Burney knew, could not be represented or interpreted apart from the dichotomizing influence of the prevailing gender ideology, and her fiction represents a lifelong effort to work against reductive representations and interpretations of women's lives. Hence, there is considerable irony in the ways in which that gender ideology has shaped the representations of Burney's career as a novelist for over two hundred years of literary history.
Burney's fiction and her career as a novelist have been persistently read through the lens of her gender. Criticism contemporary with Burney's work and published soon after her death tends to assess her work as that of a 'very woman,' as Julia Epstein says, either the precious craft of an -215- infantilized author or the tired, overdone product of a decaying coquette's last flash of literary vanity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, critical attention has shifted from her fiction to her published diaries, bringing to the surface the earlier, implicit emphasis on Burney's life as a woman as opposed to her work as a novelist. Despite important dissenting arguments, the overwhelming tendency in Burney criticism has been to characterize her career as an initial, meteoric rise in youth (never mind that she was nearly thirty when she published her first novel) followed by a steady fall through
Even recent critics such as Spencer retrace this trajectory in discussing Burney's career, albeit from a feminist point of view: 'Burney's anxiety for paternal approval and her fear of public exposure led her on a search for correctness of language and sentiment that tended to kill her early vitality.' The tenacity of this view of Burney's work and literary reputation should be analyzed in the light of the historical use of the rising and falling metaphor in eighteenth-century fictional representations of women. When applied to the women who wrote the fiction, the metaphor has the same reductive effects. Women's work tends to be sorted according to a dichotomy of falling or rising, and-as Burney's alleged rise-and-fall career suggests-what goes up must come down. In other words, the same gendered logic of rise and fall that shaped eighteenth-century women novelists' plots tends to shape literary and historical accounts of those novelists.
I would suggest that the metaphor of 'the rise' that informs so many studies of the eighteenth-century novel (chief among them Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, 1957) is, like many of our richest, most historically burdened metaphors, implicitly gendered. And like many other gendered metaphors, it reduces historical complexities to orderly narratives and taxonomies. Watt, for example, admits the historical reality that the majority of novelists during much of the century were women, but the story he tells of the novel's rise to 'formal realism' is the tale of a masculine dynasty. (Austen is the only woman novelist he discusses at any length.) It seems that when there is rising to be done, men will do it, and Watt is neither alone nor especially to blame for perpetuating this cultural 'structure of feeling,' as Raymond Williams would call it. As Terry Lovell points out, the reputation of novel writing was threatened by its «feminization» through the large number of women who wrote novels during the eighteenth century and enhanced by the emer-216- gence of a greater number of male writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the period of the novel's 'first expansion,' Lovell suggests, 'writing might have become a feminized occupation, with all the characteristics of such occupations-low pay and low status.' It took male novelists to bring this reputation 'up.'
Watt has often been attacked for eliding the work of eighteenth-century women novelists, and McKeon's and J. Paul Hunter's subsequent books on the beginnings of the novel include a wide range of writers-not all male, not all novelists-in their narrations of the English novel's early history. But their complex and rich histories include women in their stories of the novel's development but do not specifically address how femininity figures in those stories. McKeon's dialectical process complicates Watt's story of the novel's rise in relation to capitalism, and Hunter's sophisticated sense of how literary form develops from broad social and literary contexts similarly complicates Watt's tale of a male dynasty. Women are included in an 'equal opportunity' fashion that does not allow for much attention to historical differences between how men and women were represented in eighteenth-century culture and how these differences might, in turn, affect the representation of women novelists. The investigation of gender differences is not, of course, McKeon's or Hunter's project, and my point is not to denigrate their work but to suggest that the inclusion of women writers does not in itself advance our understanding of the complex relationship between eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and the historical trajectory of the novel's form and definition.
Watt's novel rises in relation to an ascending middle class; Hunter's novel reaches higher levels of social and literary respectability; McKeon's follows a path of uneven, dialectical development. None of these 'big stories' is helpful in accounting for why women have traditionally been left out of accounts of the novel's rise and why Frances Burney's career has repeatedly been characterized in terms of rise and fall. While they allow the woman novelist to rise just like the men, such stories of the novel's emergence, which accept the metaphor of rising without thinking through its implications for both heroines and women writers, have not been helpful in analyzing the specific phenomena of women's literary careers in the eighteenth century.
A similar reductionism with respect to eighteenth-century women's writing results when feminist literary historians and critics pursue uncritically the project of charting the rise of the woman novelist. Jane -217- Jane's Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen argues that women novelists rose to a position of respectability and literary authority in the eighteenth century by means of a feminist fall. That is, women novelists rose to public acceptance by giving up their earlier critiques of masculine authority, particularly as that authority affected women's sexuality. Spencer sees the early fiction of Eliza Haywood as more liberating than her later novel, Betsey Thoughtless, for instance, and the novels of Frances Burney are a political falling-off from those of Delariviere Manley and Jane Barker, notwithstanding the gains in public acceptance represented by Burney's respectability and professional success. Spencer writes that this feminist fall from political critique was arrested by the polemical fiction of the 1790s, particularly that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. But this conception that the woman novelist's rise in public acceptance was facilitated by her fall from feminism is belied, in part, by Spencer's interesting and complex discussion of a range of novels that resist such sorting. Resistance to oppressive notions of women and their sexuality occurs, it seems, in «subversive» forms in much of the fiction that fails to meet Spencer's feminist standards. Spencer's book reveals the deficiencies of the very paradigm of rising and falling that it espouses in its title and central thesis. Historical narratives of rising and falling, whether they reflect a feminist outlook or some other political perspective, tend to reinforce a Calvinistic, damned-or-saved taxonomy of texts and writers. Burney's fiction could teach us of the dangers of such a taxonomy, especially for the historically silenced and underrepresented.
This is not to say that feminist politics have no place in women's literary history. In fact, as I said at the outset of this chapter, Burney's importance as a writer is explicitly and profoundly political. What I argue here is that gender identity and gendered experience are encoded not only in the stories told by a culture's fictions, but in the stories we tell about those fictions. Just as Burney knew that she could best tell effective new stories of female identity and experience by careful and knowledgeable reworkings of the old ones, feminist critics and literary historians do some of their best work by knowing and reworking the «plots» of literary history. Otherwise, it is too easy to repeat the oppressions of past narratives in our haste to write new stories. The vast and complex range of narratives in eighteenth-century women's fiction is best understood if we in turn understand the political implications of the historical narratives we write about them. -218-
Much of the enormous amount of exciting, revisionary critical attention received by the work of Frances Burney in the last few years is symptomatic of a healthy trend in women's literary history toward making the big historical narratives of rising and falling literary forms more reflective of the specificity of the writers' texts and lives, rather than the other way around. The feminist reassessment of Burney's fiction does not guarantee the emergence of a literary history that self-consciously questions the political implications of its own rises and falls, of course, but it is a positive signal that tomorrow's students of the novel's history will find room within the historical narratives of the novel's development for serious consideration of the rich array of stories told by eighteenth-century women writers.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 4 (July 1991), special Evelina issue.
