Author: madeleinemaillet

Frances Burney Response 

My very sincere enjoyment of Frances Burney’s Evelina lead me to a question that is often tabled in creative writing classes as a matter of craft: what is a “tonal shift”, when can the reader bear it, in craft parlance “when is it earned” and when is it beyond the narrative pale? Expectations for tonal consistency were obviously not elucidated as rules by an institutional apparatus in the eighteenth century, and yet readers have always had expectations and critics have always responded to novels as successful or not with recourse to these. What to make of a novel that is both chipper and crass, sweet and disgusting, rude and mannered, and after all that, still successful?

Margaret Anne Doody is a highly influential eighteenth century scholar and an expert on Burney who edited an issue of Eighteenth Century Fiction on Evelina. I selected her essay  

“Beyond Evelina: The Individual Novel and the Community of Literature”(as my pre-2000 source) to shed light on the legacy of Burney scholarship as well as on new avenues for study of her oeuvre. I found that Burney had previously been deemed a minor writer in a major form worthy of studying for her role in the development of the novel, but dismissed as conventional and “light” by critics before feminist scholars made a case for the innovation the frame narrative of the novel represents and the socio-political critique it put forward in a patriarchal society. While this focus renewed interest in and respect for Burney as a novelist, it did not engage consideration of all the formal strategies Burney deploys in her writing, or even some of these strategies. Doody’s call to consider Burney’s satire in dialogue with Smollett’s and Fielding’s and Swift’s, and as informed by the socio-political context of the moment helped direct my critical reading further. 

Satire does seem to be the right word for it. After all, I want to understand the resilience of Evelina’s canonical status, the pleasures its comedy continues to bring readers and the weightiness of its plot in terms of the literary and socio-political context of its composition and the particular narrative structure it engendered which is deeply satirical, even if its satire remains almost unrecognizable as such by contemporary readers like myself. My first inkling that this book is a satire came from the very duality of its structure, Mr. Villars is opposed to Mme. Duval, the Mirvan’s are contrasted with the Braughton’s, and Lord Orville gallantly intercedes on Evelina’s behalf with every fop in the kingdom, these contrasts give an exemplary quality to Burney’s characterizations that allow them to be both instructive and ridiculous simultaneously. This is the hallmark of satire, however the tone of her satire still made me resist unreservedly identifying it as such. 

From a formal perspective, Julian Fong’s “Frances Burney as Satirist” proved to be most useful in providing answers to my inciting question about the very particular tone of Burney’s comedy.

He identifies her as a gloomy satirist whose view of female agency and of society’s ability to change is deeply pessimistic while her writing remains far from joyless. This description could not be more apt. Her purpose then is what puts her tonally at odds with other satirists like the sillier Fielding or angrier Smollett. Fong writes, “Her satiric purpose, as I understand it, is neither punitive nor reformative, but rather cautionary. She is not trying to chastise the vicious; she tries to warn her readers against the many dangers to which they may be vulnerable, particularly those that threaten young women” (939). This begs the question: if male writers are more readily accepted into the cannon how does this circumscribe today’s reader from recognizing formal strategies in women’s comedic writing. A literary historical knot a course like this one is indeed working to untangle.

Finally, Leanne Maunu’s “Quelling the French Threat in Frances Burney’s Evelina” was very enlightening in providing the historical context and familiarity with the cultural productions of the eighteenth century that made the very troubling characters of Mme Duval and Captain Mirvan legible to me as more than caricature, as studies of the nationalism that was on the rise and all its discontents. 

From it’s setting to its characters the reader can tell Evelina is a novel deeply concerned with publics, those that exist in the city of London and those that exist in the character’s mind, and Burney represents these publics as extremely fraught, her satire is indeed gloomy and serves as a caution to the reader, but not one devoid of pleasure. I’m glad these essays have helped me consider these questions and pointed to future sources and avenues for inquiry. 

Annotated Bibliography, Frances Burney’s Evelina

Doody, Margaret Anne. “Beyond Evelina: The Individual Novel and the Community of Literature”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 3, Number 4, July 1991, pp. 359-372

This essay provides historical context about the reception history of Frances Burney’s novels and Evelina in particular, starting with her contemporaries and moving onto shifting trends in the scholarship around her work and how Evelina is taught in institutions. She describes contemporary critics of Burney’s and early scholarship on her work as failing to distinguish between the author and the “nice little rustic miss” she portrays in Evelina, as plagued by a sort of biographical fallacy that neglected Burney’s actual biography, for example the fact that Burney was 26 when she wrote Evelina and not in fact a teenager. Doody’s own biography of Frances Burney which revealed her problematic parentage is credited with a shift in the scholarship on Evelina which once dismissed the plot as conventional but now focuses the frame narrative of the novel and the means by which it’s heroine comes to claim her true name, this more recent scholarship reads the frame variously through formalist, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses. Doody is critical of this shift as she feels it represents a dismissal of Burney’s comic effects and satiric agenda, she attributes neglect of this generic concern to a critical disinterestedness in Burney’s contemporaries, namely: Eliza Haywood and Tobias Smollett. Her criticism of this focus on Evelina’s frame structure and its preoccupation with naming to the exclusion of its comedy evinces the critical establishment’s belief in the individual and a disavowal of the novel’s communal concerns, of Evelina’s relation to the Braughton’s, to Mme. Duval, to Captain Mirvan, and to the political and literary contexts of its composition.  

Fung, Julian. “Frances Burney as Satirist”. The Modern Language Review , Vol. 106, No. 4 (October 2011), pp. 937-953

Critic Julian Fung takes up the gauntlet laid down by Doody two decades later, in his essay he describes the formal character of Burney’s satire and attributes the reason it has not been studied to its inconsistency with the forms of “Augustan satire” that became dominant in the twentieth century, which is characterized by an attack on some object being carried out through humour. By comparing Burney’s writing to Fielding’s, Smollett’s and Swift’s he provides historical evidence that satire as it was understood in the eighteenth century was more various than it is now understood to be, satire could be light, it could grim, it could be angry. Fung provides a list of considerations for critics seeking to qualify the satirical effects of an author, such as: what is the protagonists role in relation to the satire, are the satirical characters dangerous, are they sympathetic, are they reformed, and can they be mollified by the protagonist. All of these considerations of plot effect the tone and style of the satire and the degree to which contemporary critics recognize it as such. For Fung, Evelina is a gloomy satire, “she warns her readers against a dangerous world and laments the impossibility of its reform by combining light, humorous ridicule with darker, more disturbing satire.” As the plot thickens lighter representations of course and rude satirical characters who do not threaten Evelina give way to grimmer representations of Evelina as a victim. This critics conclusions have implications that invoke the blind spot of eighteenth-century literary criticism of the novel, “Devotees of the ‘rise of the novel’ theory have been too focused on how Burney can be made to serve as a transitional novelist between Smollett and Austen to recognize her own considerable satiric accomplishments.”

Maunu, Leanne. “Quelling the French Threat in Frances Burney’s Evelina” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Volume 31, 2002, pp. 99-125.

(Because there is a limited generic criticism that engages socio-political questions of Evelina, and of the character of Mme. Duval specifically, I broadened my field of interest in Burney’s satire to include the French question which is a thematic explored satirically in the novel.)

In her lifetime, critic Leanne Maunu explains that Frances Burney was referred to as a “character-monger” by Dr. Johnson because of her skill at representing types, like the frenchified fop and the simple country girl. Maunu writes that Mme. Duval and Captain Mirvan are among these types but that they have not undergone the same kind of critical study as others (nor has their violent relationship), but that these types would have been familiar to and resonated with her contemporary readers as they drew on the nationalist rhetoric and anti-french propaganda of the day. Indeed Maunu’s socio-historical criticism describes the way the constant warfare between the two nations fomented a sense of Britishness as something distinct from and superior to Frenchness, a rival power who were perceived to threaten mores at home and colonies abroad. This political inspiration does not merely provide local colour in the novel but configures the plot— Evelina is unlike other marriage plot narratives of the period— seducer’s figure prominently but do not represent the main villain or central threat to the heroine, instead the villainess is a bawdy old French grandmother. For Maunu, Evelina’s grandmother is threatening because of her dual national identity. Indeed when Mme. Duval posits that a Grand Tour of Europe would make quite another person of Captain Mirvan, both he and the novel appear to be skeptical that becoming another person is a desirable thing. (The threat of not being who one seems to be permeates the novel as Evelina is seen with prostitutes by Orville at Vauxhall and wonders is he has misapprehended her character.) The relationship between Mme. Duval and Captain Mirvan is figured as a battle, because Mirvan is representative of the British state his violence is more or less sanctioned by the novel— even if its means are suspect its ends are deemed to be acceptable, at least in theory. But Mirvan does not merely want to beat Mme. Duval, he wants to humiliate her, deflate her pretensions to superiority and silence her. This humiliation is brutal, Mme Duval is kicked while she is down. The grimness of Burney’s satire is inconsistent with the tone of contemporary satire but it speaks to the different satiric registers she is capable of deploying in a single novel and the complexity of her project. For Maunu, “Burney uses humiliation as a strategy to induce us to laugh, but she uses the representation of the Captain to force us to catch that laughter in our throats.” It is the very grimness of her satire that allows the reader to question the righteousness of the nationalist project and Mirvan’s blind and brutal allegiance to it. 

Annotated Bibliography 

In my reading of Clarissa, I’ve done what many critics have done, tried to understand what is the story, the real story, of the novel. As Terry Castle notes, “different “constructions” placed on Richardson’s big, balky text from without are exactly that: images of order imposed from without by the reader.” As such, I chose to read criticism about interruption, about curses and oaths, about the sharp edges of the language of the novel rather than looking for symbolic unity, because these edges are part of the disturbing nature, both conventional and affective, of the text. 

Gemmill, Katie. “Typography and Conversational Threat in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.” Narrative. May 2019; 27 (2): 140-159. Ohio State University Press.

Formalist scholarship on the nascent novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth century has tended to focus on the narrative innovations of free indirect discourse, of omniscience, of character’s psychological complexity, to the exclusion of dialogue, which was considered to be inherited from dramatic forms and therefore one of the least “novel” features of the novel. However strictly codified the formal conventions of dialogue in narrative have become, this was not the case in the eighteenth century, critic Katie Gemmil argues that because of his experience as a printer, Richardson was highly invested in elaborating a “graphic scaffolding” for his novels that mined his experience with the typography of other forms to express the dynamics (interruptions, exhortations, simultaneity, cadence, etc) of his characters’ dialogue and to impart an orality to the novel form. She describes his particular use of dashes for interruptions, the pattern of advance and riposte, italics for cadence, ellipses for hesitation, etc… amplifies the aural and emotional quality of the scenes makes them “loud”, they rarely repress their reactions in favor of deference or reflection but react spontaneously, so that their thoughts and feelings may be able to, as Richardson writes in his introduction, “be brought to the breast of the reader” (15). In borrowing conventions for dialogue from the more embodied narrative forms of drama and music, she argues that Richardson foreshadows bodily violation. The essay studies Richardson’s pioneering use of the dash to express interruption as an emotional and physical phenomenon that is deeply threatening. The essay also studies the way Richardson breaks up words and uses capitalization to give visual cues for their embodied expression, this is hard to describe so I’ll give an example from Richardson: “Lord M. “What say you to this, SIR-R—! Remember, Jack, to read all their sirs in this dialogue with a double rr, sirr!—denoting indignation rather than respect” (1030). And this prescriptive typography is not Richardson’s only trick, he relies excessively on dialogue tags ascribe tone which he borrowed from musical notation, but which he expanded to describe affective stance, gesture, and facial expression, recognizing that tone is not merely an aural but a bodily phenomenon. This attention to Samuel Richardson’s conventional innovation might allow a new focus on how gaps between cause and effect in the novel rely on the body as much as they do the constantly working minds of their epistolary narrators. 

Hynes, Peter. “Curses, Oaths, and Narrative in Richardson’s Clarissa” ELH Vol. 56, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 311-326 

Critic Peter Hynes draws attention to the way cursing and swearing, forms of utterance that are conventional in that they express control over other utterances by guaranteeing their truth, and that they lay claims on the future, by predicting events. Cursing also has a special relationship to power, Clarissa opines that: “it proclaims the profligate’s want of power, and his wickedness at the same time: for should such a man punish as he speaks, he would be a fiend!” (396) Lovelace considers cursing to be an expression of power, whereas Clarissa thinks it expresses the speakers lack thereof, these expletive curses are illustrative of character but are not deterministic of the structure of the novel like perlocutionary curses (which invoke the divine). Clarissa’s father damns her. Clarissa fears that this curse will come true, and she takes Lovelace’s torture of her to be a proof, culminating in her rape. However, Anna Howe’s rationalization, Lovelace’s scheming, and the very ambiguous authority of Mr. Harlowe which is constantly being usurped undermine the reader’s faith in his curse as a matter of destiny to be taken seriously. Richardson was prevailed upon to revise all mentions of the curse in the third edition of  Clarissa because his friend Hester Mulso believed it undermined Clarissa’s authority with the reader to have her indulge in superstition. In the third edition, her fear of the curse was attributed to her weakened condition. But the curse still haunts her, as does Lovelace’s sworn oath that he will “try her”. Yet for every prayer, curse and oath that bears out there are a dozen that never do in the novel, we cannot trust that Clarissa wouldn’t have been made to marry Solmes, nor can we trust that she would have… This doesn’t make oaths and curses unimportant to the narrative, it makes their capriciousness realistic. Peter Hynes finds Richardson’s strategy of setting reason and prolepsis against each other to generate narrative tension to be consistent with Mikahil Bakhtin’s formulation of novelistic discourse, in that it endlessly renews the reader’s engagement in the “hermeneutics of motive”. This essay engages interesting questions of how and why rational characters have recourse to unreason alongside reason.