The Columbia History of the British Novel

Out of this Garret, there was a Door went out to the Leads; on which I us'd frequently to walk to take the Air… Here I entertain'd my Thoughts, and indulg'd my solitary Fancy. Here I could behold the Parliament-House, Westminster-Hall, and the Abbey, and admir'd the Magnificence of their Structure, and still more, the Greatness of Mind in those who had been their Founders.

Just as Jane's moment of mental expansion is interrupted by the maniacal laughter of 'Grace Poole,' actually the mad and sexually depraved Bertha -204- Bertha, Galesia's is broken in on by a character who epitomizes the sexual ruin of a woman. As though she stepped from the pages of an eighteenth-century romance by Eliza Haywood or Aphra Behn, she has been seduced, abandoned, and left pregnant. She knocks on the door of Galesia's refuge while fleeing parish officers across the rooftops of London. Galesia's mother forbids her daughter further use of her garret retreat for fear that she might encounter, even in a passive way, similar or even more «pernicious» 'Adventures.' Thus even though Galesia herself resists the love plot of marriage or 'ruin,' her flight from that plot is obstructed by the sexuality that she must deny in order to «rise» as a writer.

This scene hints rather broadly at the personal and professional struggles of many eighteenth-century women writers, and it has a good deal of relevance for women in the late twentieth century who seek to define themselves, in a traditionally masculine way, through their work rather than their sexuality. Barker's fiction suggests that women's sexuality is the force that ultimately gives their lives its shape and meaning. It portrays the reductively and rigidly dichotomous possibilities of marriage versus «ruin» that that sexuality imposes on women's lives. The scene on the leads calls into question Galesia's denials of her sexuality; even more forcefully, however, Barker depicts the way a woman's sexuality hobbles her dreams of shaping her life through work rather than love. In the dream mountain scene, Bosvil threatens to topple Galesia from Parnassian heights. Spencer reads this threat as Galesia's fear of seduction, but her reading also admits the possibility that what Galesia fears is marriage-the «up» side of the coin. Barker's fiction assumes the incompatibility of marriage with a literary career; the romantic «rise» into marital bliss might mean a fall for the woman writer. On the other hand, the young woman who spoils Galesia's garret retreat, her 'Cave on the Top of Parnassus,' obtrudes into her literary and intellectual work space the opposing possibility of women's fall through sexual 'ruin.' Significantly, Galesia's life is not forced into the mold of either rising or falling in the feminine, sexual sense, but it is impossible for her to get on with her life and work without feeling the limiting effects of that mold.

After the successful publication of Evelina in 1778, when she was twenty-six years old, Frances Burney found herself, figuratively, out on the leads with Galesia and Jane Eyre. Like her predecessor and her successor in rooftop ruminations, Burney found the new heights she achieved through intellectual labor heady and exciting. But also like them, she could not escape feeling the threat of a fall: -205-

I am now at the summit of a high hill; my prospects on one side are bright, glowing, and invitingly beautiful; but when I turn around, I perceive, on the other side, sundry caverns, gulphs, pits, and precipices, that, to look at, make my head giddy and my heart sick. I see about me, indeed, many hills of far greater height and sublimity; but I have not the strength to attempt climbing them; if I move, it must be downwards. I have already, I fear, reached the pinnacle of my abilities, and therefore to stand still will be my best policy. (Diaries and Letters, volume 1)

Burney's pessimistic conviction that her literary rise must be followed by a fall derived, at least in part, from her conception of the female maturing process and the diminution of happiness and power she supposed it entailed. In sum, Burney's sense of her destiny as a woman writer was, like Barker's, inevitably affected by the plots available to women for imaging female life. These plots overwhelmingly suggested that the only sure escape from «ruin» was marital bliss-if such could be found. But even a happy marriage could be problematic for a woman's literary ambitions, as Galesia's dream suggests. Burney was to be more successful than Galesia could have imagined at combining a happy marriage with a literary career, but, as Doody and others point out, Burney's success in both the literary and domestic realms was earned through tough choices and hard work. The point remains that among the plots available to both Burney and Barker for imagining their lives, none offered much room for a woman's work substantially to shape her life's trajectory. The prospect of rising or falling still haunted both a woman's career and her personal life, since both were presumed to be influenced overwhelmingly by her sexuality.

Burney's fiction thematizes the sexualization of women's labor through the ideological process of defining femininity. Her heroines in Cecilia (1782) and The Wanderer (1814) both try to take some control over their lives through work. And both discover the ways in which that work is inevitably redefined according to the heroine's sexual destiny. Cecilia turns to books and study when she is bored by the vapidity of London social life, and, like Galesia, throws herself into work-this time philanthropic as well as scholarly-when the hero, Delvile, disappoints her romantic expectations. But Cecilia's love story, however unsatisfactory, will not go away; it repeatedly intrudes upon her Rasselas-like search for a meaningful 'course of life' outside the framework of love. Try as she does to get on with her life through books, good deeds, and friendship, the romantic extremes of marital bliss versus «ruin» (the - 206- unspoken significance behind her secret marriage to Delvile) continue to undermine her sanity to the point of actual madness. Juliet, in The Wanderer, takes up, one by one, a series of the limited number of vocations available to women, only to find that none of them protect her from the physical and emotional abuse to which her gender exposes her. As she sews in a milliner's shop her face and body are on display along with the goods she produces, and she finds herself the target of an opportunistic male's sexual predation. Even working as a paid companion to an irascible old lady puts her at the mercy of the latter's misogynist son. The problem with all of Juliet's lines of work is, quite simply, that none of them give her any power over others and the way in which they treat her. As a result, her work is hopeless: it cannot change any of the «plots» to which those who are more powerful-either by virtue of class, material advantage, or gender-care to subject her.

Acting, music, sewing, commerce, and domestic labor successively fail to bring Juliet more than momentary comfort or safety. She finally achieves both in marriage to her man of choice, but Burney suppresses the redemptive powers of Prince Charmings by giving Juliet a pointedly ineffectual hero to fall in love with. In the novel's conclusion, Burney explicitly attributes Juliet's survival of 'the DIFFICULTIES of The Wanderer' to her own 'resources,' describing the heroine as

a being who had been cast upon herself; a female Robinson Crusoe, as unaided and unprotected, though in the midst of the world, as that imaginary hero in his uninhabited island; and reduced either to sink, through inanition, to nonentity, or to be rescued from famine and death by such resources as she could find, independently, in herself.

If the careers available to women do not afford them control over their own stories, but rather lead to the same predicaments their sexuality brings upon them, what are the «resources» to which Burney refers? I will argue that these resources lie in intelligent, controlled resistance to the plots of rising and falling, to the romantic extremes into which the love story tends to cast women's lives.

Working over the Plot

Burney's heroines cannot, like their author, shape a love story directly through the work they do. Burney literally helped to make possible her marriage to the penniless Alexandre d'Arblay by earning enough money -207- with Camilla (1796) to build her family a home, Camilla cottage. But she knew the odds against women of her class gaining significant material rewards from their labor; as The Wanderer makes clear, occupations other than writing offered women even less hope of financial power and the concomitant authority to create their own «plots» and identities. (And writing was, as Burney well knew, a tenuous career available to only a few.) Burney's heroines, then, illustrate the limits imposed on female labor as a means of controlling the course of one's life. Alternatively, Burney's novels suggest that women's best resources lie in an intelligent skepticism toward the romantic modes in which the plots of marriage or sexual ruin would place them. Rising and falling are exposed by Burney's fiction as the melodramatic (and destructive) extremes of life to which overly reductive expectations of feminine identity subject women.

Burney's first novel, Evelina, demonstrates the utility of such skepticism. A beautiful young woman who lacks a family name that would give her a definite place in the class structure, Evelina finds she is cast in the role of