SOURCE: “How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina,” in ELH, Vol. 57, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 557-83.

[In the following essay, Campbell states that Evelina includes a “model of reading” similar to conduct literature in its concern with propriety, which is intended to instruct Burney's critics on how to read her work. Campbell further evaluates the way in which the male characters in the novel “read” Evelina, and render female characters into “texts” by objectifying them.]

In Evelina's dedication, “To the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews,” Frances Burney courts her prospective critics' attention or, more precisely, their protection. What is peculiar about this dedication is its tone of instruction:

The extensive plan of your critical observations,—which, not confined to works of utility or ingenuity, is equally open to those of frivolous amusement—and, yet worse than frivolous, dullness,—encourages me to seek for your protection, since,—perhaps for my sins!—it intitles me to your annotations. To resent, therefore, this offering, however insignificant, would ill become the universality of your undertaking; though not to despise it may, alas! be out of your power.¹

The extraordinary convolutions of her prose here testify to Burney's embarrassment at her own daring. She demands her critics' protection although she clearly knows that addressing them at all may backfire. Implicit in Burney's address is a criticism of the then-current critical climate for womens' novels: she acknowledges that she needs a benign or at least impartial reception and recognizes that it won't be granted as a matter of course. I will argue that Burney includes a model of reading within Evelina that resembles conduct literature in its emphasis on propriety and that is meant to serve Burney's literary ambitions by teaching her critics how they ought to read her work.

The anxiety that prompts her dedication springs from the critical climate surrounding the publication of novels in general and novels by women in particular. The contemporaneous anonymous reviewer of Woodbury or, the Memoirs of William Marchmont, Esq; and Miss Walbrook prefaces the substance of his brief notice with a telling general lament: “Surely the youthful part of the fair sex have as keen a relish for novels, as they have for green apples, green gooseberries, or other such kind of crude trash, otherwise it would not be found worth while to cultivate these literary weeds, which spring up, plenteously, every month, even under the scythe of criticism.”² The critic's duty, the reviewer suggests, is to discourage the writing of novels as much as possible in order that cultivated flowers, such as only formal education can produce, may grow. Since women were excluded from formal education, they should, according to the reviewer's notions, also be excluded from publishing.

Even benign attitudes towards women's writing presented problems. As Jane Spencer has noted, the terms of critical acceptance for women's novels were twofold: “When women writers were accepted it was on the basis of their femininity; and the kind of praise they received varied with their readers' conceptions of that quality, so that to some people feminine writing implied eroticism, to others, purity.”³ The two schools of feminine writing were well enough established by the early 1770s that an anonymous publication did not guarantee immunity from ad feminam criticism, as this review of The History of Miss Dorinda Catsby and Miss Emilia Faulkner makes clear: “Some romance writing female (as we guess from the style) with her head full of love-scenes,—shady groves, and purling streams, honourable passion and wicked purposes,—has here put together a flimsy series of such adventures and descriptions as we usually meet with in the amorous trash of the times.”⁴ Literary taste-makers were not the only ones to object to the impure strain of women's novels. The popular eighteenth-century moralist James Fordyce warns his female readers against novels in general not only because they “carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast” but also because they convey no instruction.⁵ His reaction against novels differs from the critics' dismissal of “amorous trash” chiefly in its emphasis on the shocking effects of novels rather than on their formal failings. Defining herself entirely in the tradition of feminine purity, Fanny Burney in the preface to Evelina very carefully distinguishes her novel from those that undermine virtue:

Let me, therefore, prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being transported to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where Reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvellous rejects all aid from sober Probability.

Imagination, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has convincingly argued, was believed by Burney and her contemporaries to be the “source of sexual feeling”.⁶ (In Evelina itself, Villars objects to the way Evelina has let Imagination take the reins and lead her ideas about Lord Orville into regions of “fancy and passion” [290].) The only novelist whom critics consistently proposed as a model for women writers, and whom Fordyce exempts from his condemnation of the genre as a whole, is Richardson.⁷

An adoption of Richardson's domestic subject and of his focus on feminine virtue would therefore presumably offer a female novelist some promise of success were it not for the immodesty of publication itself. A woman novelist, such as Burney, who defined herself against the erotic feminine tradition would have to come to terms with a catch-22 built into the virtuous tradition. The eighteenth-century definition of feminine virtue, with its emphasis on modesty, forbade courting attention of any kind:

This modesty, which I think so essential in your sex, will naturally dispose you to be rather silent in company, especially in a large one. People of sense and discernment will never mistake such a silence for dullness. One may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shows it, and this never escapes the observing eye.⁸

Since eighteenth-century notions of modesty required women to be reticent or even silent, for a woman to publish was to define herself as immodest.⁹ If only a demonstration of her own probity gives a novelist the hope of escaping the hostile critical reception I have outlined, then the very act of publication ought to jeopardize her reception because it undermines her moral authority. This pitfall haunts Burney. Recognizing it compelled her to try to use the text of Evelina to redefine the relationship between male critic and female novelist in a way that permits women to publish and yet to be taken seriously. To this end Burney criticizes the code of feminine virtue for silencing women, invents the ideal critic in Lord Orville and proposes an ideal principle of reading.

In Evelina; or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, Burney emphasizes the parallels between a woman's social reception and a work's critical reception to allow the narrative of Evelina's social success to stand as a trope for Evelina's (and thus her own) literary recognition. In the social arena of the eighteenth-century novel of manners, a woman's reputation is established through the reading and/or decoding of her deportment by the doyens of “society,” whose guidelines are defined and codified in conduct literature. Conduct books thus serve as an interpretive tool for reading women's behavior, and they constitute women as texts. But this interpretive tool produces simplistic readings: the conduct books' obsession with women's chastity narrows the range of questions asked about women and also narrows the inferences that one can draw from their behavior. The ways in which a woman's reputation is conventionally damaged in literature—one might think of Daisy Miller, Lily Bart, Cecilia, Cressida—make it clear not only that her reputation ultimately is based on a consensus about her chastity but also that appearance, or the evidence available to the public, is more important than fact or motive.¹⁰ Women in the eighteenth century were read according to interpretive principles that dismiss authorial intent and privilege critical consensus over exegesis.

To succeed with patriarchal critics Burney knew both she and her heroine had to appear to be conventionally good. Thus Burney had first of all to establish Evelina's virtue. But how does one immunize a portrayal of feminine virtue from the kind of derision Shamela aims at Pamela? Fielding's parody criticizes Richardson's portrait on two levels—he attacks the character Pamela for using her virtue as a commodity, and he attacks the book Pamela for titillating its readers. To succeed in her portrait Burney knew she had to make the source of readerly pleasure very chaste. Evelina, therefore, does not report hands groping in her bosom or under her skirts. The more difficult task Burney faced was to create an indisputably virtuous heroine, particularly in an epistolary novel. A character's hypocrisy or villainy is conventionally established by showing a disparity between motive and action. On the stage soliloquies and in novels psycho-narration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue can establish the nature of a character's motives in moments of unselfconsciousness.¹¹ But the epistolary novel does not offer these resources because consciousness of an audience is built into the form. Given the inherent selfconsciousness of letter-writing, a character's repeated reference to her own virtue does not in itself convince us of that virtue. Indeed it may have the opposite effect, as Fielding's response to Pamela makes clear.

Bald self-advertisement will not do, then, but neither will the kind of good deeds within Evelina's powers. Her gender and circumstances preclude her from impressing us with the heroics of a Tom Jones or the philanthropy of a Cecilia. Her range of allowable heroism is restricted by the miniature moral scale of assemblies and houseparties; but good behavior in this arena will not attract particular admiration, since perfect etiquette may well be the product of unthinking conformity. Paradoxically, Evelina proves her virtue by her nonconformity: her ignorance of the forms of etiquette testifies to her pastoral origin, and her tearful explanations of the motives behind her trespasses attest to her superior internalization of the morality on which the rules of etiquette are based. Her faux pas give her the opportunity to explain herself, while her embarrassment proves her to have been acting unselfconsciously.

The entire case for Evelina's virtue thus rests on moments of self-vindication. Putting aside the embarrassment and remorse she feels over her trivial crimes against form in the first two of Evelina's three volumes, I will focus instead on two complex and serious misapprehensions of her motives and one deliberate misreading.¹² The misapprehensions are explicitly presented as problems of readerly interpretation. Evelina's social reception is centered around her gradual conquest of Lord Orville's heart, a conquest that suffers numerous reversals along the way. During one of these setbacks, Orville apparently misreads a note she sends to him. In her ensuing unhappiness, Evelina becomes a book for Villars to read; and later she is made into a poem whose deceptive provenance leads Orville to doubt her character and her regard for him. Both Villars's and Orville's receptions are influenced by Willoughby's willful and self-serving prior misreadings of Evelina. To save her reputation with Orville, Evelina must confront Willoughby, as she does in Mrs. Beaumont's arbor. Burney emphasizes the need for a focus on intentionality or interiority by presenting each setback in Evelina's romance twice: once in a social context, where public behavior is the focus of attention, and again in a private context, where motives may be explained. These juxtapositions throw discontinuities between public persona and private self into sharp relief and by extension criticize modes of reading that discount such discontinuities. Furthermore, a demonstration of such discontinuities implicitly recommends a reading or writing process that concerns itself with the relationship between the private self and public mask, and modes of writing, such as the epistolary novel for example, that make the private public. Cumulatively, these juxtapositions establish the purity of Evelina's motives, her virtue, and they validate women's literary accomplishment. Since virtue is an inner state, it cannot contribute to a reputation until it is announced: virtue must publish itself. And by extension, publication and the self-assertion involved in publication is also exonerated. There are situations in which publication is valuable and functions in the cause of virtue.

“ORVILLE” AS A BAD READER

The nadir of Evelina's reception is marked by what appears to be Orville's extremely unflattering evaluation of her decision to write at all. Evelina writes Orville a letter of apology for the way her vulgar cousins have treated his coach. As she herself willingly admits, taking the initiative to write to Lord Orville is not strictly proper, but she excuses herself (to Maria Mirvan) on the grounds that his opinion of her would otherwise be permanently and unjustly damaged by the impudence of the Branghtons, who had shanghaied his coach in her name and damaged it.

Just as Burney in the preface to Evelina seeks to clear her novel of the notoriety attached to outlandishly imaginative novels (what the reviewer in the Monthly Review would presumably designate “amorous trash”), Evelina writes to clear herself of the vulgarity of her associates. The apology to Orville is thus an internal counterpart to Burney's prayer to her critics in her dedication. Both addresses give her interpreters an opening to impugn her motives. In the dedication Evelina is acutely aware that any address to critics may be interpreted as an attempt to compromise their integrity: “thus situated, to extol your judgment, would seem the effect of art, and to celebrate your impartiality, be attributed to suspecting it.” The ulterior motive Burney disowns is sexualized in the novel; instead of wanting to buy her critics' favor with manipulative praises, Evelina uses her apology to insinuate herself into Orville's favor—at least, that is what the note signed in Orville's name suggests:

Believe me, my lovely girl, I am truly sensible to the honour of your good opinion, and feel myself deeply penetrated with love and gratitude. The correspondence you have so sweetly commenced, I shall be proud of continuing; and I hope the strong sense I have of the favour you do me will prevent your withdrawing it. Assure yourself, that I desire nothing more ardently than to pour forth my thanks at your feet, and to offer those vows which are so justly the tribute of your charms and accomplishments.

(241-42)

The answering note, which has been forged by Willoughby, Orville's rival, who has intercepted Evelina's letter, reads her letter as an invitation to a clandestine correspondence. Entering into any kind of private exchange with a man before marriage was seen at the time as extremely disreputable in part because it afforded the correspondents an opportunity to set up a tryst. Orville's choice of the word “ardently” suggests that he himself takes Evelina's initiative to have sexual implications. His stated wish to thank her in person invites her to make a private assignation. In this context the promised “vows” do not appear in a respectable light—they may be vows merely of devotion and admiration but, given that suspicious word “ardently,” it seems more likely that they would be vows of secrecy in a liaison. Initially exhilarated by what she takes as a declaration of love, Evelina herself on rereading inclines to a less flattering interpretation: “Upon a second reading I thought every word changed,—it did not seem the same letter,—I could not find one sentence that I could look at without blushing: my astonishment was extreme, and was succeeded by the utmost indignation.” Her indignation is revived by having to copy the offending letter: “What a letter! how has my proud heart swelled every line I have copied!” (242) Her self-defense requires her not only to relive the insult but to reproduce it.

The insult is not merely sexual. As Judith Newton convincingly argues, when Evelina is commodified by the two Holborn swains, Mr. Smith and Tom Branghton, her moral worth is discounted. Their treatment of her reduces her to her marriage-market value and, in Newton's term, denies her idea of herself as “treasure”; it denies the importance of her virtue and intelligence.¹³ The freedom of Orville's letter also commodifies her, only more disgracefully. Where the two bourgeois beaux would marry Evelina, Orville is interested in a clandestine relationship only; in other words, he excludes her from the marriage market within his class. His use of the word “justly” in his expressed desire to “offer those vows which are so justly the tribute of your charms and accomplishments” perhaps stings the most because it slights rather than rewards the virtue and intelligence that, in a meritocracy like Villars's pastoral world, would earn love. Evelina's virtue and intelligence are translated in the letter to “charms and accomplishments,” in this context clearly sexual accessories that define Evelina more securely as sexual commodity, thus trapping her in a social and economic underworld.

To bring the exchange back into the realm of her own values, Evelina in turn evaluates Orville's response in a series of rhetorical questions:

If, as I am very ready to acknowledge, I erred in writing to Lord Orville, was it for him to punish the error? If he was offended, could he not have been silent? If he thought my letter ill-judged, should he not have pitied my ignorance? have considered my youth, and allowed for my inexperience?

(242)

In their emphasis on Orville's failure to adopt a protective stance, these questions recall one of James Fordyce's sermons on shamefacedness in women, in which Nature speaks:

“Behold these smiling innocents, whom I have graced with my fairest gifts, and committed to your protection? Behold them with tenderness and honour. They are timid, and want to be defended. They are frail; O do not take advantage of their weakness. Let their fears and blushes endear them. Let their confidence in you never be abused—But is it possible, that any of you can be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? … Curst be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastity!”¹⁴

Fordyce's sermon identifies men's responsibility within a code that requires female chastity—if women are to be innocent, men must be protective. Fordyce is an external moral authority for Evelina's particular defense against the aspersions the note casts on her virtue. In a similar fashion, when Burney addresses her critics, she explicitly brings men's assigned role as protectors into the relationship between critic and author, so the rhetorical questions Evelina indirectly poses to Lord Orville recapitulate the reading instructions Burney offers the critics in her dedication. Without revealing her sex, Burney, like Evelina, there claims protection on the basis of other attributes she shares with her heroine—youth, ignorance, and inexperience:

The extensive plan of your critical observations,—which, not confined to works of utility or ingenuity, is equally open to those of frivolous amusement,—and, yet worse than frivolous, dullness,—encourages me to seek for your protection, since,—perhaps for my sins!—it intitles me to your annotations. To resent, therefore, this offering, however insignificant, would ill become the universality of your undertaking; though not to despise it may, alas! be out of your power.

.....

Let not the anxious solicitude with which I recommend myself to your notice expose me to your derision. Remember, Gentlemen, you were all young writers once, and the most experienced veteran of your corps may, by recollecting his first publication, renovate his first terrors, and learn to allow for mine.

Both in the text of the novel and in her introductory material, then, Burney insists that male readers adopt a protective stance to women and their writing. If they do not, she implies, they themselves breach the code of gentility by which they judge. “Orville” as a bad reader is guilty of just such a breach.

VILLARS AS BAD READER

Evelina's self-justification to her friend Maria Mirvan, however, does not by itself succeed in comforting her; she needs to be vindicated by a moral authority. Exiled by Madame Duval to Berry Hill, Evelina suffers physically from the misunderstanding. When she does not immediately reveal to Villars the cause of her evident unhappiness, he determines to read Evelina:

But when, at last, I recollected myself, and turned round, I saw that Mr. Villars, who had parted with his book, was wholly engrossed in attending to me. I started from my reverie, and, hardly knowing what I said, asked if he had been reading?

He paused a moment, and then replied, “Yes, my child;—a book that both afflicts and perplexes me.”

He means me, thought I; and therefore I made no answer.

“What if we read it together?” continued he, “will you assist me to clear its obscurity?”

(248)

Villars's mistakes in reading Evelina are facilitated by the habitual textualization of women in good society, where the arbiters of that society (both men and women) read them as though their behavior corresponded immediately to their moral essence.¹⁵ However, as a sympathetic reader, Villars is unwilling to judge Evelina too quickly. He therefore enlists her help in construing her behavior; but his first mistake is to assume that she is the problem text. Motivated by modesty, Evelina is slow to testify to Orville's apparent depravity and perhaps reluctant to acknowledge herself as its object. Thus when Villars tries to encourage her to share the secrets of her heart with him as she was wont to do in childhood, she continues to evade him, until she sees that he is misreading her evasions:

“I must now guess again: perhaps you regret the loss of those friends you knew in town;—perhaps you miss their society, and fear you may see them no more?—perhaps Lord Orville—”

I could not keep my seat; but, rising hastily, said, “Dear sir, ask me nothing more!—for I have nothing to own,—nothing to say;—my gravity has been merely accidental, and I can give no reason for it at all.—Shall I fetch you another book?—or will you have this again?”

For some minutes he was totally silent, and I pretended to employ myself in looking for a book. At last, with a deep sigh, “I see,” said he, “I see but too plainly, that though Evelina is returned,—I have lost my child!”

“No, Sir, no,” cried I, inexpressibly shocked, “she is more your's than ever!”

(249)

Villars's mistake is complex and multilayered. His regret here has shocking implications indeed. “I have lost my child” as a response merely to Evelina's unwillingness to share the contents of her heart seems hyperbolic, since Villars associates “child” with innocence throughout the novel. Evelina's shock at the charge suggests how serious it is. While Villars does not exclude Evelina's person in his prayers for her, he is at least as anxious that she retain her purity of mind. Although he initially reads her exterior for signs of virtue, he knows that true virtue is not continuous with its outward signs. Early in the novel he sends her heaven's blessings with the prayer, “O may it guard, watch over you, defend you from danger, save you from distress, and keep vice as distant from your person as from your heart!” (14). And in his penultimate letter he prays that she may retain her “singleness of heart” and “guileless sincerity” (320) in her new situation as Orville's bride. But how does one establish the purity of someone's heart? Villars's test for an immaculate conscience is the absence of secrets. He is not ready to come to the conclusion that Evelina has lost her purity of mind until her reserve prompts him to it.

When he is “reading” Evelina, Villars's interpretive method thus brings to the personal, private sphere the rules of conduct that apply to young women in the world, namely that anything secret or clandestine is incriminating. However, as the reading unfolds, the application of this rule for reading conduct broadens. Where publication of private thought had, in Evelina's case, been a means for establishing her feminine innocence, in “Orville's” case it becomes a means for exposing male hypocrisy. Villars's exoneration of Evelina puts the blame squarely on Orville as respondent/critic:

Your indignation … is the result of virtue; you fancied Lord Orville was without fault—he had the appearance of infinite worthiness, and you supposed his character accorded with his appearance: guileless yourself, how could you prepare against the duplicity of another? Your disappointment has but been proportioned to your expectations, and you have chiefly owed its severity to the innocence which hid its approach.

(252-53)

Villars's reasoning opposes two terms, innocence and duplicity. If readability attests to innocence, illegibility indicates duplicity. Villars is talking about two styles of morality, hypocrisy versus directness, but his initial textualization of Evelina and his phrasing in this vindication, which emphasizes the innocent reader's (Evelina's) expectation that interiority or “character” is continuous with appearance, encourage one to think of the establishment of virtue and vice as a problem of reading, with special application to the novel of manners. Just as readability of character depends on a consonance between private and public selves, so a dissonance between these selves produces illegibility. Thus Orville's public good manners hide his essential badness, but his private writing reveals that essence. Evelina refers to this disparity when she hands Villars the letter: “See, Sir, how differently the same man can talk and write” (252). Similarly, by opening her heart to Villars, which entails showing him a hitherto clandestine correspondence, Evelina proves that she is still Villars's good child, still obedient to the laws of proper conduct, and still pure of mind. The publication of private writing, then, is as much a test of virtue as is the confiding of private thoughts to a moral authority. Throughout the novel the publishability of Evelina's private communication with men proves her innocence and worth just as the publishability of the epistolary, and therefore ostensibly private, contents of Evelina proves Burney's innocence of the scandal attached both to novels and to the female authors of novels. Innocent herself, Burney becomes eligible for consideration as a serious writer.¹⁶

The effect of Villars's misinterpretation, then, is to establish Evelina's and Burney's probity while calling into question the private motives informing the reception of Evelina's note and, by extension, of women's writing in general. Villars's mistakes emphasize the shortcomings of an interpretive approach that fails to take into account the dynamics of critical reception, particularly the misleading effects of reception anxiety. When in response to Villars's hint about Orville Evelina suggests that he take up another book, that is, other than herself, she is also suggesting that the problem lies not in herself as a text but in the hostile response to her letter, Orville's note, which she hands to Villars with the claim that she “hate[s] Lord Orville” (251). Villars's misreading of Evelina is based on the effects of “Orville's” prior misreading of her rather than on the essential Evelina—Orville's letter has so shocked her modesty that Evelina's bearing suggests a troubled conscience, and Villars, responding to that bearing, thinks she has compromised her modesty in some way. To correct Villars's mistake Burney simultaneously vindicates Evelina's character (her text) and invalidates Orville as a critic by exposing (publishing) Evelina's note and Orville's improper response to it. By analogy Villars's vindication of Evelina once again puts external critics on their mettle, for Evelina's confidence in Orville's disposition to read her note fairly finds a parallel in Burney's confidence in the critics' fair reception of her novel. In terms of literary reception Willoughby's rationale for intercepting Evelina's letter and forging Orville's response suggests a motive for the suppression of women's writing by ad feminam criticism: “Briefly, then, I concealed your letter to prevent a discovery of your capacity; and I wrote you an answer, which I hoped would prevent you from wishing any other” (370). The suppression of Evelina's “capacity” serves Willoughby's design because it prevents Evelina, who is accessible to him only as sexual commodity, from being recognized as a moral subject. The publication of Evelina, similarly, reveals the moral basis of both novels and female novelists.

ORVILLE AS BAD READER

The ramifications of Evelina's first metaphorical textualization as a book casts light on Burney's anxiety about both Evelina's critical reception and the riskiness of addressing her critics directly in the preface. With Evelina's second sustained textualization, during which she is turned into a blazon, Burney shows the interdependence of private, critical, and public receptions. Orville allows his private opinion of Evelina to be influenced by the literary reception, evaluative and public, that Willoughby exploits. Orville's misunderstanding of Evelina's motives highlights the ease with which women's reputations may be manipulated as long as women keep silent. When Evelina, according to Villars's instructions, begins to shun Orville as part of her program to suppress her own partiality for him, Willoughby appears and distinguishes her with his attentions. To Orville, Evelina's sudden reserve towards himself, although actuated by modesty and prudence (Villars convinces her that, given her circumstances, Orville cannot be intending to marry her), looks like partiality to Willoughby; and Willoughby does all in his power to encourage such a view. At the same time, a blazon of Evelina is circulated anonymously in the most public room in Bristol, the pump-room. While the publication of this eulogy damages Evelina's reputation, her dutifully assumed reserve towards Orville paradoxically prevents her from clearing herself easily.¹⁷ Although conduct literature of the time associates modesty with reticence, Burney demonstrates that silence in women leaves them and their reputations vulnerable to manipulation. In this way she justifies women's writing without directly attacking the feminine ideal of modesty.

The scene in the pump-room follows closely a revelation that shocks Evelina. At the beginning of the novel it is established that Evelina's mother, née Caroline Evelyn, dies in or shortly after childbirth, having been abandoned by her husband, Sir John Belmont. Belmont had eloped with her but, when the dowry was withheld, had burned the marriage certificate, thus leaving her no legal proof of her marital status or of the legitimacy of her child. Gradually Evelina's surrogate parent and moral mentor, Villars, is persuaded that Evelina should seek her father's recognition (and a retroactive clearing of her mother's good name). Villars absolutely refuses to consider a lawsuit on the grounds that it would attract unwanted attention, wounding Evelina's modesty. Shortly before Evelina enters the pump-room, she discovers that her father is travelling with a Miss Belmont, who is being introduced as his daughter and heir. Since the novel builds up to a recognition scene between Lord Belmont and Evelina, the way in which the young men compare Evelina's person to her blazon just when Belmont's eventual recognition of her seems most doubtful may be meant as a perverse or parodic recognition scene, one that, equally public, is as offensive to her modesty as the lawsuit proposed by Madame Duval would have been. The blazon directs attention to Evelina's body but does not, because it cannot, reveal anything about her mind:

We went first to the pump-room. It was full of company; and the moment we entered, I heard a murmuring of, “That's she!” and, to my great confusion, I saw every eye turned towards me. I pulled my hat over my face, and, by the assistance of Mrs. Selwyn, endeavoured to screen myself from observation, nevertheless, I found I was so much the object of general attention, that I entreated her to hasten away. But unfortunately she had entered into conversation, very earnestly, with a gentleman of her acquaintance, and would not listen to me; but said, that if I was tired of waiting, I might walk on to the milliner's with the Miss Watkins, two young ladies I had seen at Mrs. Beaumont's, who were going thither.

But we had not gone three yards, before we were followed by a party of young men, who took every possible opportunity of looking at us, and, as they walked behind, talked aloud, in a manner at once unintelligible and absurd. “Yes,” cried one, “'tis certainly she!—mark but her blushing cheek!”

“And then her eye—her downcast eye!”—cried another.

“True, oh most true,” said a third, “every beauty is her own!”

“But then,” said the first, “her mind,—now the difficulty is, to find out the truth of that, for she will not say a word.”

“She is timid,” answered another; “mark but her timid air.”

During this conversation, we walked on silent and quick: as we knew not to whom it was particularly addressed, we were all equally ashamed, and equally desirous to avoid unaccountable observations.

(308)

It is important to note that at the beginning of her report Evelina says every eye was on her, but at the end she says none of them knew who was the object of the persecution. The most obvious explanation for this inconsistency in Evelina's report is that she is unwilling to appear conceited to Villars—her modesty keeps her from saying but not from knowing that she alone is attracting all this attention.¹⁸ Similarly, Evelina's conjecture about the identity of the poem's author serves her modesty more than likelihood. According to her, Mr. Macartney must be the author, and gratitude his motive—a much more becoming speculation than the more likely option that Willoughby is the author, and desire his motive. Yet the last two lines of the poem, “Anville,—to her power unknown, / Artless strikes,—unconscious kills” (315), express not gratitude but desire. True, it is the kind of formulaic expression that a poet might resort to without passionate conviction, but its very conventionality within the courtly tradition suggests Willoughby as its author. He affects courtliness whenever he pursues Evelina, as Newton remarks: “What distinguishes Sir Clement … is the persistence with which he imposes upon his control of Evelina the courtly fiction that she is Cinderella. … Sir Clement's courtly language marks a farcical counterpoint to his behavior. … he sustains a running and sometimes hilarious pose as the powerless lover of an unreachable mistress.”¹⁹ The sentimental Macartney's characteristic style is more melodramatic and less courtly.

The minor adjustment in Evelina's story thus directs our attention to Villars's importance as addressee. Writing for him constrains Evelina from telling an immodest truth immodestly. As we become aware of Evelina's constraint before Villars, we are simultaneously made aware of how the immodesty of the pursuing swains silences the young women completely. And although the explanation Evelina offers for why they are all abashed is disingenuous, it still seems likely that the persecution she describes, in which a woman's person and mind are judged against the text of a blazon, would have the effect of striking dumb not just its particular victim, but all modest women, for the requirements of female modesty under normal social circumstances dictate reticence. In his recommendation that women be “rather silent” in company, Gregory assures them that “one may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shows it, and this never escapes the observing eye.”²⁰ Although Gregory does not gender the eye, in Evelina it is male readership, whether Villars's, Orville's, or the swains', that makes women into texts. Being objectified in this way automatically robs women of the subjectivity necessary to authorship. Whether the blazon is Willoughby's or not, it, like his forgery of Orville's note, serves his pursuit of Evelina, for while the publishability of Evelina's heart and behavior attests to her virtue, the publication of her external attributes wounds her modesty, effectually silences her, and thus prevents her from salvaging her reputation directly. Consequently she becomes first the prey of the young men, then of Willoughby himself, who takes advantage of the stir the poem has caused to become her self-appointed protector.

As with Villars's misreading, Orville's misreading involves two texts, in this case Evelina and the blazon of Evelina, and two separate but interdependent scenes of reception. We are presented first with the young men's public reading of Willoughby's version of Evelina and their comparison of the two texts (poem and heroine) before we see her own reaction to the poem. When Evelina gets to read the blazon, it wounds her modesty as much as the swains' reception of her does. Not only is it embarrassingly flattering, but Willoughby makes sure that the circumstances under which she receives it hurt her reputation with Orville: he passes the poem to Evelina in Orville's sight, knowing full well that its nature will prevent her from circulating it and thus defusing the appearance such private note-passing gives. To protect her reputation for modesty Evelina, paradoxically, must do that immodest thing, speak up for herself.

But a direct self-vindication, aside from being immodest, would not be as effective as Orville's accidental witnessing of Evelina's struggle against Willoughby is. Evelina's ongoing battle of wits with the rake reaches a crisis in Mrs. Beaumont's arbor, and Orville's happening on them there gives the same credibility to Evelina's self-defense as might be obtained from an accidental reading of a private form of writing. In other words, the accidental nature of Orville's witnessing guarantees the artlessness of the self-defense. As usual, Evelina opposes Willoughby's seductive rattle with the language of virtue, so that while they are contending over Evelina's chastity, they are also disputing the grounds of social discourse, and Evelina is convincing her patriarchal readers of her virtue.

Willoughby uses the language of courtly love, which accommodates a wide range of relationships, from platonic admiration, through married love, to adultery, and which is therefore inherently ambiguous.²¹ Although Evelina has suspected Willoughby of being a rake all along, in the privacy of the arbor he lowers his usual mask of polite if pointed attention and allows his language to become clearly risqué. About midway through the scene, he offers to allow Evelina to reform him:

Oh, Miss Anville, your reproofs, your coldness, pierce me to the soul! look upon me with less rigour, and make me what you please;—you shall govern and direct all my actions,—you shall new-form, new-model me;—I will not have even a wish but of your suggestion; only deign to look on me with pity—if not with favour!

(326)

Although the reformation of rakes was a conventional feminine temptation, it was notoriously dangerous. (Not every woman is a Pamela.) To look on Willoughby with favor would be to favor him with intimacies, presumably kisses, garters, and, eventually, her maidenhead. Merely to pity him would be to allow him to hope for these favors in the future. The prospect of reforming a rake here clearly comes with a price. According to Willoughby, before Evelina is to gain any influence she must give up her “rigor,” that is, her morality. Since he has always valued Evelina exclusively for her prettiness, he predictably seeks to make her into an object by reducing her to her good looks, as the blazon does. Could he elicit looks of passion or at least of interest, those too would be welcome. However, he is indifferent to her regard, which would be an expression of her moral being. In fact he would like to purge moral principles from looks and speech because those principles define her as a moral subject rather than a sexual object, and are also the main deterrent to her seduction.

By insistently using the language of courtly love and responding to Evelina as though she too were using it, Willoughby seeks to pervert Evelina's own moral language. He reads in the spirit of Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes declares: “The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me.” Barthes analyzes the pleasure gained by perverse readings: “The more a story is told in a proper, well-spoken, straightforward way, in an even tone, the easier it is to reverse it, to blacken it, to read it inside out (Mme de Segur read by Sade). This reversal, being a pure production, wonderfully develops the pleasure of the text.”²² Willoughby's willful misreading of Evelina is sadistic in this way, but Evelina interrupts his pleasure by rigorously insisting on clarity. Willoughby knows he cannot allow himself to be bluntly sexual, but he depends on Evelina's propriety to allow his innuendo to pass as long as it presents itself as polite and conventional chitchat. His rhetoric depends on a discontinuity between polite form and wicked intent. By pretending she does not understand his polite language, Evelina leaves him the choice of abandoning his seduction or propositioning her openly:

“Suffer me, Sir,” said I, very gravely, “to make use of this occasion to put a final conclusion to such expressions. I entreat you never again to address me in a language so flighty and so unwelcome. You have already given me great uneasiness; and I must frankly assure you, that if you do not desire to banish me from wherever you are, you will adopt a very different style and conduct in the future.”

I then rose, and was going, but he flung himself at my feet to prevent me, exclaiming, in a most passionate manner, “Good God! Miss Anville, what do you say?—is it, can it be possible, that, so unmoved, that with such petrifying indifference, you can tear from me even the remotest hope!”

“I know not, Sir,” said I, endeavouring to disengage myself from him, “what hope you mean, but I am sure that I never intended to give you any.”

(326)

Here it seems pertinent to make a distinction between Barthes's principles and Willoughby's. The reading process Barthes describes is masturbatory, but since it is applied to literary texts, its perversity (if it is perverse) is harmless. Willoughby is reading a woman, however, and his principles in the arbor scene seek to dominate Evelina and do threaten real violence:

“You distract me,” cried he, “I cannot endure such scorn;—I beseech you to have some moderation in your cruelty, lest you make me desperate;—say, then, that you pity me,—O fairest inexorable! loveliest tyrant!—say, tell me, at least that you pity me!”

(326)

The phrase, “lest you make me desperate,” warns Evelina that her resistance to Willoughby's discourse and logic will provoke him, but to what is not clear.

As both Susan Staves and Judith Newton observe, the threat of violence permeates Evelina.²³ Whether the violence is his own or some other man's, the threat of violence gives Willoughby power over Evelina: he exploits the threat of the Captain's violent practical jokes on Madame Duval to indebt Evelina to him; he exploits her predicament at Vauxhall where some drunken men seem convinced of her sexual availability, and attempts to turn the ostensible rescue into a seduction for his own benefit; again, he exploits her anxiety at being followed and harassed by the three youths from the pump-room, whose willing transgression against decorum threatens something worse, to court her himself; and, he himself physically detains her in his coach, in the arbor, and in Mrs. Beaumont's drawing room.

All this pervasive danger requires that Evelina be protected, and Willoughby gains access to Evelina only when she is separated from her rightful guardians. So, in the pump-room, Mrs. Selwyn is too absorbed in conversation to accompany Evelina out of the room, although Evelina's distress would be obvious to anyone with “feminine delicacy.” Mrs. Selwyn's indelicacy, specifically her teasing about Lord Orville, also drives Evelina into the garden for the arbor scene with Willoughby. But Orville himself most explicitly neglects his guardianship of Evelina almost immediately after he has pledged his protection as a brother. Evelina's description of his behavior during the blazon debacle suggests that not only her own silence but his inattention to her allows Willoughby to tarnish her reputation with him:

Lord Orville's reception of us was grave and cold: far from distinguishing me, as usual, by particular civilities, Lady Louisa herself could not have seen me enter the room with more frigid unconcern, nor have more scrupulously avoided honouring me with any notice. But chiefly I was struck to see, that he suffered Sir Clement, who stayed supper, to sit between us, without any effort to prevent him, though till then, he had seemed to be tenacious of a seat next mine.

(317)

In the very next paragraph Orville's neglect at the dinner table prevents him from seeing Evelina's tears. Social reception and literary reception are collapsed into one—the circulation (publication) of the blazon attaches notoriety to Evelina's name and person, and, as we have seen, Willoughby cultivates an appearance of indecency in her by making her appear to receive the poem surreptitiously in Orville's sight. When, at the dinner table, Evelina cries over Orville's sudden, pointed neglect of her, Willoughby leans forward to physically block Evelina's tears from Orville's sight. Willoughby's manipulation of Orville's regard for Evelina thus becomes a metaphor for the way ad feminam criticism of women's writing screens the real worth of their achievements from serious, principled critics. Evelina regains Orville's attention and protection only after she defends her virtue at length to Villars and the external reader and briefly but urgently to Orville. To persuade Orville to reassume his protection of her, to intercede, Evelina must convince him that her compromising situation in the arbor is not of her choosing by calling to him twice and saying to Willoughby: “Sir Clement, I insist upon your releasing me!” (326). Ultimately her discourse, then, while in itself incapable of protecting her, is a prerequisite for Orville's protection. She must speak her innocence in order to save not only her physical purity (i.e., her chastity) but Orville's estimation of her as innocent.

Willoughby's machinations succeed in making Orville lose interest in Evelina, withdraw his protection from her, and thus deliver her to Willoughby. While Orville's “delicacy” has kept him from invading Evelina's privacy, it has also, as he now can see, kept him from understanding her danger. In this way his delicacy has contributed to Evelina's endangerment as much as has her own modest reticence. Previously, when Evelina recounts how Orville called on the Mirvans on the night of the attempted abduction, Villars praises Orville's freedom from false delicacy. By creating the appearance of indecency in Evelina, Willoughby has now betrayed Orville into just such an error.

ORVILLE AS REDEEMED READER

Almost immediately after Willoughby tries to seduce Evelina through his ambiguous and illicit discourse in the arbor, a discourse that ultimately rests on male force and the threat of violence, Orville's declaration of his love for Evelina offers a representation of alternate, ideal sexual relations based on a denial of male force. Both his interview with Willoughby in the arbor and his actual declaration make it clear that Orville's love is based on his estimation of Evelina as at least his equal. When Orville first asks Willoughby what the rake's intentions toward Evelina are, Willoughby's answering question elicits a reply that establishes Orville outside of any of the normal power relations that subjugate women:

… and then Sir Clement said, “To what, my Lord, must I then impute your desire of knowing [my intentions]?”

“To an unaffected interest in Miss Anville's welfare.”

“Such an interest,” said Sir Clement, drily, “is indeed very generous; but, except in a father,—a brother,—or a lover—”

“Sir Clement,” interrupted his Lordship, “I know your inference and I acknowledge I have not the right of enquiry which any of those three titles bestow; and yet I confess the warmest wishes to serve her and to see her happy.”

(327)

At issue here is the right to protect. Sir Clement would restrict that right to those to whom a woman “belongs” because that would leave Evelina, who appears to belong to nobody, available to him. However, a father's or brother's protection is not by definition disinterested, as Clarissa's sufferings demonstrate, nor are a lover's.

The disinterestedness that ideally motivates gentlemanly protection removes the threat of male violence from gender relations and thus would seem to permit an escape from patriarchal hierarchy. When pressed, Orville identifies the grounds of his concern in his esteem for Evelina and fear for her innocence. In other words, he is her friend:

Pardon me, then, Sir Clement, if I speak to you with freedom. This young lady, though she seems alone, and, in some measure, unprotected, is not entirely without friends; she has been extremely well educated, and accustomed to good company; she has a natural love of virtue, and a mind that might adorn any station, however exalted: is such a young lady, Sir Clement, a proper object to trifle with?—for your principles, excuse me, Sir, are well known.

(328)

From this description it is clearly the value he puts on Evelina's mind and character that permits Orville to imagine a purely friendly relationship to a woman. By contrast, in its careful consideration of the ratio of beauty to booty, Willoughby's assessment of Evelina returns gender relations to an explicitly sexual and financial marketplace:

I think Miss Anville the loveliest of her sex; and, were I a marrying man, she, of all the women I have seen, I would fix upon for a wife: But I believe that not even the philosophy of your Lordship would recommend me to a connection of that sort, with a girl of obscure birth, whose only dowry is her beauty, and who is evidently in a state of dependency.

(329)

The difference in the rivals' estimation of Evelina as friend or prey is underwritten by the difference in their attitude towards the use of force. Thus Willoughby's threat of force in the arbor scene is emphasized by Orville's interceding exclamation, “Sir Clement, you cannot wish to detain Miss Anville by force!” (326). Orville, on the other hand, explicitly rejects force in his declaration:

“You are going, then,” cried he, taking my hand, “and you give me not the smallest hope of your return!—will you not, then, my too lovely friend!—will you not, at least, teach me, with fortitude like your own, to support your absence?”

“My Lord,” cried I, endeavouring to disengage my hand, “pray let me go!”

“I will,” cried he, to my inexpressible confusion, dropping on one knee, “if you wish to leave me!”

(333)

By imagining this new category, “friendship,” grounded on mutual esteem, Burney would seem to have found a basis for gender relations that does not of itself define women as inferior. Indeed, Orville's request that Evelina “teach” him makes her his superior. By contrast, Willoughby's request for “pity” is part of the courtly context he imposes on his conversation with Evelina, thus part of his willful misreading of her. Despite the implications of making a petition, which would suggest Evelina is in a position of power, the nature of Willoughby's petition insists on the system of meaning he is trying to impose on their conversation. It thus reinforces Willoughby's power over Evelina as text. Orville's request that Evelina “teach” him, which comes after he is convinced of the ineptitude of his former attempts to read her, locates authority in Evelina. Moreover, since Evelina is to teach him “fortitude,” it recognizes her moral authority. The request, then, locates authority in Evelina and bases it on her superior moral nature. In making the request and granting Evelina authority, Orville redeems himself as a reader.

IDEOLOGICAL CONTRADICTIONS AND APORIA

Each of Evelina's readers locates authority differently. Villars gives the governing code of feminine propriety authority over Evelina and over the reading process. For Villars, reading amounts to judging whether the woman/text conforms to standards of feminine virtue. As judge and moralist, he shares authority with the moral code by which he judges. Willoughby retains authority for himself and seeks to impose his reading on Evelina; reading for him is an act of domination. Orville initially reads like Villars, but his mistakes lead him to question his own principles so that for him reading finally becomes an act of submission to the greater authority of the text. Of the three, only Orville's reformed approach to reading grants women authorial subjectivity and allows women's writing, including Evelina, a respectful reception. Orville's reformation is effected by a subtle definition of male protection, which according to conduct books is in any case a gentleman's duty towards a lady. Burney would thus seem to have found a way to succeed as a writer on patriarchy's own terms. However, Orville's declaration of love is marked by an aporia that signals the ideological contradictions in Burney's achievement.

Orville's declaration serves a double function: as part of the allegory of literary reception his recognition of her makes Evelina a peer's peer and thus represents Burney's parallel wish to be recognized as the critics' equal. However, as part of a love plot it provides the climax, and as such it is unsatisfactory. Evelina reports no desire at all; instead her love is expressed in silence, paradoxically by the collapse of her body:

I attempted not to describe my sensations at that moment; I scarce breathed; I doubted if I existed,—the blood forsook my cheeks, and my feet refused to sustain me: Lord Orville, hastily rising, supported me to a chair, upon which I sunk, almost lifeless.

For a few minutes, we neither of us spoke; and then, seeing me recover, Lord Orville, though in terms hardly articulate, intreated my pardon for his abruptness. The moment my strength returned, I attempted to rise, but he would not permit me.

I cannot write the scene that followed, though every word is engraven on my heart; but his protestations, his expressions, were too flattering for repetition: nor would he, in spite of my repeated efforts to leave him, suffer me to escape:—in short, my dear Sir, I was not proof against his solicitations—and he drew from me the most sacred secret of my heart!

(334)

The aporia in Evelina's report of her own feelings during Orville's declaration dramatizes the denial of the body that the rules of propriety require of chaste women. Evelina merely alludes to that organ of sentiment, the heart, as the locus of the passionate text; she cannot voice her desire because she is not supposed to feel any.

For different reasons Orville too does not express sexual desire. Because kneeling is so conventional for the male in love scenes, the gesture hardly registers its meaning anymore, but Orville's posture asserts Evelina's power over him in body-language at the same time that he speaks his submission to her will. In other words, he reverses the power-structure operating not only in the arbor scene, but in gender relations generally. Passion is not admitted into Lord Orville's declaration:

“Mock you!” repeated he earnestly, “no I revere you! I esteem and I admire you above all human beings! you are the friend to whom my soul is attached as to its better half! you are the most amiable, the most perfect of women! and you are dearer to me than language has the power of telling.”

(334)

This is the entire available text of Orville's declaration, but what is he declaring? In his esteem for Evelina, Orville does not even permit himself to use the word “love.” Instead of a declaration of love Orville's apostrophe may be seen as a declaration of equality paradoxically based on inequality, for by calling Evelina his “better half,” he suggests that she is simultaneously his superior and his equal. This paradox reflects Burney's acknowledgement of the inequity produced by superior strength in men. Along similar lines, Burney goes to some length to establish Orville's non-violence before the proposal scene. In the scene itself she has him insisting on Evelina's moral superiority in an effort to compensate for his physical advantage: by subordinating his will to her superior will he neutralizes his ability to detain her by force and removes the threat of force that Willoughby relies on for his access to her. However, language fails him just when he is about to say how “dear” she is to him. All Burney is able to do, then, is to distinguish the basis of Orville's desire from the basis of Willoughby's; Orville cannot articulate the desire itself lest it upset the balance of their equality. The declaration scene's function as a scene between lovers is incompatible with its other function as proleptic trope for Burney's recognition by her critics because the first requires some show of desire, but, in Evelina, sexual desire introduces gender inequality via the ubiquitous threat of male violence, including, at least implicitly, rape. Burney does not want to admit any inequality into the relationship between male critic and female writer.

While it may be difficult to avoid reproducing existing hierarchies in any text, Burney handicaps her project of winning authority for women at the outset by deciding to write from within the patriarchal code of feminine propriety. The way Evelina reinscribes the literary patriarchy is most clearly illustrated by the importance Burney gives to male protectorship. Just as a gentleman's protection ostensibly shields a woman from rape and preserves her reputation, a critic's protection shields a woman writer from misreadings that violate her text and her literary reputation. Now although this protection is available to innocence, the determination of innocence requires an act of reading: a man, potential protector or rapist, gauges (reads) the woman's relationship to sexuality and acts according to or in despite of his interpretation, which is not guided by a woman's simple “no” because within the code of modesty that trammels her she has no “yes.” Thus, as Ellen Willis has pointed out, male protection, insofar as it depends on a woman's innocence, denies her desire and will, her autonomy as a sexual subject, and reinforces her objectification.²⁴ Burney's insistence that men, to be gentlemen, must be protective of feminine innocence potentially turns every gentleman critic into an interfering moral mentor and keeps the critical eye trained on women writers' personal probity.²⁵ Insofar as a focus on their personal behavior turns women into texts, the critical stance Burney implicitly recommends, in which gentlemanly attention is given only to innocent writers and their innocent texts, thus paradoxically has the effect of fixing both women writers and their texts as the objects of the interpretive, evaluative male gaze.

Whether as writer or as addressee, Villars, representing the ideology of conduct literature, constructs for Evelina an ego-ideal she continuously struggles to approximate even while her struggle implicitly criticises some aspects of it. As the emphasis in conduct literature on female chastity and feminine modesty suggests, this ego-ideal is based on a denial of female desire. So, while Burney can afford to have Evelina transgress against minor laws of etiquette in order to demonstrate her thorough probity, she cannot have Evelina and she cannot herself transgress against this major tenet of conduct literature, nor is there any indication that she might want to: hence the emphasis on Evelina's modesty, and on Evelina's chastity as a text. Having accepted chastity as a requirement for morality in women, Burney cannot have her heroine express an autonomous sexual desire. But in the absence of female sexual autonomy, which depends on the recognition of female desire and the absence of male force, any male desire is threatening, hence she also cannot allow her otherwise innocuous hero to express his sexual desire. Orville's incongruous, slightly ridiculous declaration of equality or, rather, subordination to Evelina takes the place of a true equality, which the values of conduct literature that Burney accepts precludes. Evelina's aporia in the declaration scene, then, hides the fundamental contradiction of trying to assert gender equality within a patriarchal paradigm. While Burney recognizes that the silence the feminine ideal of modesty imposes on women can be a tool for reducing women to sexual objects, her unwillingness to renounce chastity means that in representing desire between equals she emasculates the hero, obliterates the heroine's body, and fails to report any passion. The proposal scene thus reasserts the silence of modesty that Burney combats in her account of Evelina's textualization.

Evelina is a book for Villars, a blazon for the swains; her heart is the engraved text of Orville's avowals, as, later, it holds the text of filial tenderness towards Belmont.²⁶ Not just during the declaration but during all these textualizations Evelina is curiously speechless. Burney would thus seem to privilege the authority of the (private) text over the authority of (public) speech, as Evelina does when she denounces what appears to be Orville's hypocritical note: “See, Sir, … how differently the same man can talk and write!” (252). As I have already suggested, since the virtuous text that substitutes for Evelina's speech is so often located in her heart, textualizing Evelina is a strategy for unequivocally publishing her virtue as well as valorizing publication in the literary sphere. Throughout her novel Burney discredits speech, and substitutes writing as the only medium of truth in the novel. In the declaration scene it is no surprise, therefore, to find that the truth of Evelina's feelings cannot be spoken; however, for the first time it also cannot be written in the letter to Villars, and it cannot be read. The emotion that is too strong for utterance we must assume to be sexual desire in Evelina; in Burney the parallel unutterable desire is her ambition to succeed with her critics. Disguising her writerly desire is the cost of her pact with the critics, in which she agrees that in the expectation of being read by gentlemen, she writes like a lady.²⁷

Notes

1. Frances Burney, Evelina; or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), unpaginated front matter. Both the Preface and the Dedication are unpaginated. All further references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.

2. Article 34, Monthly Review, May 1773.

3. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 75. For further discussion about women's difficulties in gaining literary authority, see Nancy Armstrong, “The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel,” Novel 15 (1982): 127-145; and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

4. Article 30, Monthly Review, August 1772.

5. James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1766), 1:75.

6. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1974): 38.

7. For a good analysis of the connection between the requirement of the virtuous heroine (modelled after Richardson's heroines) and the artistic weakness of eighteenth-century domestic novels, see Katherine Rogers's “Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 11 (1977): 63-67.

8. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), in Eighteenth Century Women: An Anthology, Bridget Hill, ed., (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 19.

9. Dale Spender's chapter “Publish—and be damned … as a woman,” addresses the conflict between a female author's “womanliness” and her literary ambition. In Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora Press, 1986), 23-29.

10. Joyce Hemlow has shown that contemporary conduct books instructed women not to rely merely on their own virtue but to exercise “prudence,” in order to preserve an impeccable reputation for virtue. See her “Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 65 (1950): 754. Poovey (note 3) analyzes how the importance attached to womens' reputations lead to the notion that one could or should be able to read them like books (24).

11. I take my terms from Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978).

12. In her recent critical biography of Burney, Margaret Doody astutely defines the importance of embarrassment in Evelina:

    Embarrassment is a point of interface between the individual as known from within and social identity as known from without—and it represents the inner person's knowledge of his/her outer persona. The narrative form of Evelina, combining private letter with public farcical scenes, is perfectly designed to exhibit embarrassment—it is embarrassment's objective correlative.

    Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), 59.

13. Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981), 31-32.

14. Fordyce (note 5), 1:99.

15. Poovey (note 3) remarks that Villars assumes Evelina can be “read” (251).

16. Similarly, Frances Burney's journal-keeping was sanctioned by one of the most fastidious of her mother's friends, Dorothy Young, only after Burney had demonstrated that the journal's contents, if accidentally made public, would cause no scandal. See Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 30-31.

17. Jonathan Deitz and Sidonie Smith have deplored Mr. Villars's poor advice in their “From Precept to Proper Social Action: Empirical Maturation in Fanny Burney's Evelina,” Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1977): 85-88.

18. Julia Epstein discusses how questionable the sincerity of Evelina's letters to Villars is in The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98-101.

19. Newton (note 13), 37.

20. Gregory in Hill (note 8), 19.

21. Thomas A. Kirby, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Enlarged Edition, Alex Preminger, ed., (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974).

22. Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 27, 26.

23. Susan Staves, “Evelina, or, Female Difficulties,” Modern Philosophy 73 (1976): 368-381. Newton (note 13), 23-54.

24. Ellen Willis, “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 460-467.

25. Martin Price in conversation.

26. During her second interview with Belmont, Evelina exclaims: “Oh, Sir, … that you could but read my heart!” (366).

27. Jane Spencer (note 3) points out that Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was not welcomed by women writers precisely because it “attacked the entire ideology of femininity that had been developed during the century, and on the basis of which women writers had been accorded acceptance and respectability” (100).