The Columbia History of the British Novel

complex and interesting than the fallen or ascendant heroine. Elinor is more attractive and interesting at the level of self-deprecating «plodding» than in her passionate extremes. Women's lives are simply not like the dramatic ups and downs of romance plotting.

One of the major accomplishments of Burney's fiction lies in its resistance to the tendency of romantic plots to stifle the complexity of feminine identity and experience by reducing them to dichotomous extremes. This resistance lies, as we have seen, in Burney's curiously «disappointing» heroes, the errors her heroines commit through a mistaken trust in romantic conventions, and even in their occasional commonsensical skepticism about romance. Another way in which Burney struggles against the reductive tendencies of female plotting is through the structure of her novels. Like Elinor, Burney tells us that women's experience is more about «delays» and «procrastinations» than rising or falling. This message is conveyed through two features common to Burney's work. One is that Burney's romantic love plots are characterized by the strategy of waiting and delay. The course of true love is circuitous in Burney's novels. The other feature is that Burney's endings tend more toward the whimper than the bang: they emphasize openendedness, lack of closure, and the «plodding» rather than «plotting» aspect of feminine life and experience.

In a fascinating discussion of Burney's 'The Witlings'-an early attempt at writing a comedy for the stage that was repressed by the order of her father, Charles Burney, and her adopted 'daddy,' Samuel Crisp-Margaret Doody points to the innovative nature of the play's dramatic action. Burney, Doody argues, has written a play that thematizes waiting. By doing so, the play comments on social time-wasting and provides an aesthetic solution to the 'stilted quality' of much eighteenth-century drama by incorporating 'the real essential waiting of late eighteentcentury comedy in the structure of the play.' Waiting is also a large and important part of the plot structure of Burney's novels. While things do happen to Burney heroines, even romantic things, the pacing of the plot often serves to undermine climactic structures so that they crumble even as they seem to build. The most striking example of this strategy is the sequence in Cecilia in which the unfortunate Harrel commits suicide at the public pleasure grounds of Vauxhall. Doody points out the oddity of -212- this part of the novel, which drags on for a considerable number of pages after the shooting, recounting the anticlimactic actions of characters as they wait, in the aftermath of the tragedy, until they can go home. Less dramatically, perhaps, but just as strikingly, Burney's heroines from Evelina through Juliet spend large portions of their time waiting for their constraining circumstances to change so that they can move on, both physically and psychologically. Evelina must wait for carriages; Cecilia sits through the tedium of social calls; Camilla is, literally, stranded up a tree; Juliet is continually waiting for some character or other to leave the room so that she can escape from embarrassment and emotional pain. While the heroine waits, Burney gives us the often violent, almost always painful satiric scenes that have earned her, rightly or wrongly, her reputation as a novelist of 'manners.' These scenes should not be read, however-as they sometimes have been-as removed from the love stories of Burney's heroines; they provide a pointed commentary on those love stories by dramatizing what eighteenth-century writers on middle-class women's employments and education well knew-that little of women's time is spent in romantic climax or the depths of ruin, and much of it is spent in the tedium of waiting for someone else, usually male, to make something happen.

Another characteristic feature of Burney's plots is the frustration of the heroine's attempts to direct action. Elinor Joddrell is an extreme example of a woman whose attempts to take charge of her life meet with continual defeat. But Burney's heroines often find themselves frustrated in their attempts to direct events by the sheer randomness of experience. Evelina's letter to Orville miscarries in an early example of how happenstance derails the romance plot, but Burney's later heroines all encounter some character or characters who, like Mr. Dubster in Camilla, stall the action of the novel into stretches of comic tedium by their unintended obstructions. The benevolent but absent-minded Giles Arbe in The Wanderer is perhaps Burney's most accomplished plot-spoiler: his inability to deliver notes and to remember who should or should not be privy to certain information renders all Juliet's plans useless. While clearly marked as a «good» character, Arbe stands for the randomness of life's events that thwarts the heroine's attempts to control the course of her life.

Waiting and anticlimax are woven into the very experience of reading The Wanderer. The name of the heroine is not revealed until well into the novel, and when it is, it proves no great revelation, as it might -213- in an earlier novel by Haywood or Behn. Her story, the tale of her identity as the product of an aristocratic secret marriage, is a carefully guarded secret until very late in the novel, and when it emerges it does so in an oddly offhand way when a friend of the heroine lets it slip to someone she thinks is already in the know. The romantic plot of a concealed true identity so dear to novelists ranging from Behn to Henry Fielding is submerged to the point of unimportance in the snarled plot lines of 'female difficulties.' William Hazlitt's famous, negative review of The Wanderer inadvertently stumbled on this characteristic feature of the Burney novel: 'The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are, indeed, 'Female Difficulties';-they are difficulties created out of nothing.' What irritates Hazlitt, as Epstein observes, is precisely Burney's point. The story of women's experience that Burney tells is about stalled plots, arbitrary obstacles, and random difficulties.

Hazlitt also had difficulty with Burney's endings, which are another means she uses to resist the constraining plots of the rising or falling heroine. 'The whole artiface of her fable,' he assesses quite rightly, 'consists in coming to no conclusion. Her ladies stand so upon the order of their going, that they do not go at all.' Indeed, while Burney's endings are in some ways conventionally romantic (depicting the happy marriage of the heroine), Hazlitt is not alone in finding something oddly inconclusive about her novels. Cecilia is the most explicitly antiromantic in its conclusion; while the hero and heroine end up married, Cecilia must give up her fortune to achieve this status, and Burney makes a point of qualifying her heroine's happiness:

Yet human it [Cecilia's life] was and as such imperfect! she knew that, at times the whole family must murmur at her loss of fortune, and at times she murmured herself to be thus portionless, tho' an HEIRESS. Rationally, however, she surveyed the world at large, and finding that of the few who had any happiness, that there were none without some misery, she checked the rising sigh… and… bore partial evil with chearfullest resignation.

Burney records her friend Edmund Burke's objection to this ending:

He wished the conclusion either more happy or more miserable; 'for in a work of imagination,' said he, 'there is no medium.'

I was not easy to answer him, or I have much… to say in defence of following life and nature as much in the conclusion as in the progress of a tale; and when is life and nature completely happy or miserable? (Diaries and Letters, volume 2) -214-

Further defending Cecilia's conclusion to her mentor Samuel Crisp, Burney speaks against the extremes of 'every other book of fiction' and her wish to avoid them:

I think the book, in its present conclusion, somewhat original, for the hero and heroine are neither plunged in the depths of misery, nor exalted to UN human happiness. Is not such a middle state more natural, more according to real life, and less resembling every other book of fiction? (Diaries and Letters, volume 2)

Even when Burney's novels end more unequivocally in marital happiness than Cecilia, the romantic exaltation of the heroine is suppressed, for readers such as Hazlitt (and myself), in relation to the repetitions and circumlocutions of the plot. Even the almost fairy-tale ending of Evelina, in which the heroine returns to her native Berry Hill and 'the arms of the best of men,' calls conclusive endings into question. 'The best of men' in Evelina's language identifies either her new husband, Lord Orville, or her adopted father and mentor, Mr. Villars; is Evelina's happy ending exaltation into married bliss or a return to where the novel began, with her adopted father? There is an implied circularity here that introduces ambiguity to even the most «exalted» of endings for Burney's heroines.

In sum, Burney's novels are shot through with skepticism about rising or falling heroines. The 'middle state' is more 'according to real life,' in Burney's view, because it resists the oversimplification of feminine identity and experience according to a dichotomous model of rising or falling, angel or demon. Feminine happiness or misery,