The Columbia History of the British Novel

either angel or whore by men like Sir Clement Willoughby. Sir Clement falls in love with Evelina in his own fashion, which means that he either idolizes her as 'an angel,' as he does upon first seeing her at a ball, or he assumes just the opposite, that she is a 'devil.' Later, finding her unexpectedly without a protector in a public place, an unthinkable position for a respectable young lady, Sir Clement responds to Evelina's embarrassed inability to explain her situation by assuming the license to make his own 'construction.' In both instances, Sir Clement's «constructions» follow the drearily bipolar model of ascension or fall, angel or «ruined» woman.

Sir Clement is not the hero of the novel, so his behavior cannot be taken as the best that Burney expected from men. But the best that she does seem to expect is oddly unlike the Prince Charming required in a Cinderella love story. Rather than confirming the romance plot of rising or falling, Burney's heroes function, in different ways, as points of resistance to the female plot of «rising» angel or «fallen» whore. The hero, Lord Orville, is a more cautious interpreter of Evelina than Sir Clement. His response to Sir Clement's effusions over the «angel» Evelina-'a pretty modest-looking girl'-suggests a slightly more subtle if not overly imaginative interpretive framework. Like Harleigh, Juliet's beloved in The Wanderer, Orville can value the heroine even when the signals of her social status are mixed: he does not leap to the obvious, extreme conclusions. But this ability depends less on elevating -208- the heroine to angelic heights and more on rather pedestrian forms of lifting. In an important scene just before Evelina marries him, Orville lifts Evelina into a chair to protect her from a monkey that the misogynist prankster, Captain Mirvan, has unleashed on the company. This scene illustrates the extent and importance of the heroine's elevation in Burney's fiction: the most that can be expected from the heroine's «rise» into married bliss is a slightly removed vantage point from which to observe the social violence that is the stuff of Burney's plots.

Lord Orville is usually identified as the most idealized of Burney's heroes. The rest are often described as somewhat flat-disappointing as characters and as romantic figures. The disappointed and sometimes puzzled responses that readers have had to Burney's heroes may result from the ways in which Burney uses male characters to subvert the dichotomous possibilities of the heroine's plot. Burney's heroes expose the overly simplistic extremes of rising or falling, either by positing commonsensical alternatives or by embodying-with a vengeance-a slavish adherence to the dichotomous definition of femininity. Camilla is the most explicit of Burney's novels in its exposure of the misogynist tendencies implicit in limiting women to rising or falling. Whereas Sir Clement's reductive interpretations of the heroine in Evelina are marginal to the main love story, in Camilla the romantic hero, Edgar, is instrumental in instigating and driving a plot of rise or fall that nearly destroys the heroine. Edgar is advised by a blatantly woman-hating mentor to assume that any symptom of moral weakness in Camilla, the girl he wants to marry, automatically disqualifies her to be his wife. As Doody argues with brilliant hilarity, the novel is less about the heroine's failure to deserve her marital reward (who would, on those terms?) than it is about the absurdity and destructiveness of Edgar's expectations. I would add the observation that Camilla is a narrative about the gap between a young, middle-class woman's experience and the romance plot that divides women into deserving angels or fallen women. The gap has its comic effects at the expense of the deadly Edgar, but it also nearly destroys the heroine's health and sanity and can only be closed when the hero wakes up to the romanticism of his expectations.

Camilla, like The Wanderer, discounts the redemptive powers of Prince Charmings; one of the common themes of the two novels is women's frustrations as they try to control their lives through their own efforts. While The Wanderer focuses on the futility of women's labor, Camilla treats another, particularly feminine form of labor under capi-209- talism: consumption. Like Juliet's labor, Camilla's consumption only binds the heroine more tightly to the distortions of the romance plot and reinforces Edgar's reductive misinterpretations. Throughout the novel, Camilla incurs expenses that culminate in a climactic act of disastrous feminine consumption. Camilla purchases a new ball dress that she cannot afford because she has bought into a romantic fantasy that Edgar will see her at the ball in all her splendor and fall in love with her once more. The plan backfires horribly, of course, marking Camilla's final attempt to create her own story of romantic success. The dream of the heroine's control over the romantic plot is, in fact, a nightmare. In a dream sequence, Camilla literally confronts her inability to write her own plot. Ill and delirious, she dreams that she is dying and is asked by a supernatural voice (like the one heard by Galesia on her mountaintop) to write her claims to justice with a stern and unforgiving 'iron pen.' Julia Epstein points out that this scene dramatizes the violence and pain that was associated with writing for Burney, as a woman who found it both central to her sense of self and a cultural no-woman's-land. When Camilla tries to obey the injunction, she cannot write: the pen makes no mark. This writer's nightmare sums up Camilla's futile attempts to control her own story when «writing» to an audience as radically binary in its thinking about heroines as Edgar.

Paradoxically, then, Burney's plots are often about the inadequacy of plotting. Perhaps no Burney character illustrates this inadequacy better than Elinor Joddrell in The Wanderer, who, until recent feminist interpretations, has been read as Burney's conservative commentary on the new political ideologies of the French Revolution. Julia Epstein and Margaret Doody give us more subtle readings of the feminist and revolutionary politics of this character, but I want to focus on Elinor to suggest that one of the points she illustrates most forcefully is the folly, for women, of «overwriting» their life plots according to the extremes of rising and falling.

Elinor falls in love with Harleigh, who does not return her passion. Since she cannot «rise» in the plot of romantic love, Elinor decides to fall, dramatically, by killing herself for love. As Doody suggests, Elinor's elaborately staged public suicide evokes the recent suicide attempt of Mary Wollstonecraft in despair over the lost affections of her lover, Gilbert Imlay. While there is no explicitly sexual element in Elinor's 'fall,' then, it is taken for granted that her «ruin» is possible, if not accomplished. By 'falling,' Elinor stages the ultimate gamble to win -210- the love of Harleigh, but her scheme, like Camilla's ball dress, yields the opposite result. Elinor «falls» to a self-inflicted knife wound, but Juliet's reactive fall into a faint at the sight of Elinor elicits more concern from Harleigh than Elinor's romantic suicide attempt. Elinor's repeated attempts to be a romantic heroine who gives up her life for love make her seem silly even to herself, as she admits to Juliet while asking her to arrange a final «conference» with Harleigh:

No! the soft moment of indulgence to my feelings is at an end! When I allowed my heart that delicious expansion; when I abandoned it to nature, and permitted it those open effusions of tenderness, I thought my dissolution at hand, and meant but to snatch a few last precious minutes of extacy from everlasting annihilation! but these endless delays, these eternal procrastinations, make me appear so unmeaning an idiot, even to myself, that, for the remnant of my doleful ditty, I must resist every natural wish; and plod on, till I plod off, with the stiff and stupid decorum of a starched old maid of half a century. Procure me, however, this definitive conference. It is upon no point of the old story, I promise you. You cannot be more tired of that than I am ashamed.

Elinor's words reveal the ineffectuality of female plotting in a life more prone to «delays» and «procrastinations» than climactic extremes. Elinor must learn to «plod» rather than «plot» in order to get on with her life. And this lesson entails a certain loss of elevation, as Elinor finally reflects: ''Alas! alas! she cried, 'must Elinor too, — must even Elinor! — like the element to which, with the common herd, she owes chiefly, her support, find, — with that herd! — her own level? '

The characterization of Elinor illustrates two themes that are central to Burney's fiction. First, it points to the cultural odds against a woman's control over her own «plot» and the subtlety and strength necessary to counter those odds. Elinor's direct approach to controlling her own plot through dramatic self-display inevitably becomes a ridiculous self-parody. On the other hand, Juliet's methods of self-imposed silence and sparing self-disclosure are not unproblematic options, as the misinterpretations to which she is subjected attest, but they are her best choice in a culture that denies women the direct control over their lives to which Elinor aspires. As Juliet wryly points out to Harleigh, a direct approach to 'female difficulties' will only expose her to the reductive interpretations that she seeks to avoid. Telling Harleigh about the marriage into which she has been forced and enlisting his aid to help her escape it would ultimately cast Juliet in the role of conniving 'devil.' Even men like Harleigh are not to be trusted with all of the informa-211- tion about the experience of feminine victimization. Second, it shows us the silly reductiveness of romantic extremes. Women, Burney's fiction suggests, are both more commonplace and more