around a precise intention, a diary entry is supposed to be a state in an overall narrative of self-understanding. In an epistolary novel, the fragmented quality of the letter form is consciously placed in tension with our knowledge as readers that the letters are part of a progression that, by virtue of its status as the production of a single author and as a formal whole, is meant to be understood as more or less unified. This tension subverts any clean opposition between the unified and the fragmentary. Within Evelina, this collapse of the unifiecl!fragmentary opposition is manifested by a simultaneous recognition of the inevitability of the marriage plot that characterizes the eighteenth-century novel and the temporary subversion of that plot figured by the discontinuity ofthe individual letters . 5) Letters are identifiable by certain material forms (salutation, address, stationary, seal, etc.). These material forms are Simultaneously present and conspicuously absent in the epistolary novel, since the novel invokes some of these forms-the salutation and structure of letter-in order to identify the letters in the novel as letters, yet in so doing, makes obvious the absence of other forms (the fact that the letters are printed rather than handwritten, that there are no envelopes or seals). This splitting of material and ideal forms of the letter-the idea of the letter is invoked, while many of the material aspects are held in abeyance-recalls Hardwicka's strange decision in Pope v. Curll to preserve the letter writer's rights of ownership by separating the material and ideal aspects of the letter. 13 The status of Evelina as a published, copyrighted work ought not to be ignored in this context. The materiality of the book comes into being only by the act of separating the text from the matter of the letter. Textual property exists at the vanishing point of matter, but it is precisely at this point that material transformation can occur. If the epistolary novel as a form serves to highlight the contradictions intrinsic to a natural rights theory ofproperty and, more fundamentally, the pitfalls associated with traditional forms ofself-representation, then Evelina, as a particular example of the epistolary form, seizes upon these contradictions with a vengeance. Writing as a woman within a society whose system of patrilineal inheritance made the relation between identity and property oblique at best, Frances Burney creates in Evelina a protagonist whose position as disowned heiress places her at the center of the contradictions regarding property and identity. 14 Evelina first appears surprisingly late in the novel that bears her name; her appearance (in the form of her first letter) is delayed by a protracted

exchange ofletters in which Evelina's guardian, the Reverend Arthur Villars; resists then finally yields to the urgings of a female representative of Evelina's maternal grandmother to allow his ward to.leave his home in the provinces in order to visit the grandmother in"London. Evelina's initial identity within the novel is thus produced in her absence; in order for her to acquire the voice necessary for self-representation, she must absent herself from the site of this initial making. As the letters are presented in the novel, each one labeled with its author and recipient, they are clearly established as the self-representations of their authors, yet the unavoidable presence of the recipient in the identification of the letter introduces the limitations of the letter as a form of self-representation at the same moment its possibilities appear. Moreover, as the opening epistolary dialogue of the novel makes clear, Villars views not only the letters he writes but the ward whose fate those letters negotiate as instances of his own moral production. Because Evelina is unclaimed by her own father, she is free to be appropriated by her guardian as his representation. l5 Thus the prospect of sending Evelina away from the self-enclosed paradise in which the two of them have lived strikes him much as the prospect ofsending off a carefully crafted letter might; the act of self-representation is only able to function by being made public, yet the step of making that representation public means that it is no longer fully Villars's own: The mind is but too naturallyprone to pleasure, but too easily yielded to dissipation:it has been my study to guard [Evelina] againsttheir delusions, by preparing her to expect,- andto despise them. But the time drawsonforexperience and observationto take place of instruction:if I have, in some measure, rendered her capableofusingthe onewithdiscretion, and makingthe other with improvement, I shallrejoice myself with the assuranceof having largelycontributed to her welfare.
16

Evelina's behavior becomes, within the terms her guardian sets out, the possibility of Villars's celebration of himself. Furthermore, the movement into time-into narrative and into experience-manifested by both the letter and Evelina herself is figured simultaneously as a necessary precondition for Villars's self-representation and as a condition that guarantees the impossibility of complete, owned self-representation. In the letter immediately following, the contradictory elements of the letter as a structure of self-representation are made even more evident as they begin to be wrenched apart from one another. As she Irene Tucker

424

Writing Home

425

--,

leaves Villars's home in the provinces bearing the letter that gives her permission to leave, Evelina effectively stands as the bearer of the letter of permission and that letter itself. That she has completed her act of delivery necessarily indicates that she has been allowed to leave, yet the fact that she functions both as the representation of Villars's authority as a moral educator and as the bearer of that representation testifies that she is fully neither. The language of Villars's letter marks his growing alienation from his ward that necessarily accompanies the sending of the letter, as the progression of appositives reveals the increasing tenuousness of his claim to Evelina. "This letter will be delivered to you by my child, - the child of my adoption, - my affection (20, emphasis added). Within this structure, it is the sociality of the letter form and, by extension, of the act of self-representation that brings about Evelina's fall into narrative, into experience and history, into the material. Without the demands of the social, both Evelina and the letter she carries might remain within their provincial glade, forever unaffected by "the experience and observation [that] takes place of instruction." Granted, the moral instruction Villars imparts unto Evelina within the privacy of his own estate is itself a social relation, but it can only be of limited consequence as long as that instruction remains outside of the public eye; Evelina can only function as Villars's representation once he consents to allow her to be seen within a wider public sphere. Only retrospectively, from a position outside Villars's enclosure, can the sociality of his relationship with Evelina be recognized and made to mean. (Significantly, it is not until Evelina leaves home that we hear anything of her own voice, since she has no need to write letters until she is separated from acquaintances.) The doubleness of the novel's title pithily encapsulates the tension between Villars's prelapsarian fantasy-the promise of a perfect, transcendent identity implied by the concept of the name-and identity as a narrative, socially produced and historically contingent. But even the terms of the opposition between name and narrative laid out within the title Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World are immediately set into motion. The reference to "entrance" suggests the way in which both Evelina's and Villars's identities are formed by the process of moving away that mutually marks the outer limits of the selves, yet the transformation of that process into an entity called history that is itself the history of a type- "a Young Lady"> further suggests the fundamental inextricability of the two aspects of identity. . 426 Writing Home

r:

I am proposing that Burney establishes the letter from the outset of the novel as the emblem of the paradoxes implicit in,both identity and in property as a form of self-representation. It is important, then, to examine the ways in which the form of the letter changes over the course of Evelina, for these shifts can be read as an attempt to trace the outer edges of the apparently opposing models of identity. While the letters at the opening of the novel ate relatively short and "letterlike," as the novel progresses and Evelina begins to establish a social world for herself apart from the one that had been defined for her by her guardian, the letters lose much oftheir letter-like quality, becoming considerably longer than the early examples and taking on many of the characteristics of non-epistolary narrative forms. 17 (Many of these later letters are labeled, confusing if tellingly, "Evelina in continuation.") A short, letter-like letter is necessarily more fully characterized by its "Sender to Recipient" label, suggesting a model of the self that becomes representative in being presented to, and hence limited by, an other. But, importantly, the shorter the letters are-the more completely they are identified by their label as the self-representation of their author-the greater the significance of the time gap created by the letter's transmission. The shorter and less narrative the letters are-the more like letters they are-the more they become subject to the temporal gaps brought about precisely by their status as lettersthe time necessary for them to travel from London to the provinces and back again. Conversely, while the long, more narrative letters are proportionately less affected by the fact of their transmission, their narrative qualities at the time undermine the claims they might make to identify their authors, insofar as identity is most purely expressed in the form of an isolated name. Authorship, then, is figured as an assertion of control over interpretation - here, the interpretation of how the space of time is to be understood. This opening out of time introduces the possibility-clearly a frightening one-that the letter won't be read, that a reply will not be forthcoming. But we ought to keep in mind that, in an epistolary novel as opposed to an actual letter, the author and reader of any given letter are not only the people whose names are affixed to the letter's text, but the novel's author and readers as well. Not only does this doubleness serve to undermine the simple notion ofletter as self-representation to which Villars would willfully cling, but it draws our attention to the temporal doubleness implicit in the epistolary novel. Since we as readers are never certain at exactly what point in its circuit of production we gain access to a given letter, the authority - both in the sense of aut~orial Irene Tucker

427

identity and in the sense offorce oflaw-that any letter commands is called into question. This subversive potential made possible by the form's temporal doubleness is most clearly manifested near the middle of the novel, when Villars condemns his ward's growing intimacy with Lord Orville, a man she has become acquainted with in London. When, having already read Villars's condemnation of the connection, we read Evelina's description of her continuing pursuit of the relationship, we are led to believe that she is willfully disregarding her guardian's wishes. Soon enough we learn that Evelina's apparent disregard of Villars's desires is merely an illusion created by the temporal doubleness of the epistolary novel: we have read Villars's letter before she has. Nonetheless, the lesson of the incident is marked indelibly. Once again, the very sociality of the construction of identity-whether the identity takes the form of authority, property or written self-representation, that makes it necessary for the letters to be transmitted to gain their meaning-also figures the limitation of that authority. Thus far we have traced the trajectory of the novel according to the way it calls into question with increasing force Villars's authority and structures of identity. But the novel's development can be figured equally well in terms of Evelina's developing voice as a letter-writer, even as the valuation we normally lend such a development is called into question. Most obviously, Evelina's letters to Villars stand as a sign of her growing distance from him, both geographically and ontologically. Initially, Evelina is reluctant to write, recognizing that writing signals her ontological break from him:
My dear Sir, I am desired to make a request to you. I hope you will not think me an encroacher; Lady Howard insists upon my writing!-and yet I hardly know how to go on; a petition implies a want, -and have you left me one? No indeed. (23)

Here, as in the novel's opening pages, Evelina serves both as message and as the means of transmission for that message. The parallels between these two moments ought to alert us to their crucial difference, however: while in the first instance Evelina is sent away from Villars as if she were a letter, here, the letter returns to Villars as if it were Evelina. The substitution of the ideality of the letter for the materiality of Evelina's actual body hence becomes a necessary condition of her developing autonomy. The act of self-definition is explicitly figured as a definition of the limits of property; it is her conception of a want, of the possibility of lack, that marks her break from Villars. Still, just a few paragraphs later in the same letter, Evelina has already begun to 428 Writing Home

conceive of her relationship to her erstwhile guardian differently, with his authority over her desires transformed into a legal control rather than a control emerging from their mutuality of identification or desire. She asks him, "Ought I to form a wish that has not your sanction?" (23). She marks the transitory state of her identity at this moment by refusing to mark, signing her letter with a blank space whose significance will become clearer later. Villars responds, not unexpectedly, with an attempt to assert his imaginative authority to recreate the time in which the unity of their identities - his moral, emotional and financial possession of Evelinaproduced the illusion of satiation, oflimitlessness:' "To see my Evelina happy is to see myself without a wish" (25). But Villars clearly, if reluctantly, recognizes the increasing untenability of his position, an untenability brought on by the fact that his self-representation in the form of Evelina has already been made public. To the extent that Evelina has become a writing subject, someone engaged in her own self-representation, she has become irreducibly different from Villars. His solution, acknowledgedly ideal, is to cancel her identity as letterwriter by eliminating the geographical (and, implicitly, the temporal) space that separates them. "To follow the dictates of my own heart, I should instantly recall you to myself, and never more consent to your being separated from me; but the manners and opinions of the world demand a different conduct" (129). Even this ideal, admittedly unachievable, solution is a fallen one, however, as Villars figures the unity between them as consent given or withheld rather than as a form of organic identity. What is crucial to keep in mind is the way in which, throughout most of the novel, the paradox of identity and property is inflected differently across gender lines. If Evelina is schooled in the possibilities for subversion by witnessing the forms her own movement away from Villars takes, she is nonetheless, as a woman, placed differently from her guardian within the conflicting and intersecting lines ofpower that define identity and property. As the novel makes clear, Evelina's vulnerability to being appropriated as the site of Villars's moral selfproduction-her appropriateness to being made both the material and limit of others' self-representation - depends in large part upon her status as orphan, or, more accurately, as unowned heiress. Paradoxicallyenough, however, while her unconnectedness is what allows her to be seized as the stuff out of which others' self-production is made, Evelina nonetheless needs to imagine an absence of connection (at least ofconnection to men) as the foundation of her own identity. Faced Irene Tucker
429

with an array of competing suitors at her first public ball, Evelina tells each of them she is engaged to another to avoid having to commit herself to any of them. Where Villars uses his (and Evelina's) isolation from the world to justify his appropriation of her as a representation before the world, Evelina's fiction is a negative one, one that describes something that is not there. If the paradoxes of property and identity make clear the way in which the oppositions of autonomy and sociality tend to collapse into one another, men and women within the novel still begin at different places within the ever-intertwining set of terms. Rather than using control over others to represent identity before the world as Villars does, Evelina creates a fiction of connectedness in the form of her story to the suitors, intended to create for her the possibility of an autonomy that otherwise would not exist. To the extent to which personal autonomy is either possible or desirable (Burney is clearly wary on both counts), women seem only able to approach such autonomy under the cover of sociality. The threat posed by Evelina's lie at the ball resounds throughout the novel. Just as Evelina's lack offamilial connection both allows her appropriation by Villars and figures her identity as possible (and, from Villars's point of view, threatening) in its very Huidity, her social fictionmaking, her telling of stories deliberately unrepresentative of and unconnected to her social reality, creates in part the possibility of her selfhood. Evelina clearly recognizes the power of the threat presented by her capacity to lie, particularly as that capacity remakes her relationship with Villars. She deliberately sets that threat into motion as she withholds information from Villars and then Haunts that act of withholding:
Will you forgive me if I own that I have first written an account of this transaction to Miss Mirvan?-and that I even thought of concealing it from you?-Short-lived, however, was the ungrateful idea, and sooner will I risk the justice of your displeasure, then unworthily betray your generous confidence. (249)

Here, the capacity to lie that Evelina first demonstrates at the ball is clearly associated with the structure of temporal doubleness associated with the letter in the epistolary novel. Evelina demonstrates her acumen as a reader of Evelina. To write letters is to prove that one is capable oflying. Evelina, who is characterized in the early sections of the novel explicitly by her lack of guile, learns to lie by coming to understand the operation of the letter. Inasmuch as her mendacity marks a deviation from her early character, writing letters would seem to serve to make Evelina less, rather than more, herself. Clearly,
430

however, Burney holds no stock in the possibility of personal "essence"; not only do the novel's letters signal Evelina's growing independence from Villars, but autonomy in general, to the extent to Which it is possible, is shown to be borne of the capacity to misrepresent. In Evelina, the act of lying becomes an assertion of the possibility of ohoice ." Even more fundamentally, the association between lying and letter writing points up the extent to which the fact of human distance and separateness-the distance between London and the provinces that compels Evelina and Villars to communicate by Jetter and opens the temporal gap that makes it impossible for either to own their communication-coupled with the sociality of meaning, creates the possibility, indeed, the inevitability, of misrepresenting. There seems no position from which letters may be owned, from which they can even confidently be read. To assert that one is capable of either owning or reading is therefore to assert a fiction, to write a letter, to lie. Within the novel, sending, withholding and receiving information are not fundamentally different acts, but simply different moments in a single circuit. But as our experience as readers of the epistolary novel teaches us, we can never know exactly where in the circuit we are. For Evelina, such undecidability is opportunity. Toward the end of the novel, as the inexorable marriage plot narrows around her , systematically closing off all avenues of escape, Evelina seizes upon the temporal undecidability made so evident by the epistolary form in one final, desperate effort to postpone the closure of marriage. When Lord Orville proposes marriage, "to make [his] devotion to [her] public," Evelina begs for more time, asking his deference to a secret she is not currently in a position to reveal. "There is nothing, my Lord, I wish to conceal; - to postpone an explanation is all I desire" (354). Her secret is, of course, the mystery of her personal history, the explanation of her status as "orphan," and the ostensible purpose of her delay is to await an opportunity for presenting herself to her father, Sir John Belmont, to be owned. Evelina invokes the conditions of her dependence as a further means of delaying her marriage. She informs Lord Orville she must write away to Villars for permission to marry:
I told [Lord Orville] I was wholly dependent upon you, and that I was certain your opinion would be the same as mine, which was that it would be highly improper should I dispose of myself forever so very near the time which must finally decide by whose authority I ought to be granted. (370)

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

431

Reading her situation as a woman in a world in which autonomy and dependence are not distinguishable ontological conditions but, rather, names for discursive strategies, Evelina invokes the impropriety of "disposjing] of [her]self," as a means of buying more time as she waits for Villars's response to arrive by the mails. That the novel raises no question regarding Belmont's status as Evelina's real father is crucial, since the presumption of their relatedness shifts the issue to be resolved from one of determining natural connection to one of determining ownership. As Evelina sets off to meet her father, the question at hand is not whether Evelina is her father's daughter, but, rather, whether her father will own her as such. As the novel describes the encounter, Belmont could just as easily own her as not, a fact that explicitly empties the act of any ontological significance. As a result, Evelina's receipt of the patronym is not, as we might have expected, a moment at which her freedom to act is shut down, but, rather, one in which the strictures that might limit her action are revealed to be at their most arbitrary. Clearly, for this novel, there is nothing "natural" about owning or being owned. If Burney labors both within and by means of the novel to represent the denaturalization of paternal ownership, she does not do so in opposition to Locke, but squarely within his terms. Until now, I have been discussing the concept of paternal property-the relationship of paternal ownership, authority and identity-as though it can be accommodated unproblematically within the general liberal model of property. While it is the Second Treatise's natural rights theory for which Locke is best known, the political and philosophical context for this model is laid out in the largely ignored First Treatise, in which Locke explicitly refutes Sir Robert Filmer's identification of the authority of absolute monarchs with the "natural" authority of fathers over their children. What becomes clear in examining Locke within the context of Filmer is the extent to which Evelina's strategy of postponement is an accord with Locke's own project to pry apart property, paternity and political authority. Insofar as this separation depends upon both the ambiguous materiality of the "labor" metaphor and the oscillation of alienability that the metaphor implies, such a move threatens the liberal form of property at the very moment it constitutes such a model; within this view, Evelina's status as disowned daughter becomes not perverse but paradigmatic.l? Indeed, "being Belmont" marks, if anything, the freedom that for Evelina accompanies undecidability, since her life as Evelina Belmont is almost perfectly coextensive with the period of time during which 432

the letters requesting and granting permission for her to marry are en route. Within the structure of relations suggested by the names in the book, in fact, Evelina is figured as least "owned" when she has received the patronym Belmont, insofar as the surname Villars had chosen for her-Anville-linguistically emphasizes her links with both himself and with Orville. The association between her life as Evelina Belmont and her freedom from ownership is further extended through her letter to Villars in which she describes the arrival of his letter granting her permission to marry: Open it, indeed, I did;-but read it I could not,-the willing, yet aweful consent you have granted, -the tenderness of your expressions,-the certainty that no obstacle remained to my external union with the loved owner of my heart, gave me sensations too various, and though joyful, too little placid for observation. Finding myself unable to proceed, and blinded by the tears of gratitude and delight which started into my eyes, I gave over the attempt of reading, till I retired to my own room: and, having no voice to answer the enquiries of Lord Orville, I put the letter into his hands, and left it to speak both for me and itself. (404) This letter, which she signs Evelina Belmont, "for the first-and probably the last time I shall ever own the name" (404), appears at first glance to mark, in the form' of the arrival of Villars's letter, the final dosing down of the structure of postponement that has heretofore enabled her limited freedom. Evelina is unable to read or speak, and if it was her movement beyond the status of Villars's "letter" that marked her initial break from her guardian, here she is explicitly returned to the status of his letter, "which speaks for both [her] and itself. " But in this closing section, as in the rest of Evelina, nothing is quite as simple as it seems, no divisions quite so easily upheld. While the force and immediacy of the description may lead us to forget the con text in which it is written, we ought to keep in mind that this passage is composed by Evelina retrospectively as part of a letter to Villars recalling precisely the moment of his letter's arrival. Once again, the acts of receiving, reading and writing letters collapse into one another, so that the primacy that might otherwise have been accorded the moment of writing is transferred to this complex knot of activity in which all acts become the same act: Villars reads Evelina's writing about her reading of his writing, all of which is further complicated by the fact that we as external audience enter the circuit at some undefinable point to read Fanny Burney's writing about this knotted complex of reading and writing, sending and receiving. Not only is

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

433

'\\

the moment of Evelina's apparent voicelessness and self-dissolution at least partially recuperated by our knowledge that Evelina herself has represented this disempowerment, but the act of representation itself is shown to be one that gains its meaning only in being received and read. Viewed within the structure of the letter laid out by Evelina, Lord Chancellor Hardwickes creation ofthe concept of intellectual property by granting copyright to the writer rather than the recipient of a letter threatens to unravel the intertwined concepts of material property and personal identity on which intellectual property right is founded. It makes no sense, in understanding the functioning of the letter, to separate the act of writing from the acts of receiving and reading; thus the legal privileging of writing has the effect of pointing up the incoherences implicit within the notion of private property. The Lockean notion of property that grounds ownership in the "natural" ownership of the body, figuring the objects of possession as extensions and representations of the self, must ignore the fact that those objects must necessarily be defined as already alienated, already different from the self, in order for them to be owned. Evelina is able to transform the letters intended to secure her ties first to guardian, then to husband into an instrument for postponing her links to either; similarly, Fanny Burney, as a woman novelist, seizes Pope's attempts to extend his control from material to immaterial property as a means of challenging his right to property in any form. In refusing as illusory the legal separation between property as self-extension and property as selfdifference, the structure of the letter in Evelina challenges the natural rights notion of property by exposing the contradiction at its core. But ought we to read Evelina simply as critique? Far from simply pointing up the paradox of property as self-representation, Burney attempts in her novel to figure a new model of authorship that implicitly suggests new. relations between self, production and property. In the dedicatory poem that opens the volume, "To ---," Burney once again uses the doubleness implicit in the epistolary novel to extend a discussion focused historically around the ownership ofletters to apply to published writing in general as part of her larger attempt to imagine a kind of authorship that is not based on the model of possession. The blank place of the recipient, which recalls the blank signature of Evelina's first letter to Villars, most explicitly refers to Burney's status as anonymous author of the novel. Directed to the" author of my being" (1), the poem is offered as an explanation from the author to her father for her decision to publish her work anonvmouslv" "But since my

niggard stars that gift refuse / Concealment is the only boon I claim; / Obscure oe still the unsuccessful Muse, / Who cannot raise, but would not sink, your fame" (1). Clearly, if Burney has chosen to publish anonymously, as she claims in the poem, in order to avoid sinking her father's fame, then she cannot name him as the recipient of the poem and the novel without revealing his identity. But like Evelina within the body of the novel, Burney also seems to refuse the social structures that define the daughter as "recorder of [her father's] worth" (1), as his self-production and representation. Likewise, it is possible to read the character of Evelina as the speaker throughout the poem (the blank in Evelina's first letter to Villars helps validate such a reading), addressing to Burney her own reluctance to stand as "recorder of thy worth." With the blank place of the recipient holding both readings in suspension, Burney and Evelina, author and production, become indistinguishable from one another, an apparent fulfillment of the Lockean fantasy. But clearly Burney has more than utopian wish-fulfillment in mind. While the blankness of the dedication conflates Burney and Evelina, if the two readings are considered at once, Burney becomes simultaneously both speaker and listener-the speaker of her address to her father, the listener of Evelina's address to her author. As soon as the validity of a natural rights notion of property is suggested by 'the conflation of author and artistic production, that validity is undermined by the collapse of speaker and listener that effectively challenges any move to privilege the speaker/author. The risks of such a strategy for Burney are at least equally as pronounced as the potentially liberatory effectsofher subversion. 21 The possibility of self-representation is made available only with the acknowledgement that any self that might be represented has already disappeared, replaced by a system of relations uniting reader and writer, sender and recipient, speaker and listener. Finally, however, the blankness allows each of the novel's readers to become the recipient of the dedication, to take his or her place as "author of [the speaker's] being." In assuming her position as anonymous author and uncovering the infinite openness of the position of recipient/author that is implicitly characteristic of the relationship of allauthors to their reading public, Burney figures a notion of authorship that is the production of all involved in the reading/writing process." In sending Evelina, like a letter, to everyone, she belongs to no one. University of California, Berkeley

434

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

435

NOTES This essay was first prepared in conjunction with Catherine Gallagher's graduate seminar on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Women Writers, held at the University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 1990. I am grateful to the other participants in the seminar for their helpful comments on the earliest formulation of this piece and to Cynthia Franklin, Catherine Gallagher, Victoria Pond, Simon Stern and Elizabeth Todesco for their sensitive, astute and supportive readings oflater versions. I also benefited greatly from the lively discussion that followed my presentation of this paper under the aegis of the Berkeley Graduate English Women's Caucus. My thinking about Locke has been influenced significantly by Howard Horwitz's work on the subject; I thank him as well. 1 Mark Rose, "The Author in Court; Pope v. Curll (1741)," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1992): 475-493. Rose cites Pope v. Curll as the first case in which a major English author went to court in his own name to defend his literarv rights. As such, the case marks a transitional moment both in the concept of authorship and in the notion of literary property more generally., 2 Some standard works on the Statute of Anne and on the development of copyright generally are Harry Ransom, The First Copyright Statute (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1956); John Feather, "The Book Trade in Politics: the Making of the Copyright Act of 17lO," Publishing History 8 (1980): 19-34; Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1968); Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967); and Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1939). 3 Quoted in Rose (note 1), 484. 4 Public Record Office CU/1569/29, quoted in Rose (note 1), 485-86. 5 While the Statute of Anne certainly initiated a concept of literary property, Rose. following Kaplan, contends that the statute operated within terms presumed by the economic structure of printing rather than that of authorship. That the statute mandated that violators of the law forfeit all offending books to their rightful proprietors, who were in turn, required to "Damask and make Waste Paper of them" points up the statute's emphasis on the book as a physical entity (Rose [note 1], 487). 6 In his provocative discussion of the intersections of narrative and critical literalism in Clarissa ("Taking Clarissa Literally: The Implication of Reading," Genre 21 [Summer 1988]), Stephen Melville comments that "nothing can stop this suspicion of art, fiction, reflection, once it has started. (And isn't that just the fear close reading always provokes, the fear internal to criticism that always turns its theoretical debates back into matters of detail, the accidental and essential of reading?)" (143). Indeed, Evelina seems to undermine any claims it (or its critics) might possibly make for the novel's representative status in its strategic exposure of the contingency signaled by the material. Evelina as example-whether it be as representative or unrepresent-ative text, whether its meaningful context be the epistolary novel, eighteenth-century fiction, or the history of women's writing-always threaten to veer into Evelina as random sample, with such randomness marking the point of intersection between significance and insignificance. The relationship between the historical claims I make in this paper and the evidence I adduce to support those claims, that is, a fairly detailed reading of a single novel, bears a striking resemblance to the text/manuscript knot Hardwicke tried unsuccessfully to unravel: a theoretical point happens to appear in the form of a novel, but need not necessarily do so (although, within certain professional contexts, it is only of interest insofar as it does). Finally, I think a clue to this puzzle lies in what Melville calls the epistolary novel's "seamlessness of mimesis," the fact that "we can know [the epistolary novel] to be a fiction only if we are assured in advance or by some third person that it is such" (138). The difficulty we might have in distinguishing foreground from background with regard to the relationship between the history of the Hardwicke decision and the text of Evelina seems to me an analytically helpful one, the difficulty of the

epistolary novel's "seamless mimesis," since it .suggests that such distinctions are achieved only by the intervention of either authority or personal interest. 1John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 287-88. . \ 8 For some discussions of the paradox of the natural rights theory of property in other contexts, see Catherine Gallagher's "George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question," in Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 39-62; Walter Benn Michaels's "Romance and Real Estate," in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1987), 85-112; and Howard Horwitz's "0 Pioneers! and the Paradox of Property: Cather's Aesthetics of Divestment," Prospects 13 (1988): 61-93. I am interested in exploring here the ways in which the structure-of the letter, within both Burney's adaptation of the tradition of the epistolary novel and the contemporary debate over the ownership of letters, makes the relations of the Lockean paradox particularly evident. 9 Mary Poovey argues that Burney identifies the courtship period as a moment at which the interests.of fathers and husbands potentially come into conflict, but that she then retreats from the implications of such an analysis. See Poovey, "Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing Up Female," in Fanny Burney's "Evelina," ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 85-98. While Burney does seem particularly interested in this period for precisely the reasons Poovey suggests, I intend to argue that, far from backing away from such a conflict, Burney dramatizes the ways in which young women may employ it strategically to their own ends. 10 Charles A. Porter, "Forward: MenIWomen of Letters," Yale French Studies 74 (1986): 1-14. 11 In "Of Readers and Narratees: The Experience of Pamela," L'Esprit Createur 21 (Summer 1981): 93, Susan Rubin Suleiman identifies convincingly an additional level of narration implicit in the epistolary form-that of the editor (and editor's reader). This narrative level may be emphasized to a greater degree (as in Les Liasons dangereuses and Pamela) or to a lesser extent (as in Clarissa or Evelina). While Suleiman argues that narrators and narratees within the same narrative levels remain stable in relation to one another, the relations seem to me to get more tricky at the extranarrative levels. While the distinction between author and editor remains clear, for example, the condition of author's narratee is to aspire to become editor's narratee through the willing suspension of disbelief demanded of most realism's readers. That this relationship between narratees is so unstable, in addition to the fact Burney identifies an editor in the Preface only immediately to subsume the role of that editor within the functions of an explicitly imaginative author, suggests that she is eager to minimize the distinction between author and editor. As I will argue, possession and authorship are figured in terms of one another and are plagued by the same incoherences. 12 Janet Gurkin Altman points out that epistolary novels conventionally emphasize the immediacy of their narration, what she terms the "pivotal, yet impossible present." The only event that can be represented with the presence the form of the epistolary novel claims for itself is the act of writing. See Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1982),129. Paradoxically, the materiality of writing, the same materiality that is threatening insofar as it limits the transparency (hence, the completeness) with which writing can function as a means of self-representation, is the only thing that can be represented completely (the completeness of the representation contingent upon the transformation of writing from an act into a thing.) 13 Altman (note 12) terms the two uses of the letter "metaphoric" (by which the "message" of the letter stands in for the sender by virtue of its immateriality) and

436

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

437

"

"metonymic" (by which the materiality of the letter becomes the conduit of physical contact between sender and recipient) (19). 14 Susan Staves, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Judith Lowder Newton all trace a preponderance of physical violence within the novel. See Staves, "Evelina; or, Female Difficulties," in Bloom (note 9), 13-30; Spacks, "Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney," in Bloom, 31-57; and Newton, "Evelina: A Chronicle of Assault," in Bloom, 59-83. This excess of violence seems to testify to the anxiety produced by these contradictions within and between property and identity. 15 Since EvelinaIs without a patronym, Villars has created a surname for herAnville, an obvious variation on his own name, as well as an anagram both for Evelyn (Evelina's grandfather and Villars's pupil) and for Evelina's own name. Not only does Evelina's lack of a patronym allow Villars to construct a lineage based strictly on their legal ties to one another, but the explicit linking of Evelina's first name to this fictional ancestral line would seems to suggest the impossibility of preserving any aspect of her identity from association with this line. Still, this collapse of given name and surname into an undeniably artificial genealogy suggests that Evelina might possess, in the absence of actual family ties, an extraordinary opportunity to fashion her own identity. This oscillation between discourses of complete determinacy and a complete absence of referentiality returns repeatedly throughout the novel and seems to function, both for Evelina and for Burney, as a means of creating actual, if temporary, freedom in the world. I will discuss this pattern in greater detail below. 16 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 18. All further page references to the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text. 17 This retrospective, narrative (as opposed to dramatic) quality stands in sharp contrast to the forms of narration characteristic of Richardson's epistolary fiction, the narration of "writing to the moment," a phrase Richardson coined in his Preface to Sir Charles Grandison. "The nature offamiliar letters, written, as it were, to the moment, while the heart is agitated by hopes and fears, or events undecided, must plead as an excuse for the bulk of a collection of this kind" (Richardson, quoted in Altman [note 12], 141). 18 Altman argues that the epistolary novel became a favorite eighteenth-century form within a cultural milieu that saw authentication as a form of "presentification .. whereby the writer tries to create the illusion that both he and his addressee are immediately present to each other and to the action .... Such tendencies suggest an eighteenth-century reading public whose dominant esthetic is contemporaneity; one might speculate on the dialectical relationship between the epistolary novel so popular in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the historical novel focusing on more distant events that ushered in a new kind of narrative in the nineteenth century" (202). If we understand Evelina, in its tendency toward retrospectivity and postponement. to be a movement away from the classic epistolary form identified by Altman, then we might see the beginnings of a new form of authority here-the authority of fiction. of the lie. We would thus understand the emergence of this new aesthetic of fictionality as a response to the particular conditions of disempowerment that made immediacy insupportable for Burney and for Evelina-propertylessness and daughterhood. 19 Along these lines, Richard Swartz argues that the concept of patrimony-the right offathers to will their property to their children-was frequently employed in eighteenth-century debates over perpetuity of copyright in an attempt to resolve the tension between the literary artifact's status as unique creation and its status as commodity. While Swartz's reading of the Miller v. Taylor (1769) copyright case tends to emphasize the diachronic aspects of the contradictions within the Lockean conception of property in distinction to my focus on the synchronic aspects, these differences, rather than being understood as opposing positions, might productively be read as offering insights into Locke's complex use of time in his natural rights model. See Swartz, "Patrimonv

and the Figuration of Authorship ill the Eighteenth-Century Property Debates," Works and Days 7 (1989):29-54. 20 For detailed biographical accounts of the nature of Burney's relationship to her father, see Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the \Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988) and Poovey (note 9). \ 21 Burney writes in her journal on the occasion of the publication of Evelina, "I have an exceeding odd sensation, when 1 consider that it is now in the power of any and every body to read what 1 so carefully hoarded even from my best friends, till this last month or two, -and that a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy of my bureau, may now be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms" (Burney, quoted in Jennifer A, Wagner, "Privacy and Anonymity in Evelina, in Bloom [note 9],99--109). 22 Inasmuch as books must be bought and postage must be paid, such infinite openness is only theoretical. Nevertheless, because, before the establishment of the penny post in 1840, most postage was paid by recipients ofletters rather than senders, the analogy between recipients and readers still holds. See Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 332. 1 am thankful to Elizabeth Young for asking this question and Cheri Larsen for her help in tracking down the answer.

438

Writing Home

Irene Tucker

439

HOW TO READ LIKE A GENTLEMAN:

INSTRUCTIONS
BY GINA CAMPBELL

TO HER CRITICS

BURNEY'S IN EVELINA

CL

/f()

In Evelina's dedication, "To the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews," Frances Burney courts her prospective critics' attention or, more precisely, their protection. What is peculiar about this dedication is its tone of instruction: /
The extensive plan of your critical observations,-which, not confined to works of utility or ingenuity, is equally open to those of frivolous amusement,-and, yet worse than frivolous, dullness,-encourages me to seek for your protection, since,perhaps for my sins!-it intitles me to your annotations. To resent, therefore, this offering, however insignificant, would ill become the universality of your undertaking; though not to despise it may, alas! be out of your power.'

~ ,"'" t
" "',
""""

~'IP'''' ~I"",.,

"";"

The extraordinary convolutions of her prose here testify to Burney's embarrassment at her own daring. She demands her critics' protection although she clearly knows that addressing them at all may backfire. Implicit in Burney's address is a criticism of the thencurrent critical climate for womens' novels: she acknowledges that she needs a benign or at least impartial reception and recognizes that it won't be granted as a matter of course. I will argue that Burney includes a model of reading within Evelina that resembles conduct literature in its emphasis on propriety and that is meant to serve Burney's literary ambitions by teaching her critics how they ought to read her work. The anxiety that prompts her dedication springs from the critical climate surrounding the publication of novels in general and novels hy women in particular. The contemporaneous anonymous reviewer of Woodbury or, the Memoirs of William Marchmont, Esq; and Miss Walbrook prefaces the substance of his brief notice with a telling general lament: "Surely the youthful part of the fair sex have as keen a relish for novels, as they have for green apples, green gooseberries, or other such kind of crude trash, otherwise it would not be found worth while to cultivate these literary weeds, which spring up, plenteously, every month, even under the scythe
ELH 57 (1990) 557-584 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

557

\"

~.
Let me, therefore, prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation ofbeing transported to the fantasticregions of Romance,where Fiction is coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where Reason is an outcast,and where the sublimity ofthe Marvellous rejects all aid from sober Probability. Imagination, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has convincingly argued, was believed by Burney and her contemporaries to be the "source

of criticism."2 The critic's duty, the reviewer suggests, is to discourage the writing of novels as much as possible in order that cultivated flowers, such as only formal education can produce, may grow. Since women were excluded from formal education, they should, according to the reviewer's notions, also be excluded from publishing. Even benign attitudes towards women's writing presented problems. As Jane Spencer has noted, the terms of critical acceptance for women's novels were twofold: "When women writers were accepted it was on the basis of their femininity; and the kind of praise they received varied with their readers' conceptions of that quality, so that to some people feminine writing implied eroticism, to others, purity."3 The two schools of feminine writing were well enough established by the early 1770s that an anonymous publication did not guarantee immunity from ad feminam criticism, as this review of The History of Miss Dorinda Catsby and Miss Emilia Faulkner makes clear: "Some romance writing female (as we guess from the style) with her head full of love-scenes,-shady groves, and purling streams, honourable passion and wicked purposes,has here put together a flimsy series of such adventures and descriptions as we usually meet with in the amorous trash of the times.T' Literary taste-makers were not the only ones to object to the impure strain of women's novels. The popular eighteenthcentury moralist James Fordyce warns his female readers against novels in general not only because they "carryon their very forehead the mark of the beast" but also because they convey no instruction.f His reaction against novels differs from the critics' dismissal of "amorous trash" chiefly in its emphasis on the shocking effects of novels rather than on their formal failings. Defining herself entirely in the tradition of feminine purity, Fanny Burney in the preface to Evelina very carefully distinguishes her novel from those that undermine virtue:

of sexual feeling"." (In Evelina itself, Villars objects to the way Evelinajlas-Iet Imagination take the reins and lead her ideas about Lord Orville into regions of "fancy and passion" [290].) The only novelist whom critics consistently proposed as a model for women writers, and whom Fordyce exempts from his condemnation of the genre as a whole, is Richardson." An adoption of Richardson's domestic subject and of his focus on feminine virtue would therefore presumably offer a female novelist some promise of success were it not for the immodesty of publication itself. A woman novelist, such as Burney, who defined herself against the erotic feminine tradition would have to come to terms with a catch-22 built into the virtuous tradition. The eighteenthcentury definition of feminine virtue, with its emphasis on modesty, forbade courting attention of any kin d: This modesty,which I think so essential in your sex, will naturally dispose you to be rather silent in company, especially in a large one. People of sense and discernment will never mistake such a silence fordullness. One maytake a share in conversation without uttering a syllable, The expression in the countenance shows it, and this never escapes the observing eye.8 Since eighteenth-century notions of modesty required women to be reticent or even silent, for a woman to publish was to define herself as immodest.i' If only a demonstration of her own probity gives a novelist the hope of escaping the hostile critical reception I have outlined, then the very act of publication ought to jeopardize her reception because it undermines her moral authority. This pitfall haunts Burney. Recognizing it compelled her to try to use the text of Evelina to redefine the relationship between male critic and female novelist in a way that permits women to publish and yet to be taken seriously. To this end Burney criticizes the code of feminine virtue for silencing women, invents the ideal critic in Lord Orville and proposes an ideal principle of reading. In Evelina; or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, Burney emphasizes the parallels between a woman's social reception and a work's critical reception to allow the narrative of Evelina's social success to stand as a trope for Evelina's (and thus her own) literary recognition. In the social arena of the eighteenthcentury novel of manners, a woman's reputation is established through the reading and/or decoding of her deportment by the doyens of "society," whose guidelines are defined and codified in conGina Campbell

W !-~
1", !~'a

iII"-'''

..".. ,....~
, I~""i

_I"",,"

.... ,~-

"lItI't

r '~"
(.

",""" .".~~'

558

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

559

'"

duct literature. Conduct books thus serve as an interpretive tool for reading women's behavior, and they constitute women as texts. But this interpretive tool produces simplistic readings: the conduct books' obsession with women's chastity narrows the range of questions asked about women and also narrows the inferences that one can draw from their behavior. The ways in which a woman's reputation is conventionally damaged in literature-one might think of Daisy Miller, Lily Bart, Cecilia, Cressida-make it clear not only that her reputation ultimately is based on a consensus about her chastity but also that appearance, or the evidence available to the public, is more important than fact or motive. 10 Women in the eighteenth century were read according to interpretive principles that dismiss authorial intent and privilege critical consensus over exegesis. To succeed with patriarchal critics Burney knew both she and her heroine had to appear to be conventionally good. Thus Burney had first of all to establish Evelina's virtue. But how does one immunize a portrayal of feminine virtue from the kind of derision Shamela aims at Pamela? Fielding's parody criticizes Richardson's portrait on two levels-he attacks the character Pamela for usingher virtue as a commodity, and he attacks the book Pamela .for titillating its readers. To succeed in her portrait Burney knew she had to make the source of readerly pleasure very chaste. Evelina, therefore, does not report hands groping in her bosom or under her skirts. The more difficult task Burney faced was to create an indisputably virtuous heroine, particularly in an epistolary novel. A character's hypocrisy or villainy is conventionally established by showing a disparity between motive and action. On the stage soliloquies and in novels psycho-narration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue can establish the nature of a character's motives in moments of unselfconsctousness.P But the epistolary novel does not offer these resources because consciousness of an audience is built into the form. Given the inherent selfconsciousness of letter-writing, a character's repeated reference to her own virtue does not in itself convince us of that virtue. Indeed it may have the opposite effect, as Fielding's response to Pamela makes clear. Bald self-advertisement will not do, then, but neither will the kind of good deeds within Evelina's powers. Her gender and circumstances preclude her from impressing us with the heroics of a Tom Jones or the philanthropy of a Cecilia. Her range of allowable

heroism is restricted by the miniature moral scale of assem blies and houseparties; but good behavior in this arena will not attract particular admiration, since perfect etiquette may well be the product of unthinking conformity. Paradoxically, Evelina proves her virtue by her nonconformity: her ignorance of the forms of etiquette testifies to her pastoral origin, and her tearful explanations of the motives behind her trespasses attest to her superior internalization of the morality on which the rules of etiquette are based. Her faux pas give her the opportunity to explain herself, while her embarrassment proves her to have been acting unselfconsciously. The entire case for Evelina's virtue thus rests on/moments of self-vindication. Putting aside the embarrassment and remorse she feels over her trivial crimes against form in the first two of Evelina's three volumes, I will focus instead on two complex and serious misapprehensions of her motives and one deliberate misreading.V The misapprehensions are explicitly presented as problems of readerly interpretation. Evelina's social reception is centered around her gradual conquest of Lord Orville's heart, a conquest that suffers numerous reversals along the way. During one of these setbacks, Orville apparently misreads a note she sends to him. In her ensuing unhappiness, Evelina becomes a book for Villars to read; and later she is made into a poem whose deceptive provenance leads Orville to doubt her character and her regard for him. Both Villars's and Orville's receptions are influenced by Willoughby's willful and self-serving prior misreadings of Evelina. To save her reputation with Orville, Evelina must confront Willoughby, as she does in Mrs. Beaumont's arbor. Burney emphasizes the need for a focus on intentionality or interiority by presenting each setback in Evelina's romance twice: once in a social context, where public behavior is the focus of attention, and again in a private context, where motives may be explained. These juxtapositions throw discontinuities between public persona and private self into sharp relief and by extension criticize modes of reading that discount such discontinuities. Furthermore, a demonstration of such discontinuities implicitly recommends a reading or writing process that concerns itself with the relationship between the private self and public mask, and modes of writing, such as the epistolary novel for example, that make the private public. Cumulatively, these juxtapositions establish the purity of Evelina's motives, her virtue, and they validate women's literary accomplishment. Since virtue is an

560

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

Gina Campbell

561

inner state, it cannot contribute to a reputation until it is announced: virtue must publish itself. And by extension, publication and the self-assertion involved in publication is also exonerated. There are situations in which publication is valuable and functions in the cause of virtue.
"ORVILLE" AS A BAD READER

~IIII I' ~II~

The nadir of Evelina's reception is marked by what appears to be Orville's extremely unflattering evaluation of her decision to write at all. Evelina writes Orville a letter of apology for the way her vulgar cousins have treated his coach. As she herself willingly admits, taking the initiative to write to Lord Orville is not strictly proper, but she excuses herself (to Maria Mirvan) on the grounds that his opinion of her would otherwise be permanently and unjustly damaged by the impudence of the Branghtons, who had shanghaied his coach in her name and damaged it. Just as Burney in the preface to Evelina seeks to clear her novel of the notoriety attached to outlandishly imaginative novels (what the reviewer in the Monthly Review would presumably designate "amorous trash"), Evelina writes to clear herself of the vulgarity of her associates. The apology to Orville is thus an internal counterpart to Burney's prayer to her critics in her dedication. Both addresses give her interpreters an opening to impugn her motives. In the dedication Evelina is acutely aware that any address to critics may be interpreted as an attempt to compromise their integrity: "thus situated, to extol your judgment, would seem the effect of art, and to celebrate your impartiality, be attributed to suspecting it." The ulterior motive Burney disowns is sexualized in the novel; instead of wanting to buy her critics' favor with manipulative praises, Evelina uses her apology to insinuate herself into Orville's favor-at least, that is what the note signed in Orville's name suggests: Believe me, my lovely girl, I am truly sensible to the honour of your good opinion, and feel myselfdeeply penetrated with love and gratitude. The correspondence you have so sweetly commenced, I shall be proud of continuing; and I hope the strong sense I have of the favour you do me will prevent your withdrawing it. Assure yourself,that I desire nothing more ardently than to pour forth my thanks at your feet, and to offer those vows which are so justly the tribute of your charms and accomplishments.(241-42)

11l1li"

'''''''.

11: ..
,"
,"'""

'"'"" ""'~'

The answering note, which has. been forged by Willoughby, Orville's rival; who has intercepted Evelina's letter, reads her letter as an invitation to a clandestine correspondence. Entering into any kind of private exchange with a man before marriage was seen at the time as extremely disreputable in part because it afforded the correspondents an opportunity to set up a tryst. Orville's choice of the word "ardently" suggests that he himself takes Evelina's initiative to have sexual implications. His stated wish to thank her in person invites her to make a private assignation. In this context the promised "vows" do not appear in a respectable light-they may be vowsmerely of devotion and admiration but, given that suspicious word "ardently," it seems more likely that they would be vows of secrecy in a liaison. Initially exhilarated by what she takes as a declaration of love, Evelina herself on rereading inclines to a less flattering interpretation: "Upon a second reading I thought every word changed,-it did not seem the same letter.c--I could not find one sentence that I could look at without blushing: my astonishment was extreme, and was succeeded by the utmost indignation." Her indignation is revived by having to copy the offending letter: "What a letter! how has my proud heart swelled every line I have copied!" (242) Her self-defense requires her not only to relive the insult but to reproduce it. The insult is not merely sexual. As Judith Newton convincingly argues, when Evelina is commodified by the two Holhorn swains, Mr. Smith and Tom Branghton, her moral worth is discounted. Their treatment of her reduces her to her marriage-market value and, in Newton's term, denies her idea of herself as "treasure"; it denies the importance of her virtue and intelltgence.P The freedom of Orville's letter also commodifies her, only more disgracefully.Where the two bourgeois beaux would marry Evelina, Orville is interested in a clandestine relationship only; in other words, he excludes her from the marriage market within his class. His use of the word "justly" in his expressed desire to "offer those vows which are so justly the tribute of your charms and accomplishments" perhaps stings the most because it slights rather than rewardsthe virtue and intelligence that, in a meritocracy like Villars's pastoral world, would earn love. Evelina's virtue and intelligence are translated in the letterto "charms and accomplishments," in this context clearly sexual accessories that define Evelina more securely as sexual commodity, thus trapping her in a social and economic underworld. Gina Campbell

562

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

563

To bring the exchange back into the realm of her own values, Evelina in turn evaluates Orville's response in a series of rhetorical questions: If, as I am very ready to acknowledge, I erred in writing to Lord Orville, was it for him to punish the error? If he was offended, could he not have been silent? Ifhe thought my letter ill-judged, should he not have pitied my ignorance? have considered my youth, and allowed for my inexperience? (242) In their emphasis on Orville's failure to adopt a protective stance, these questions recall one of James Fordyce's sermons on shamefacedness in women, in which Nature speaks: "Behold these smiling innocents, whom I have graced with my fairest gifts, and committed to your protection? Behold them with tenderness and honour. They are timid, and want to be defended. They are frail; 0 do not take advantage oftheir weakness. Let their fears and blushes endear them. Let their confidence in you never be abused-But is it possible, that any of you can be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? .. , Curst be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastityl'P" . Fordyce's sermon identifies men's responsibility within a code that requires female chastity-if women are to be innocent, men must be protective. Fordyce is an external moral authority for Evelina's particular defense against the aspersions the note casts on her virtue. In a similar fashion, when Burney addresses her critics, she explicitly brings men's assigned role as protectors into the relationship between critic and author, so the rhetorical questions Evelina indirectly poses to Lord Orville recapitulate the reading instructions Burney offers the critics in her dedication. Without revealing her sex, Burney, like Evelina, there claims protection on the basis of other attributes she shares with her heroine-youth, ignorance, and inexperience: The extensive plan of your critical observations,-which, not confined to worksof utility or ingenuity, is equally open to those of frivolous amusement,-and, yet worse than frivolous, dullness,-encourages me to seek for your protection, since,perhaps for my sins!-it intitles me to your annotations. To resent, therefore, this offering, however insignificant, would ill become the universality of your undertaking; though not to despise it may, alas! be out of your power.

Let not the anxioussolicitude with whichI recommend myselfto your notice expose me to your derision. Remember, Gentlemen, you'were all young writers once, and the most experienced veteran of your corps may, by recollecting his first publication, renovate his first terrors, and learn to allow for mine. Both in the text of the novel and in her introductory material, then, Burney insists that male readers adopt a protective stance to women and their writing. If they do not, she implies, they themselves breach the code of gentility by which they judge. "Orville" as a bad reader is guilty of just such a breach.
VILLARS AS BAD READER

Evelina's self-justification to her friend Maria Mirvan, however, does not by itself succeed in comforting her; she needs to be vindicated by a moral authority. Exiled by Madame Duval to Berry Hill, Evelina suffers physically from the misunderstanding. When she does not immediately reveal to Villars the cause of her evident unhappiness, he determines to read Evelina: But when, at last, I recollected myself,and turned round, I saw that Mr. Villars,who had parted with his book, was wholly engrossedin attending to me. I startedfrommy reverie, and, hardly knowingwhat I said, asked if he had been reading? He paused a moment, and then replied, "Yes, my child;-a book that both afflicts and perplexes me." He means me, thought I; and therefore I made no answer. "What if we read it together?" continued he, "will you assist me to clear its obscurity?" (248) Villars's mistakes in reading Evelina are facilitated by the habitual textualization of women in good society, where the arbiters of that society (both men and women) read them as though their behavior corresponded immediately to their moral essence. IS However, as a sympathetic reader, Villars is unwilling to judge Evelina too quickly. He therefore enlists her help in construing her behavior; but his first mistake is to assume that she is the problem text. Motivated by modesty, Evelina is slow to testify to Orville's apparent depravity and perhaps reluctant to acknowledge herself as its object. Thus when Villars tries to encourage her to share the secrets of her heart with him as she was wont to do in childhood, she continues to evade him, until she sees that he is misreading her evasions: "I must now guess again: perhaps you regret the loss of those friends you knew in town;-perhaps you miss their society, and fear you may see them no more?-perhaps Lord Orville-" Gina Campbell

564

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

565

I could not keep my seat; but, rising hastily, said, "Dear sir, ask me nothing moreI-for I have nothingto own,-nothing to say;my gravityhas been merely accidental,and I can give no reason for it at all.-Shall I fetch you another book?-or will you have this again?" For some minutes he was totally silent, and I pretended to employ myself in lookingfora book.At last, with a deep sigh, "I see," said he, "I see but too plainly, that though Evelina is returned,-I have lost my child!" "No, Sir, no," cried I, inexpressibly shocked, "she is more your's than ever!" (249) Villars's mistake is complex and multilayered. His regret here has shocking implications indeed. "I have lost my child" as a response merely to Evelina's unwillingness to share the contents of her heart seems hyperbolic, since Villars associates" child" with innocence throughout the novel. Evelina's shock at the charge suggests how serious it is. While Villars does not exclude Evelina's person in his prayers for her, he is at least as anxious that she retain her purity of mind. Although he initially reads her exterior for signs of virtue, he knows that true virtue is not continuous with its outward signs. Early in the novel he sends her heaven's blessings with the prayer, "0 may it guard, watch over you, defend you from danger, save you from distress, and keep vice as distant from your person as from your heart!" (14). And in his penultimate letter he prays that she may retain her "singleness of heart" and "guileless sincerity" (320) in her new situation as Orville's bride. But how does one establish the purity of someorie's heart? Villars's test for an immaculate conscience is the absence of secrets. He is not ready to come to the conclusion that Evelina has lost her purity of mind until her reserve prompts him to it. When he is "reading" Evelina, Villars's interpretive method thus brings to the personal, private sphere the rules of conduct that apply to young women in the world, namely that anything secret or clandestine is incriminating. However, as the reading unfolds, the application of this rule for reading conduct broadens. Where publication of private thought had, in Evelina's case, been a means for establishing her feminine innocence, in "Orville's" case it becomes a means for exposing male hypocrisy. Villars's exoneration of Evelina puts the blame squarely on Orville as respondent/critic: Your indignation ... is the result of virtue; you fancied Lord Orville was without fault-he hadthe appearance of infinite worthiness, and you supposed his character accorded with his ap-

pearance: guileless yourself,how could you prepare against the duplicity ofanother? Yourdisappointment has but been propor- /tioned to your expectations,and you have chiefly owed its severity to the innocence which hid its approach. (252-53) Villars's reasoning opposes two terms, innocence and duplicity. If readability attests to innocence, illegibility indicates duplicity. Villars is talking about two styles of morality, hypocrisy versus directness, but his initial textualization of Evelina and his phrasing in this vindication, which emphasizes the innocent reader's (Evelina's) expectation that interiority or "character" is continuous with appearance, encourage one to think of the establishment of virtue and vice as a problem of reading, with special application to the novel of manners. Just as readability of character depends on a consonance between private and public selves, so a dissonance between these selves produces illegibility. Thus Orville's public good manners hide his essential badness, but his private writing reveals that essence. Evelina refers to this disparity when she hands Villars the letter: "See, Sir, how differently the same man can talk and write" (252). Similarly, by opening her heart to Villars, which entails showing him a hitherto clandestine correspondence, Evelina proves that she is still Villars's.good child, still obedient to the laws ofproper conduct, and still pure of mind. The publication of private writing, then, is as much a test of virtue as is the confiding of private thoughts to a moral authority. Throughout the novel the publishability of Evelina's private communication with men proves her innocence and worth just as the publishability of the epistolary, and therefore ostensibly private, contents of Evelina proves Burney's innocence of the scandal attached both to novels and to the female authors of novels. Innocent herself, Burney becomes eligible for consideration as a serious writer. 16 The effect of Villars's misinterpretation, then, is to establish Evelina's and Burney's probity while calling into question the private motives informing the reception of Evelina's note and, by extension, of women's writing in general. Villars's mistakes emphasize the shortcomings of an interpretive approach that fails to take into account the dynamics of critical reception, particularly the misleading effects of reception anxiety. When in response to Villars's hint about Orville Evelina suggests that he take up another book, that is, other than herself, she is also suggesting that the problem lies not in herself as a text but in the hostile response to her letter, Orville's note, which she hands to Villars with the claim that she

(;
at!,

..
"

~'
mIll ~,'

.,

~,,,.,
1I11'1W!1f

I~,

..,...,...'ltf\/'

566

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

I Gina

Campbell

567

"hate[s] Lord Orville" (251). Villars's misreading of Evelina is based on the effects of "Orville's" prior misreading of her rather than on the essential Evelina-Orville's letter has so shocked her modesty that Evelina's bearing suggests a troubled conscience, and Villars, responding to that bearing, thinks she has compromised her modesty in some way. To correct Villars's mistake Burney simultaneously vindicates Evelina's character (her text) and invalidates Orville as a critic by exposing (publishing) Evelina's note and Orville's improper response to it. By analogy Villars's vindication of Evelina once again puts external critics on their mettle, for Evelina's confidence in Orville's disposition to read her note fairly finds a parallel in Burney's confidence in the critics' fair reception of her novel. In terms of literary reception Willoughby's rationale for intercepting Evelina's letter and forging Orville's response suggests a motive for the suppression of women's writing by ad feminam criticism: "Briefly, then, I concealed your letter to prevent a discovery of your capacity; and I wrote you an answer, which I hoped would prevent you from wishing any other" (370). The suppression of Evelina's "capacity" serves Willoughby's design because it prevents Evelina, who is accessible to him only as sexual commodity, from being recognized as a moral subject. The publication of Evelina, similarly, reveals the moral basis of both novels and female novelists.
ORVILLE AS BAD READER

" (

.,
''ft1
, \\I'~,

::;

jlj;

,~ .."

'1", ,~

The ramifications of Evelina's first metaphorical textualization as a book casts light on Burney's anxiety about both Evelina's critical reception and the riskiness of addressing her critics directly in the preface. With Evelina's second sustained textualization, during which she is turned into a blazon, Burney shows the interdependence of private, critical, and public receptions. Orville allows his private opinion of Evelina to be influenced by the literary reception, evaluative and public, that Willoughby exploits. Orville's misunderstanding of Evelina's motives highlights the ease with which women's reputations may be manipulated as long as women keep silent. When Evelina, according to Villars's instructions, begins to shun Orville as part of her program to suppress her own partiality for him, Willoughby appears and distinguishes her with his attentions. To Orville, Evelina's sudden reserve towards himself, although actuated by modesty and prudence (Villars convinces her that, given her circumstances, Orville cannot be intending to marry 568 Burney's Instructions to Her Critics

her), looks like partiality to Willoughby; and Willoughby does all in his power.to encourage such a view. At the same time, a blazon of Evelina is circulated anonymously in the most public room in Bristol, the pump-room. While the publication of this eulogy damages Evelina's reputation, her dutifully assumed reserve towards Orville paradoxically prevents her from clearing herself easily.!" Although conduct literature of the time associates modesty with reticence, Burney demonstrates that silence in women leaves them and their reputations vulnerable to manipulation. In this way she justifies women's writing without directly attacking the feminine ideal of modesty. The scene in the pump-room follows closely a revelation that shocks Evelina. At the beginning of the novel it is established that Evelina's mother, nee Caroline Evelyn, dies in or shortly after childbirth, having been abando~ed by her husband, Sir John B!mont, Belmont had eloped with her but, when the dowry was withheld, had burned the marriage certificate, thus leaving her no legal proof of her marital status or of the legitimacy of her child. Gradually Evelina's surrogate parent and moral mentor, Villars, is persuaded that Evelina should seek her father's recognition (and a retroactive clearing of her mother's good name). Villars absolutely refuses to consider a lawsuit on the grounds that it would attract unwanted attention, wounding Evelina's modesty. Shortly before Evelina enters the pump-room, she discovers that her father is travelling with a Miss Belmont, who is being introduced as his daughter and heir. Since the novel builds up to a recognition scene between Lord Belmont and Evelina, the way in which the young men compare Evelina's person to her blazon just when Belmont's eventual recognition of her seems most doubtful may be meant as a perverse or parodic recognition scene, one that, equally public, is as offensive to her modesty as the lawsuit proposed by Madame Duval would have been. The blazon directs attention to Evelina's body but does not, because it cannot, reveal anything about her mind: We went first to the pump-room.It was full of company;and the momentwe entered, I heard a murmuring of, "That's she!" and, to my great confusion, I saw every eye turned towards me. I pulled my hat over my face,and, by the assistance of Mrs. Selwyn, endeavoured to screenmyself from observation, nevertheless, I found I was so muchthe objectof general attention, that I entreated her to hasten away.Butunfortunately she had entered Gina Campbell 569

into conversation, very earnestly, with a gentleman of her acquaintance, and would not listen to me; but said, that if I Was tired of waiting, I might walk on to the milliner's with the Miss Watkins, two young ladies I had seen at Mrs. Beaumont's, who were going thither. But we had not gone three yards, before we were followed by a party of young men, who took every possible opportunity of looking at us, and, as they walked behind, talked aloud, in a manner at once unintelligible and absurd. "Yes," cried one, " 'tis certainly shel=-mark but her blushing cheek!" "And then her eye-her downcast eye!"-cried another. "True, oh most true," said a third, "every beauty is her own!" "But then," said the first, "her mind,-now the difficulty is, to find out the truth of that, for she will not say a word." "She is timid," answered another; "mark but her timid air." During this conversation, we walked on silent and quick: as we knew not to whom it was particularly addressed, we were all equally ashamed, and equally desirous to avoid unaccountable observations. (308)

i
I:; .

111<

r""
' ' ' .~

C 1.."
""" ,,,,,,.;iIPI"V

'''~

It is important to note that at the beginning of her report Evelina says every eye was on her, but at the end she says none of them knew who was the object of the persecution. The most obvious explanation for this inconsistency in Evelina's report is that she is unwilling to appear conceited to Villars-her modesty keeps her from saying but not from knowing that she alone is attracting all this attention. 18 Similarly, Evelina's conjecture about the identity of the poem's author serves her modesty more than likelihood. According to her, Mr. Macartney must be the author, and gratitude his motive-a much more becoming speculation than the more likely option that Willoughby is the author, and desire his motive. Yet the last two lines of the poem, "Anville,-to her power unknown, I Artless strikesv+unconscious kills" (315), express not gratitude but desire. True, it is the kind of formulaic expression that a poet might resort to without passionate conviction, but its very conventionality within the courtly tradition suggests Willoughby as its author. He affects courtliness whenever he pursues Evelina, as Newton remarks: "What distinguishes Sir Clement ... is the persistence with which he imposes upon his control of Evelina the courtly fiction that she is Cinderella .... Sir Clement's courtly language marks a farcical counterpoint to his behavior .... he sustains a running and sometimes hilarious pose as the powerless lover of an unreachable mistress.Y'? The sentimental Macartney's characteristic style is more melodramatic and less courtly.

The minor adjustment in Evelina's story thus directs our attention to Villars's importance as addressee. Writing for him constrains Evelina.-fromtelling an immodest truth immodestly. As we become aware of Evelina's constraint before Villars, we are simultaneously made aware of how the immodesty of the pursuing swains silences the young women completely. And although the explanation Evelina offers for why they are all abashed is disingenuous, it still seems likely that the persecution she describes, in which a woman's person and mind are judged against the text of a blazon, would have the effect of striking dumb not just its particular victim, but all modest women, for the requirements of female modesty under normal social circumstances dictate reticence. In his recommendation that women be "rather silent" in company, Gregory assures them that "one may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shows it, and this never escapes the observing eye.,,20 Although Gregory does not gender the eye, in Evelina it is male readership, whether Villars's, Orville's, or the swains', that makes women into texts. Being objectified in this way automatically robs women of the subjectivity necessary to authorship. Whether the blazon is Willoughby's or not, it, like his forgery of Orville's note, serves his pursuit of Evelina, for while the publishability of Evelina's heart and behavior attests to her virtue, the publication of her external attributes wounds her modesty, effectually silences her, and thus prevents her from salvaging her reputation directly. Consequently she becomes first the prey of the young men, then of Willoughby himself, who takes advantage of the stir the poem has caused to become her selfappointed protector. As with Villars's misreading, Orville's misreading involves two texts, in this case Evelina and the blazon of Evelina, and two separate but interdependent scenes of reception. Weare presented first with the young men's public reading of Willoughby's version ofEvelina and their comparison of the two texts (poem and heroine) before we see her own reaction to the poem. When Evelina gets to read the blazon, it wounds her modesty as much as the swains' reception of her does. Not only is it embarrassingly flattering, but Willoughby makes sure that the circumstances under which she receives it hurt her reputation with Orville: he passes the poem to Evelina in Orville's sight, knowing full well that its nature will prevent her from circulating it and thus defusing the appearance such private note-passing gives. To protect her reputation for modGina Campbell

570

Burney's I nstructions

to Her C ritics

571

esty Evelina, paradoxically, must do that immodest thing, speak up for herself. But a direct self-vindication, aside from being immodest, would not be as effective as Orville's accidental witnessing of Evelina's struggle against Willoughby is. Evelina's ongoing battle of wits with the rake reaches a crisis in Mrs. Beaumont's arbor, and Orville's happening on them there gives the same credibility to Evelina's self-defense as might be obtained from an accidental reading of a private form of writing. In other words, the accidental nature of Orville's witnessing guarantees the artlessness of the self-defense. As usual, Evelina opposes Willoughby's seductive rattle with the language of virtue, so that while they are contending over Evelina's chastity, they are also disputing the grounds of social discourse, and Evelina is convincing her patriarchal readers of her virtue. Willoughby uses the language of courtly love, which accommodates a wide range of relationships, from platonic admiration, through married love, to adultery, and which is therefore inherently ambiguous.r! Although Evelina has suspected Willoughby of being a rake all along, in the privacy of the arbor he lowers his usual mask of polite if pointed attention and allows his language to become clearly risque. About midway through the scene, he offers to allow Evelina to reform him: Oh, MissAnville, your reproofs, your coldness, pierce me to the soul! look upon me with less rigour, and make me what you please;-you shall govern and direct all my actions,-you shall new-form, new-model me;-I will not have even a wish but of your suggestion;only deign to look on me with pity-if not with favour! (326) Although the reformation of rakes was a conventional feminine temptation, it was notoriously dangerous. (Not every woman is a Pamela.) To look on Willoughby with favor would be to favor him with intimacies, presumably kisses, garters, and, eventually, her maidenhead. Merely to pity him woud be to allow him to hope for these favors in the future. The prospect of reforming a rake here clearly comes with a price. According to Willoughby, before Evelina is to gain any influence she must give up her "rigor," that is, her morality. Since he has always valued Evelina exclusively for her prettiness, he predictably seeks to make her into an object by reducing her to her good looks, as the blazon does. Could he elicit looks of passion or at least of interest, those too would be welcome.

However, he is indifferent to her regard, which would be an expression of her moral being. In fact he would like to purge moral principles from looks and speech because those principles define her as a moral subject rather than a sexual object, and are also the main deterrent to her seduction. By insistently using the language of courtly love and responding to Evelina as though she too were using it, Willoughby seeks to pervert Evelina's own moral language. He reads in the spirit of Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes declares: "The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me." Barthes analyzes the pleasure gained by perverse readings: "The more a story is told in a proper, well-spoken, straightforward way, in an even tone, the easier it is to reverse it, to blacken it, to read it inside out (Mme de Segur read by Sade), This reversal, being a pure production, wonderfully develops the pleasure of the text."22 Willoughby's willful misreading of Evelina is sadistic in this way, but Evelina interrupts his pleasure by rigorously insisting on clarity. Willoughby knows he cannot allow himself to be bluntly sexual, but he depends on Evelina's propriety to allow his innuendo to pass as long as it presents itself as polite and conventional chitchat. His rhetoric depends on a discontinuity between polite form and wicked intent. By pretending she does not understand his polite language, Evelina leaves him the choice of abandoning his seduction or propositioning her openly: "Suffer me, Sir," said I, very gravely, "to make use of this occasionto put a final conclusionto such expressions. I entreat you never again to address me in a language so flighty and so unwelcome.Youhave already given me great uneasiness; and I must franklyassure you, that if you do not desire to banish me fromwherever you are, you will adopt a very different style and conduct in the future." I then rose, and was going, but he flung himself at my feet to prevent me, exclaiming, in a most passionate manner, "Good God! Miss Anville, what do you say?-is it, can it be possible, that, so unmoved,that with such petrifying indifference, you can tear from me even the remotest hope!" "I know not, Sir," said I, endeavouring to disengage myself from him, "what hope you mean, but I am sure that I never intended to give you any." (326) Here it seems pertinent to make a distinction between Barthes's principles and Willoughby's. The reading process Barthes describes is masturbatory, but since it is applied to literary texts, its Gina Campbell

." I:.. ,

""
1,"".

~t ~,
"

... '

572

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

573

perversity (if it is perverse) is harmless. Willoughby is reading a woman, however, and his principles in the arbor scene seek to dominate Evelina and do threaten real violence: "You distract me," cried he, "I cannot endure such scorn;-I beseech you to have some moderation in your cruelty,lest you make me desperate;-say, then, that you pity me,-O fairest inexorable! loveliest tyrant!-say, tell me, at least that you pity me!" (326) The phrase, "lest you make me desperate," warns Evelina that her resistance to Willoughby's discourse and logic will provoke him, but to what is not clear. As both Susan Staves and Judith Newton observe, the threat of violence permeates Evelina.23 Whether the violence is his own or some other man's, the threat of violence gives Willoughby power over Evelina: he exploits the threat of the Captain's violent practical jokes on Madame Duval to indebt Evelina to him; he exploits her predicament at Vauxhall where some drunken men seem convinced of her sexual availability, and attempts to turn the ostensible rescue into a seduction for his own benefit; again, he exploits her anxiety at being followed and harassed by the three youths from the pump-room, whose willing transgression against decorum threatens something worse, to court her himself; and, he himself physically detains her in his coach, in the arbor, and in Mrs. Beaumont's drawing room. All this pervasive danger requires that Evelina be protected, and Willoughby gains access to Evelina only when she is separated from her rightful guardians. So, in the pump-room, Mrs. Selwyn is too absorbed in conversation to accompany Evelina out of the room, although Evelina's distress would be obvious to anyone with "feminine delicacy." Mrs. Selwyn's indelicacy, specifically her teasing about Lord Orville, also drives Evelina into the garden for the arbor scene with Willoughby. But Orville himself most explicitly neglects his guardianship of Evelina almost immediately after he has pledged his protection as a brother. Evelina's description of his behavior during the blazon debacle suggests that not only her own silence but his inattention to her allows Willoughby to tarnish her reputation with him: Lord Orville's reception of us was grave and cold: far fromdistinguishing me, as usual, by particular civilities, Lady Louisa

herself could not have seen me enter the room with more frigid unconcern, nor have more scrupulously avoided honouringme with any notice. ButchieflyI was struck to see, that he suffered Sir Clement, who stayedsupper,to sit between us, withoutany effort to prevent him, though till then, he had seemed to be tenacious of a seat next mine.(317) In the very next paragraph Orville's neglect at the dinner table prevents him from seeing Evelina's tears. Social reception and literary reception are collapsed into one-the circulation (publication) of the blazon attaches notoriety to Evelina's name and person, and, as we have seen, Willoughby cultivates an appearance of indecency in her by making her appear to receive the poem surreptitiously in Orville's sight. When, at the dinner table, Evelina cries over Orville's sudden, pointed neglect of her, Willoughby leans forward to physically block Evelina's tears from Orville's sight. Willoughby's manipulation of Orville's regard for Evelina thus becomes a metaphor for the way ad feminam criticism of women's writing screens the real worth of their achievements from serious, principled critics. Evelina regains Orville's attention and protection only after she defends her virtue at length to Villars and the external reader and briefly but urgently to Orville. To persuade Orville to reassume his protection of her, to intercede, Evelina must convince him that her compromising situation in the arbor is not of her choosing by calling to him twice and saying to Willoughby: "Sir Clement, I insist upon your releasing me!" (326). Ultimately her discourse, then, while in itself incapable of protecting her, is a prerequisite for Orville's protection. She must speak her innocence in order to save not only her physical purity (i.e., her chastity) but Orville's estimation of her as innocent. Willoughby's machinations succeed in making Orville lose interest in Evelina, withdraw his protection from her, and thus deliver her to Willoughby. While Orville's "delicacy" has kept him from invading Evelina's privacy, it has also, as he now can see, kept him from understanding her danger. In this way his delicacy has contributed to Evelina's endangerment as much as has her own modest reticence. Previously, when Evelina recounts how Orville called on the Mirvans on the night of the attempted abduction, Villars praises Orville's freedom from false delicacy. By creating the appearance of indecency in Evelina, Willoughby has now betrayed Orville into just such an error.

t
1;1;

~r,.~
'" ,

L, ....
,,""

1
~'''';I''

574

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

Gina Campbell

575

ORVILLE

AS REDEEMED

READER

Almost immediately after Willoughby tries to seduce Evelina through his ambiguous and illicit discourse in the arbor, a discourse that ultimately rests on male force and the threat of violence, Orville's declaration of his love for Evelina offers a representation of alternate, ideal sexual relations based on a denial of male force. Both his interview with Willoughby in the arbor and his actual declaration make it clear that Orville's love is based on his estimation of Evelina as at least his equal. When Orville first asks Willoughby what the rake's intentions toward Evelina are, Willoughby's answering question elicits a reply that establishes Orville outside of any of the normal power relations that subjugate women: ... and then Sir Clement said, "To what, my Lord, must 1 then impute your desire of knowing [my intentions]?" "To an unaffected interest in Miss Anville's welfare." "Such an interest," said Sir Clement, drily, "is indeed very generous; but, except in a father,-a brother,-or a lover-" "Sir Clement," interrupted his Lordship, "I know your inference and 1 acknowledge 1 have not the right of enquiry which any of those three titles bestow; and yet 1 confess the warmest wishes to serve her and to see her happy." (327) At issue here is the right to protect. Sir Clement would restrict that right to those to whom a woman "belongs" because that would leave Evelina, who appears to belong to nobody, available to him. However, a father's or brother's protection is not by definition disinterested, as Clarissa's sufferings demonstrate, nor are a lover's. The disinterestedness that ideally motivates gentlemanly protection removes the threat of male violence from gender relations and thus would seem to permit an escape from patriarchal hierarchy. When pressed, Orville identifies the grounds of his concern in his esteem for Evelina and fear for her innocence. In other words, he is her friend: Pardon me, then, Sir Clement, if I speak to you with freedom. This young lady, though she seems alone, and, in some measure. unprotected, is not entirely without friends; she has been extremely well educated, and accustomed to good company; she has a natural love of virtue, and a mind that might adorn ally station, however exalted: is such a young lady, Sir Clement, a proper object to trifle with?-for your principles, excuse me, Sir. are well known. (328)

From this description it is clearly the value he puts on Evelina's mind and character that permits Orville to imagine a purely friendly relationship to a woman. By contrast, in its careful consideration of the ratio of beauty to booty, Willoughby's assessment of Evelina returns gender relations to an explicitly sexual and financial marketplace:
I think Miss Anville the loveliest of her sex; and, were 1a marrying man, she, of all the women 1 have seen, 1 would fix upon for a wife: But 1 believe that not even the philosophy of your Lordship would recommendme to a connection ofthat sort,with a girl of obscure birth, whoseonly dowry is her beauty, and who is evidently in a state of dependency. (329)

The difference in the rivals' estimation of Evelina as friend or prey is underwritten by the difference in their attitude towards the use of force. Thus Willoughby's threat of force in the arbor scene is emphasized by Orville's interceding exclamation, "Sir Clement, youcannot wish to detain Miss Anville by force!" (326). Orville, on the other hand, explicitly rejects force in his declaration: "Youare going, then," cried he, taking my hand, "and you give me not the smallest hope ofyour return!-will you not, then, my too lovely friend!-will younot, at least, teach me, with fortitude like your own, to support your absence?" "My Lord," cried I, endeavouring to disengage my hand, "pray let me go!" "I will," cried he, to my inexpressible confusion, dropping on one knee, "if you wish to leave me!" (333) By imagining this new category, "friendship," grounded on mutual esteem, Burney would seem to have found a basis for gender relations that does not of itself define women as inferior. Indeed, Orville's request that Evelina "teach" him makes her his superior. By contrast, Willoughby's request for "pity" is part of the courtly context he imposes on his conversation with Evelina, thus part of his willful misreading of her. Despite the implications of making a petition, which would suggest Evelina is in a position of power, the nature of Willoughby' s petition insists on the system of meaning he is trying to impose on their conversation. It thus reinforces Willoughby's power over Evelina as text. Orville's request that lEvelina "teach" him, which comes after he is convinced of the ineptitude of his former attempts to read her, locates authority in Evelina. Moreover, since Evelina is to teach him "fortitude," it irecognizes her moral authority. The request, then, locates authority Campbell

I'

"'

i""',

''''

,."'" ~~ ,~.."

576

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

577

in Evelina and bases it on her superior moral nature. In making the request and granting Evelina authority, Orville redeems himself as a reader.
IDEOLOGICAL CONTRADICTIONS AND APORIA

were too flattering for repetition: nor would he, in spite of my repeated efforts to leave him, suffer me to escape:-in short, my dear Sir, I was not proof against his solicitations-and he drew from me the most sacred secret of my heart! (334)

Each of Evelina's readers locates authority differently. Villars gives the governing code of feminine propriety authority over Evelina and over the reading process. For Villars, reading amounts to judging whether the woman/text conforms to standards of feminine virtue. As judge and moralist, he shares authority with the moral code by which he judges. Willoughby retains authority for himself and seeks to impose his reading on Evelina; reading for him is an act of domination. Orville initially reads like Villars, but his mistakes lead him to question his own principles so that for him reading finally becomes an act of submission to the greater authority of the text. Of the three, only Orville's reformed approach to reading grants women authorial subjectivity and allows women's writing, including Evelina, a respectful reception. Orville's reformation is effected by a subtle definition of male protection, which according to conduct books is in any case a gentleman's duty towards a lady. Burney would thus seem to have found a way to succeed as a writer on patriarchy's own terms. However, Orville's declaration of love is marked by an aporia that signals the ideological contradictions in Burney's achievement. Orville's declaration serves a double function: as part of the allegory of literary reception his recognition of her makes Evelina a peer's peer and thus represents Burney's parallel wish to be recognized as the critics' equal. However, as part of a love plot it provides the climax, and as such it is unsatisfactory. Evelina reports no desire at all; instead her love is expressed in silence, paradoxically by the collapse of her body:
" l: .,

The aporia in Evelina's report of her own feelings during Orville's dramatizes the denial of the body that the rules of propriety require of chaste women. Evelina merely alludes to that organof sentiment, the heart, as the locus of the passionate text; she cannot voice her desire because she is not supposed to feel any. For different reasons Orville too does not express sexual desire. Becausekneeling is so conventional for the male in love scenes, the gesture hardly registers its meaning anymore, but Orville's posture assertsEvelina's power over him in body-language at the same time that he speaks his submission to her will. In other words, he reverses the power-structure operating not only in the arbor scene, but in gender relations generally. Passion is not admitted into Lord Orville's declaration:
"Mock you!" repeated he earnestly, "no I revere you! I esteem and I admire you above all human beings! you are the friend to whom my soul is attached as to its better halfl you are the most amiable, the most perfect of women! and you are dearer to me than language has the power of telling." (334)

,. ,~,
l!.I 1

I'' """
1"'1

""', , .....
"

,,'"

~''''''

This is the entire available text of Orville's declaration, but what is he declaring? In his esteem for Evelina, Orville does not even permit himself to use the word "love." Instead of a declaration of love Orville's apostrophe may be seen as a declaration of equality paradoxically based on inequality, for by calling Evelina his "better half," he suggests that she is simultaneously his superior and his equal. This paradox reflects Burney's acknowledgement of the inequity produced by superior strength in men. Along similar lines, Burney goes to some length to establish Orville's non-violence beI attempted not to describe my sensations at that moment; i forethe proposal scene. In the scene itself she has him insisting on scarce breathed; I doubted if I existed,-the blood forsook m. Evelina's moral superiority in an effort to compensate for his physcheeks, and my feet refused to sustain me: Lord Orville, hastilrising, supported me to a chair, upon which I sunk, almost ical advantage: by subordinating his will to her superior will he neutralizes his ability to detain her by force and removes the threat lifeless. For a few minutes, we neither of us spoke; and then, seeing me of force that Willoughby relies on for his access to her. However, recover, Lord Orville, though in terms hardly articulate, inlanguage fails him just when he is about to say how "dear" she is to treated my pardon for his abruptness. The moment my strength him. All Burney is able to do, then, is to distinguish the basis of returned, I attempted to rise, but he would not permit me. I cannot write the scene that followed, though every word i' Orville's desire from the basis of Willoughby's; Orville cannot arengraven on my heart; but his protestations, his expression>. ticulate the desire itself lest it upset the balance of their equality. Burney's Instructions to Her

578

c-u. .Cina Campbell

579

" " f
iII"

1,_:_1_
,;,.11

:.. ';: n", ~~;

",~jllil"

:..,;r"'l

(:::: ,:~

l"'P'''''

The declaration scene's function as a scene between lovers is incompatible with its other function as proleptic trope for Burney's recognition by her critics because the first requires some show of desire, but, in Evelina, sexual desire introduces gender inequality via the ubiquitous threat of male violence, including, at least implicitly, rape. Burney does not want to admit any inequality into the relationship between male critic and female writer. While it may be difficult to avoid reproducing existing hierarchies in any text, Burney handicaps her project of winning authority for women at the outset by deciding to write from within the patriarchal code of feminine propriety. The way Evelina reinscribes the literary patriarchy is most clearly illustrated by the importance Burney gives to male protectorship. Just as a gentleman's protection ostensibly shields a woman from rape and preserves her reputation, a critic's protection shields a woman writer from misreadings that violate her text and her literary reputation. Now although this protection is available to innocence, the determination of innocence requires an act of reading: a man, potential protector or rapist, gauges (reads) the woman's relationship to sexuality and acts according to or in despite of his interpretation, which is not guided by a woman's simple "no" because within the code of modesty that trammels her she has no "yes." Thus, as Ellen Willis has pointed out, male protection, insofar as it depends on a woman's innocence, denies her desire and will, her autonomy as a sexual subject, and reinforces her objectification.r" Burney's insistence that men, to be gentlemen, must be protective of feminine innocence potentially turns every gentleman critic into an interfering moral mentor and keeps the critical eye trained on women writers' personal probity." Insofar as a focus on their personal behavior turns women into texts, the critical stance Burney implicitly recommends, in which gentlemanly attention is given only to innocent writers and their innocent texts, thus paradoxically has the effect of fixing both women writers and their texts as the objects of the interpretive, evaluative male gaze. Whether as writer or as addressee, Villars, representing the ideology of conduct literature, constructs for Evelina an ego-ideal she continuously struggles to approximate even while her struggle implicitly criticises some aspects of it. As the emphasis in conduct literature on female chastity and feminine modesty suggests, this ego-ideal is based on a denial of female desire. So, while Burney can afford to have Evelina transgress against minor laws of eti-

quette in order to demonstrate her thorough probity, she cannot have Evelina and she cannot herself transgress against this major tenet of conduct literature, nor is there any indication that she might want to: hence the emphasis on Evelina's modesty, and on Evelina's chastity as a text. Having accepted chastity as a requirement for morality in women, Burney cannot have her heroine express an autonomous sexual desire. But in the absence of female sexual autonomy, which depends on the recognition of female desire and the absence of male force, any male desire is threatening, hence she also cannot allow her otherwise innocuous hero to express his sexual desire. Orville's incongruous, slightly ridiculous declaration of equality or, rather, subordination to Evelina takes the place of a true equality, which the values of conduct literature that Burney accepts precludes. Evelina's aporia in the declaration scene, then, hides the fundamental contradiction of trying to assert gender equality within a patriarchal paradigm. While Burney recognizes that the silence the feminine ideal of modesty imposes on women can be a tool for reducing women to sexual objects, her unwillingness to renounce chastity means that in representing desire between equals she emasculates the hero, obliterates the heroine's body, and fails to report any passion. The proposal scene thus reasserts the silence of modesty that Burney combats in her account of Evelina's textualization. Evelina is a book for Villars, a blazon for the swains; her heart is . the engraved text of Orville's avowals, as, later, it holds the text of filialtenderness towards Belmont.r" Not just during the declaration but during all these textualizations Evelina is curiously speechless. Burney would thus seem to privilege the authority of the (private) textover the authority of (public) speech, as Evelina does when she denounces what appears to be Orville's hypocritical note: "See, Sir, . , . how differently the same man can talk and write!" (252). As I have already suggested, since the virtuous text that substitutes for Evelina's speech is so often located in her heart, textualizing Evelina is a strategy for unequivocally publishing her virtue as well as valorizing publication in the literary sphere. Throughout her novel Burney discredits speech, and substitutes writing as the only medium of truth in the novel. In the declaration scene it is no surprise, therefore, to find that the truth of Evelina's feelings cannot be spoken; however, for the first time it also cannot be written in the letter to Villars, and it cannot be read. The emotion that is too strong for utterance we must assume to be sexual desire in Evelina; Gina Campbell 581

580

Burney's Instructions

to Her Critics

in Burney the parallel unutterable desire is her ambition to succeed with her critics. Disguising her writerly desire is the cost of her pact with the critics, in which she agrees that in the expectation of being read by gentlemen, she writes like a lady.27 Yale University
NOTES
1 Frances Burney, Evelina; or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), unpaginated front matter. Both the Preface and the Dedication are unpaginated. All further references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 2 Article 34, Monthly Review, May 1773. 3 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 75. For further discussion about women's difficulties in gaining literary authority, see Nancy Armstrong, "The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel," Novel 15 (1982): 127-145; and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984). 4 Article 30, Monthly Review, August 1772. 5 James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1766), 1:75. 6 Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake," Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1974): 38. 7 For a good analysis of the connection between the requirement of the virtuous heroine (modelled after Richardson's heroines) and the artistic weakness of eighteenth-century domestic novels, see Katherine Rogers's "Inhibitions on EighteenthCentury Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith," Eighteenth-Century Studies 11 (1977): 63-67. 8 John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), in Eighteenth Century Women: An Anthology, Bridget Hill, ed., (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984),19. 9 Dale Spender's chapter "Publish-and be damned ... as a woman," addres the conflict between a female author's "womanliness" and her literary ambition. I Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora Press, 1986), 23-29. 10 Joyce Hemlow has shown that contemporary conduct books instructed not to rely merely on their own virtue but to exercise "prudence," in preserve an impeccable reputation for virtue. See her "Fanny Burney and the tesy Books," PMLA 65 (1950): 754. Poovey (note 3) analyzes how the importan attached to womens' reputations lead to the notion that one could or should be to read them like books (24). 11 I take my terms from Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). 12 In her recent critical biography of Burney, Margaret Doody astutely defines importance of embarrassment in Evelina:

,~.~ Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988),59. .
13 Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies British Fiction, 1778-1860 (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981), 31-32. 14 Fordyce (note 5), 1:99. 15

in

Poovey (note 3) remarks that Villars assumes Evelina can be "read" (251). Similarly, Frances Burney's journal-keeping was sanctioned by one of the most fastidious of her mother's friends, Dorothy Young, only after Burney had demonstrated that the journal's contents, if acctdentally made public, would cause no ;candaI. See Joyce Hem low, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1958), 30-31.
16 17 Jonathan Deitz and Sidonie Smith have deplored Mr. Villars's poor advice in their"From Precept to Proper Social Action: Empirical Maturation in Fanny Burney's Evelina," Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1977): 85-88. . 18 Julia Epstein discusses how questionable the Sincerity of Evelina's letters to rillars is in The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing II!adison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98-101 . . 19 Newton (note 13), 37. 20 Gregory in Hill (note 8), 19.

Thomas A. Kirby, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Enlarged EdiAlex Preminger, ed., (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974). Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: farrar,Straus and Giroux, 1975), 27, 26. 23 Susan Staves, "Evelina, or, Female Difficulties," Modern Philosophy 73 (1976): 1. Newton (note 13), 23-54. 24 Ellen Willis, "Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography," in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson,eds., Powers of Desire; The Politics of Sexu'/;"/,(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 460-467. Martin Price in conversation. 26 During her second interview with Belmont, Evelina exclaims: "Oh, Sir, ... that could but read my heart!" (366). Jane Spencer (note 3) points out that Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights Woman (1792) was not welcomed by women writers precisely because it "atthe entire ideology of femininity that had been developed during the cenand on the basis of which women writers had been accorded acceptance and (100).
21

~
.a::

,I
~~

jiolij,

~~w
. .;Mi'

<: : .
"Ii,

--.

,1'1,,",'

.I"",~'_'

.F' .

;.,'::: -, ::: :::1::;:

i\!ltIh ~'

"""".,IIi/H

",r'.\<\>,

";

.;:
,

..

Embarrassment is a point of interface between the individual known from within and social identity as known from it represents the inner person's knowledge of his/her outer The narrative form of Evelina, combining private letter with farcical scenes, is perfectly designed to exhibit embarrassment-it embarrassment's objective correlative.

582

Burney's Instructions

to Her

583