The Columbia History of the British Novel

Burney has been habitual fodder for narratives that depict rising and falling fortunes. As I will argue later, the dual plot possibilities of rising and falling are inextricably tied to gender and have wide-reaching implications for women's lives and identities in the eighteenth century. How does Burney's gender affect the «stories» that are told of her? The same dualistic structure of rising and falling that dominated the heroines' plots that Burney sought to rework in her fiction tend to determine the ways in which her life and works have been represented and evaluated in academic criticism. It strikes me as ironic that gendered narrative patterns seem to play a major role in shaping the image of a writer who was such a self-conscious (and angry) critic of the stories available to women for imaging their lives. By pointing out this irony, I hope to engage, with Burney as my model and mentor, in my own reworking of feminine plots and possibilities.

Love Stories: The Rise and Fall of the Heroine

Beginning early in the century, as Jane Spencer notes, love was popularly identified as the most «natural» subject for women writers, and love plots are important in eighteenth-century novels written by both men and women. The course of love for heroines follows a paradigmatic trajectory in eighteenth-century novels. Heroines usually either rise or fall. This formulation is, of course, a deliberate oversimplification, but it identifies for us a skeletal structure and gives us a place to begin thinking about the formal conventions that faced writers such as Burney. What, exactly, does it mean to «rise» and to «fall» in the love stories of eighteenth-century fiction? Love plots entail repeated rises, falls, and paradoxical movements-one falls in love in order to rise to perfect happiness- and even a 'downward,' tragic plot, as in Richardson's Clarissa (1748), can entail an ascension of the heroine to perfect (if unearthly) bliss. Heroes share the dual prospect of tumbling down to a bad end or rising in stature and happiness. Tom Jones is either 'born to be hanged' or destined to the heights of marriage to the perfect Sophia -201- and inheritance from Squire Allworthy, just as Pamela is either to be seduced and abandoned or ascendant through an «upward» marriage.

Most important for our purposes is what rising and falling signified within eighteenth-century ideologies of femininity and the effect of that significance on the public image of the woman writer. The tendency to conflate the writer with the heroine-to view the former's story as of a piece with the latter's-was particularly evident in popular representations of women who wrote. Hence, the rises and falls of fictional heroines could not always be kept at a distance from the public images of their creators. And the narrative possibilities represented by the rises and falls of women-be they heroines or writer-heroines-are inextricably connected with women's sexuality. For a heroine as well for her female author, to rise meant marriage-not marriage in all its everyday pleasures, pains, interests, and boredoms, but a transcendently happy union with an ideal husband, perhaps accompanied by a radical improvement in class and financial standing, as in a Cinderella story. To fall, on the other hand, meant «ruin» in a specifically sexual sense. This duality is inextricably tied to the reduction of feminine identity to a simplistic «angel-whore» dichotomy. As Penelope Aubin expressed it in her novel Charlotta Du Pont (1723), 'Youth once vitiated is rarely reformed, and Woman, who whilst virtuous is an Angel, ruined and abandoned by the Man she loves, becomes a Devil.'

This is not to say that all eighteenth-century novels with love plots slavishly adhere to one or the other trajectory, sending their heroines either to marital bliss or to sexual ruin. Rising and falling, in the love story, are a pair of extremes that are always in tension with less spectacular possibilities for representing life. In Defoe's Roxana (1724), for instance, the tragic fall of the heroine is oddly balanced against the accretive detail of Roxana's story of successful sexual self-management. Clarissa's ascendence to otherworldly virtue lies in tension with Anna Howe's earthbound domestication in marriage to Hickman. In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1751), the marriage of the admirable hero with the equally admirable heroine is less a climax than an occasion for painting in bustling, cheerful detail a broad canvas depicting the social and material order in which the couple will live. Indeed, the decisive nature of the heroine's rise or fall is often depicted in novels (and in other eighteenth-century literary forms) as a matter for romance having little to do with the life that is allegedly the stuff of novels. The rise of Belinda's curl at the end of Pope's Rape of the Lock - 202- suggests a cynicism about such romantic transcendence that is frequently articulated within a long novelistic tradition of satirizing the literary extremes of romance, of which Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) is perhaps the best-known example. My point, then, is not that all writers plotted their heroines' lives according to this simplistic pattern of rise or fall; rather, rising and falling are among the repertoire of romantic tropes that eighteenth-century novels incorporated in a variety of complex ways, from straightforward repetition to total rebuttal or transformation. As Michael McKeon has argued, eighteenth-century novels both articulate and transform romance elements. The treatment of the rise and fall of heroines is part of this process of articulation and transformation.

Having made this qualification I return to the issue of how the rising and falling of heroines in eighteenth- century novels affected the way women writers of the century were thought of and perceived themselves. Using two brief examples-one drawn from the fiction of Jane Barker, one from the diaries of Frances Burney-I want to show how the heroine's dual possibilities placed certain expectations upon women writers as they imagined their own stories and, hence, their own selves. These expectations circumscribed women's thinking about their work as writers; but they also provided starting points, ideological and formal materials for the work of imagining lives beyond those limitations.

Jane Barker's fictional character Galesia, in her novels Bosvil and Galesia (1713) and, A Patch-Work Screener the Ladies (1723), stands as the figure of a writer who represents, as Spencer says, the authorial concerns of Barker herself. While it would be difficult to substantiate the strictly autobiographical nature of the character, it is obvious that Galesia is at the least a vehicle for articulating some of Barker's hopes and anxieties as a writer. Galesia, with a good deal of ambivalence, gives up on her personal love story in order to concentrate on literary work, as she wryly notes: 'I, finding my self abandoned by Bosvil, and thinking it impossible ever to love again, resolved to espouse a Book, and spend my Days in Study.' Galesia neither falls into ruin nor ascends to perfect marital bliss, and in this sense she resists the pull of the romantic dichotomy. But her representations of her aspirations as a writer almost obsessively repeat the dual possibilities of rising and falling. In verses dedicating herself to poetry, Galesia draws on the traditional imagery of the Muses and poetic «flight» in order to express her desire to follow -203- the example of the (safely dead) poet Katherine Philips, the «Orinda» of the poem:

Methinks I hear the Muses sing,
And see 'em all dance in a ring;
And call upon me to take Wing.

We will (say they) assist thy Flight,
Till thou reach fair ORINDA's Height,
If thou can'st this World's Follies slight.

The «Follies» are specifically sexual; poetry, like the reputation of Orinda, is the chaste opposite, according to Spencer's reading of these lines, of her relationship with the problematic Bosvil: 'Then gentle Maid cast off thy Chain, / Which links thee to thy faithless Swain, / And vow a Virgin to remain.'

In this same vein, Galesia dreams of climbing a mountain (Parnassus?) associated with literary achievement, and learning from an unidentified higher power that such heights preclude 'Hymen.'

Rising, for Galesia, would seem, then, to offer a way out of the determining structure of rise versus fall implicit in her sexuality. The price for this escape seems a large one-the renunciation of her sexuality-and Galesia has a hard time avoiding that sexuality in any case, as it tends to emerge at the most inopportune moments of poetic flight. In the second edition of Bosvil and Galesia, Bosvil appears in this dream sequence and attempts to cast her down from her mountain. Even more tellingly, in A Patch-Work Screen Galesia finds a lofty retreat specifically associated with her intellectual and literary pursuits, but this retreat is violated and denied her by the literal entrance of female sexuality 'in ruin.' Like an early version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, gazing from the leads of Thornfield with its soon-to-emerge sexual secrets, Galesia finds only momentary release from the claustrophobia of middle-class female life: