I could not but remark the striking difference of [Sir Clement's] attention, and that of Lord Orville: the latter has such gentleness of manners, such delicacy of conduct, and an air so respectful, that, when he flatters most, he never distresses, and when he most confers honour, appears to receive it! The former -196- obtrudes his attention, and forces mine; it is so pointed, that it always confuses me, and so public, that it attracts general notice.
The imagery of the second sentence suggests that more than mere attention is at issue: Sir Clement's obtrudes, is pointed, and Evelina feels violated and pained by it. However one interprets Evelina's language, it is clear here and elsewhere that Sir Clement is the embodiment of aggressive masculinity, unsettling to the heroine and to society at large. Lord Orville, on the other hand, is desexualized-'so feminine his delicacy,' Evelina exclaims at one point-without being altogether emasculated. He can act boldly, responsibly, and decisively among men, as when he flings out of the room the monkey that has attacked Mr. Lovel and terrified everyone else, yet he is all gentleness, modesty, and tact among women, and particularly with Evelina. This combination-the lion among men who is a lamb before women-marks Lord Orville as distinctly the hero of a female sentimental novel, since the hero of a male sentimental novel tends to be more uniformly lamblike.
The sentimental implications of a book like Evelina can be summed up as follows. In a novel focusing on a young woman, the sentimental ethos can be reconciled with 'Entrance into the World,' since the sentimental heroine epitomizes the popular ideal of what a young woman should be; and such a book can culminate in marriage without ceasing to be a sentimental novel, since the traits that go to make up a sentimental daughter or sister are those that society continues to look for in wives and mothers. Where women are concerned, sentimentalism can be a powerful agent of socialization, a process scarcely possible for the hero of a male sentimental novel. In the female sentimental novel, however, the sentimental male himself need no longer be at odds with society. A modicum of conventional masculinity is allowed him, but it is quarantined in clearly designated spheres of male activity, so that he is made amenable to the same kind of socialization and domestication as the heroine herself.
The fact that it could thus be enlisted in the service of social stability helps to explain the enduring popularity of the female sentimental novel, for it holds out to women the gratifying prospect that their psychological and moral ideals will not unfit them for the world, but rather guarantee their admittance to it on the best possible terms. With the male sentimental novel, this has never been the case.
-197-
-198-
Frances Burney and the Rise of the Woman Novelist
THE novelist, playwright, biographer, and diarist Frances Burney has had considerable political importance in the last ten years of academic thinking about the eighteenth-century novel. Feminist reevaluations of women's literature and history are in large part responsible for this importance. More than any of the hundreds of women who wrote novels during the eighteenth century, Burney is likely to turn up on reading lists for comprehensive examinations and on syllabi outside of women's literature courses. Her name joins that of Jane Austen, who for twenty years or so had been the token woman included in the canon of eighteenth-century British novelists. While Burney may be in danger of slipping into the role of token, twin to Austen, the importance of her presence on these lists and syllabi may take some of its charge from Virginia Woolf's famous recommendation that women writers since the eighteenth century should lay a wreath upon her grave in gratitude for being the first respectable, middle-class woman to earn money by writing. Woolf was not exactly accurate in granting Burney this honor, but her remark associates Burney with something rather more helpful to women than tokenism: Burney's is a name that emblematizes a change in terms of the subject matter available to women writers and in the ideological and artistic possibilities open to them. As Woolf suggests, after Burney, it was imaginable for a woman of her class to trade her traditional role as financial dependent for the equally respectable but more autonomous role of working woman. -199-
However conventional and respectable her family life may have been (and there is reason to doubt the veracity of her image as a traditional daughter, wife, and mother), Burney was also a careerist and, more importantly, she was seen as such by her contemporaries. That is to say that her life was shaped by work, as well as the other way around. The popular image of Jane Austen hiding her manuscripts in progress so as not to contaminate her personal life with her artistic one has, however reductively if not falsely, served to contain the impact of her artistic accomplishments, to keep them from suggesting how a woman's writing might have a direct and liberatory impact on her life.
That Burney was singled out by Woolf for exercising professional autonomy while retaining her status as a respectable, middle-class woman is also significant. In the eighteenth century, retaining such a status while working for money as a writer meant more than simply taking charge of one's life by writing one's own life script. Besides constituting a departure from the norm that a «lady» would not make her living outside the domestic roles prescribed for her by eighteenth-century gender ideology, it meant a careful and responsible reimagining of the lives possible for eighteenth-century, middle-class, white Englishwomen. Burney's writings show a keen, lifelong interest in assessing the culturally determined options for defining female life and identity, in realistically assessing the force of those possibilities, and in exploring what women, particularly women writers like herself, might make of these possibilities through their own exertions. This careful but innovative negotiation of the 'life stories' available to women of her class and race is an aspect of her life that is certainly found in her works-particularly her novels. One way of reading Burney's fiction is as imaginative castings into the cultural reservoir of plots available to eighteenth- century middle-class women for creating themselves and their lives. Her novels all implicitly ask the question, What can a woman do with the stories she is given to represent female life? How can she control these stories, make them work for instead of against her? Burney's fiction both embodies and thematizes the labor of reworking the plots available to eighteenth-century middle-class women for imagining the trajectory of their lives and the nature of their identities.
I will focus on these questions as they are asked in Burney's fiction, but I also want to consider the ways in which Burney herself becomes a sort of heroine in a number of stories implicitly or explicitly narrated about her by modern critics of her work and of the eighteenth-century -200- novel in general. One does not usually think of critics or literary historians as storytellers, but in writing about literature, one often finds oneself narrating a kind of story. A book about the eighteenth-century novel, for example, tells us the story of its «rise» from humble beginnings in romance to the exalted status of 'high art.' Individual writers as well as genres are fitted into plot structures, and
