[In the following essay, Thompson offers a re-examination of the relationship between Evelina's literary background and the feminist aspects of the novel. Thompson maintains that Evelina must mediate between two distinct publics: that which is aroused by her as a spectacle, and that which is summoned by her literary self.]

In concluding a recent volume of essays devoted to Frances Burney's Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, Margaret Doody makes the following appraisal: “It concerns me that none of these writers seems interested in the background of eighteenth-century literature (literature in its broadest sense) which lies behind Evelina … Attention to the literature does not mean disdaining the biographical approach (after all, what the author has read is an aspect of biography). But it does mean opening up the biographical approach, and not putting the entire emphasis, when discussing author or fable, on personal psychological material.”¹ In what reads as a rejoinder to much of the last two decades' worth of attention to Evelina, Doody expresses concern at the critical latitude available to readers who locate the novel's referent in Burney's biography.² Julia Epstein, who introduces the same volume, reviews the queries that this identification prescribes for critical feminism: “Did she [Burney] succumb to patriarchal constraints and write what she thought her father would approve, or did she deploy a subversive strategy of indirection? How ambitious was she, and how rebellious?”³ As Doody intimates, and the essays in this volume affirm, such queries can only re-elicit the evaluation that characterized the first wave of Evelina's recovery, an evaluation asserting the “ideological contradiction”⁴ of Burney's life and fiction. That this critical endpoint is a significant marker of Burney's recuperation is demonstrated in Doody's own Frances Burney: The Life in the Works.⁵ Yet Doody's recent introductory caution throws down a gauntlet of sorts, soliciting some alternative diagnostic, some mediation between Evelina and its “background” that might not so inevitably read the novel's fictions of trial and redress as the unilateral analog of Burney's strategy of production.⁶

Doody's appeal foregrounds the critical cul-de-sac occupied by Evelina, a text that repeatedly registers contradiction on a feminist litmus, no matter how historically or biographically sensitive the critic tries to make it. For Evelina and for Burney to say something else, Doody makes the equally telling suggestion that they be permitted to speak to a “broad[er]” literary background: in an irony that cannot be lost upon Burney's feminist readers, Doody would, it seems, predicate Evelina's contact with the broadly literary upon the novel's critical dissociation from its conditions of authorship. Now that Evelina's ambivalences have been gauged against a problematically imagined will-to-feminism in Burney, the novel is to be reinserted into the broader field of the literary.

I draw this conclusion with deliberate starkness to amplify the suggestiveness of the critical difficulty to which it points. To state it most schematically, how can a reading of Evelina which does not draw upon “personal psychological material” still claim to speak to the situation of the eighteenth-century woman writer—in other words, to be a feminist reading? What kind of feminism can engage in the apparently loaded trade-off of biography for “the background of eighteenth-century literature?” Finally, how might the contradiction that exhaustively genders Burney's biographical and writerly prospects occupy the language of another hermeneutic, a critical imaginary less emphatically stalled at Burney's variably “subversive” intentions?

This essay attempts one such adjudication of Evelina's critical and historical appeal. Taking Doody's concern as an occasion to rethink the relation of literary background and feminist intention, I assert that Evelina helps us reassess Jürgen Habermas's account of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. This can be defined as a feminist undertaking because it overlays a deeply gendered problematic—in brief, the relation of abstraction to embodiment—upon the historiographical coordinates that, for Habermas, mobilize England's progression into modernity. In claiming for Evelina a voice in our reconception of that process, I will, to appropriate Doody's phrase, seize for Burney's text a view upon “literature in its broadest sense.”

In his influential history of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas distinguishes between spectacular embodiment and a new form, print, which will enable the transition from medieval “home towns” to capitalist “state territory.”⁷ In its abstract inclusivity, print sustains a fiction crucial to the development of a public engaged in critical aesthetic and political debate: “the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons, whose abstract universality afforded the sole guarantee that the individuals subsumed under it in an equally abstract fashion … were set free in their subjectivity precisely by this parity.”⁸ Enabling this “implicit law” is the diffusion of bodily particulars in a modernizing technology of abstraction: a bourgeois public self constituted from its imagination of universalizing “parity” is, for Habermas, historically disjunct from a self distinguished by material display. Thus Habermas affirms the qualitative difference of the “cultivated person” and those who remain external to the subjectivizing forces of “abstract universality.” They cannot be abstract; they are, like a spectacularly anachronistic king, embodied. Indeed, subjects and practices that fall outside the operations of abstracting parity get little play in Habermas's account. This is hardly surprising, since his text can thematize them only as the ground that enables the bourgeois public self's universalizing difference. Yet Burney, I will suggest, represents public sociality as a peculiarly mediated practice, confusing the distinctness of the coordinates that animate Habermas's history. Far from affirming the smooth displacement of one form of public self-hood by another, Burney's novel claims their vexed proximity as its heroine's defining dilemma.

Evelina dramatizes the discrepancy between the sixteen-year-old Evelina's “conspicuous,”⁹ but illegitimate, beauty and a cultivated epistolarity that appeals to the sympathy of the novel's equally cultivated reader. For the bulk of Burney's novel, Evelina must negotiate between the discrepant publics summoned by her literary and her spectacular selves. To account for the charged proximity of Evelina's conspicuous embodiment and her cultivated epistolarity, I read Evelina alongside three men of letters who project various pairings of the medium of femininity and the medium of publicity: Jonathan Swift, whose account of female embodiment coincides with the most threatening and ineluctable spectacle of gender in Burney's novel; Samuel Richardson, whose vision of redemptive feminine discursivity haunts Evelina as potential anachronism; and David Hume, who, in commenting upon the function of the name in the social transmission of affect, offers a straitened compromise between Evelina's public bodies.

I. INDECENT PUBLICS: MADAME DUVAL AND MRS. SELWYN

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.¹⁰

A recent reader of Evelina cites this passage from John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughters to evoke the constraints facing Burney as she embarked on the anonymous publication of Evelina in 1778. The central condition of feminine modesty—“to be rather silent”—would thus, for this reader, affirm the immodesty of feminine publication. However, if Gregory's conduct-book endorsement of “silence” merits citation as a barrier to feminine expression, to claim it as an impediment to publication marks a peculiarly aggressive reading of his text. This claim takes Gregory's advice outside the realm of behavior in “large company,” presuming, in its equivocation of silence and non-publication, the indifference of print and speech. While such indifference may dramatically expand the range of Gregory's prescription, it effaces the historically distinct possibilities of femininity's new medium, print. Yet we know that the abstracting promise of letters did extend itself to Burney, who published Evelina anonymously because print might successfully mask not simply her identity, but her gender.¹¹ An eighteenth-century lady's modest strategy of publication could be enabled by print's negative relation to her body; modest behavior in large company is fueled by an opposing logic, restricting her representational capacities to mute self-display. This difference in strategies of feminine propriety precedes from the difference in forms of publicity elaborated by Habermas.

A more circumscribed reading of Gregory's advice yields its own interest. If, as Gregory stipulates, the modest lady in company must nonetheless “take a share,” his solution to the dilemma of silent participation relies upon the expressive capacities of that woman's body: “One may take a share in the conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shows it …” Rather than exploiting even the smallest unit of language, Gregory's lady represents herself with her countenance. If we attribute to a “Rousseauistic” ideal of speech the capacity to draw a community into transparent self-presence, then Gregory's ladies remain anchored to their bodies, incarnating that community's fund of silent interest.¹² Yet his advice, while restricting the powers of speech to one sex, leaves the ladies with a remainder whose relation to propriety is deeply vexed. Representation's irreducible opposite, feminine embodiment, can only be relegated to the domain of “show,” and Gregory can guarantee neither the modesty of his supervisory “observing eye” nor, indeed, that of the body on display.

Burney parodies the fiction of femininity's modest body in Evelina's maternal grandmother, Madame Duval. Madame Duval, responsible for the secret marriage and shameful death of Evelina's mother, enters Evelina to threaten a similar fate for her granddaughter. Most dangerous relative to the beautiful Evelina's beleaguered legitimacy, however, is Madame Duval's recapitulation of a materially grotesque femininity. If Gregory's conduct-book directive would find its support in female physiognomy, whose mute but transparent appeal enables the genre of the blazon, Madame Duval recalls Swift's scatological revision of that form. Twice in Evelina the “vulgar and illiterate” (12) Madame Duval is coated in roadside muck by the most flat-footed of the misogynists surrounding Evelina;¹³ these antics rudely bring the novel to feminine ontology's grossest stopping-point, the Swiftean recalibration of gender's referent. Far from being eccentric to Evelina's plot, the moments in which Madame Duval is covered with filth establish a strange stasis, braking the novel at a deflation of female practice that exposes the degree zero of female essence. Evelina testifies:

[I] perceived the poor lady, seated upright in a ditch … She was sobbing, nay, almost roaring, and in the utmost agony of rage and terror. As soon as she saw me, she redoubled her cries, but her voice was so broken, I could not understand a word she said …

[S]o forlorn, so miserable a figure, I never before saw. Her head-dress had fallen off; her linen was torn; her negligee had not a pin left in it; her petticoats she was obliged to hold on; and her shoes were perpetually slipping off. She was covered with dirt, weeds, and filth, and her face was really horrible, for the pomatum and powder from her head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which, with her rouge, made so frightful a mixture, that she hardly looked human.

(165-66)

Here Madame Duval falls into something like a state of nature. Yet the sartorial disarray so urgently indexed by Evelina does not threaten to expose a natural body. Rather, it precipitates the imminent “mixture” of the partial solids in and around Madame Duval, projecting, in the pressure of Evelina's italics, the encroaching miscibility of Madame Duval's body. In this “frightful” loss of integrity, Madame Duval more than affirms her tormentor's intentions: “she hardly looked human.”

Paradoxically, Evelina's ekphrastic intensity provokes this change of state in Madame Duval. Losing its precision in the force of a blunting disgust, this passage recalls the momentum of Swift's “A Lady's Dressing Room.” That poem's purpose is also indexical, providing “An Inventory” of what Swift's muse, the “sweet and cleanly” Celia, has left behind her after five hours of dressing. Each token merges with Celia's biology:

The Bason takes whatever comes
The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums the Towels,
Begumm'd, bematter'd, and beslim'd
With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd …
Nor be the Handkerchiefs forgot
All varnished o'er with Snuff and Snot.
The Stockings, why shou'd I expose,
Stain'd with the Marks of stinking Toes …(14)

While the poem's prurient interest lies in each item's “bematter'd” state, Celia represents the sweet and cleanly woman who has vacated the room, whose exposure is predicated upon her absence. Comically, Swift's lavish attention to her debris only drives Celia's ghostly referent even further from the scene. At the same time that Swift indelibly bematters Celia, he shows how completely she has voided herself of all matter.

Yet this is also to say that Celia is nothing but matter, the most immediately legible point of a poem culminating in the discovery “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” This last attribution can hardly claim metonymic crispness: ultimately, the “Pomatum, Paints and Slops, / And Ointments good for scabby Chops” that Celia applies to her outsides are barely distinguishable from the substances that “spue” from her insides. Celia ends the poem far more radically objectified than when she and it began, corresponding to no female readership, or even any female subjective capacity, at all. In this way, Swift's heroine figures a complete split between female objectivity and a male narratorial, voyeuristic, or proto-scientific subjectivity. Celia's trash is far more than the material shell of an evasive, impossibly cleanly “she”; it figures the waste of demattered masculinity. In bemattering Celia, her narrator relieves himself.

Kristina Straub cites Swift's scatological blazons to show how, in devaluing the occupations of the woman of mode, they exemplify a general cultural tendency that exerts a “dangerous influence over the self-imaging of a writer like Burney.”¹⁵ Yet within the economy of Evelina, the recapitulation of Swift's feminine grotesque promises both danger and opportunity. At her worst, Madame Duval represents a spectacle of feminine abjection that can no longer fulfill the proper function, as Gregory would have it, of mutely maintaining its own composure. If Madame Duval exposes the conduct-book possibility of modest show as Swiftean fraud, however, her essential grossness provides a counter to Evelina's epistolary abstraction. Like Celia, Madame Duval affirms her narrator's transparency: Evelina's abstract and cultivated epistolarity opposes itself to this spectacle of feminine nastiness.¹⁶ The danger here, of course, is that Burney cannot prevent her reference to Swiftean scatology from extending its essentializing claims to her heroine. Evelina is both the negative of Madame Duval and, her granddaughter, made of the same stuff as she. The importance of Burney's reference to Swift lies in this paradox.

We can read Swift's poem to enable feminist commentary upon the Habermasian history of publicity with relative ease. “A Lady's Dressing-Room” inspires the not-so-extravagant metaphor of a trade in waste internal to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, whereby modernity's historical refuse, embodied spectacle, is shunted off to the notoriously underdeveloped territory of gender.¹⁷ In Burney's text, however—and this constitutes much of its revisionary interest—such a trade is negotiated between women: Madame Duval and Evelina demarcate an unstable splitting within the gender that would indifferently take on the Swiftean burden of residual spectacularity. Madame Duval's vulgarity, illiteracy, and poorly faked French mannerisms thus prove her capacity to embody not only her own, but, more importantly, Evelina's Swiftean femininity. To reduce it to a neat calculus, the illiterate Madame Duval becomes the epistolary Evelina's trash.

Yet Burney's reference to Swift is revisionary because it is not neat and cannot sustain neat readings. The scenes where Madame Duval is muddied (where, in becoming-mud, she is simultaneously becoming-woman¹⁸) signal a complex crisis of adjudication, shoring up Evelina's claim to the abstract parity of cultivated letters by rendering feminine embodiment the essential of a sub-gender constituted in failed distinction. We can recognize the instability of this compromise first in its obvious departure from Swift's expansive claims—Celia's is a lady's dressing room, after all—and, then, in Evelina's own conspicuous and illegitimate beauty. This unstable re-apportionment of Swiftean waste solicits Judith Butler's account of what she calls a crisis in “masculine” reason:

This figuration of masculine reason as disembodied body is one whose imaginary morphology is crafted through the exclusion of other possible bodies … [T]his is a figure in crisis, for this body of reason is itself the phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity, one which requires that women and slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily functions, that it will not perform.¹⁹

To approximate Butler's formulation to this reading of Burney, we must first take Swift's satiric bemattering of Celia as the “phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity.” We might then observe that Madame Duval's “bodily function”—and this seems true throughout Evelina—can only be the embodiment of a crisis which is, precisely, the crisis of embodiment, erupting as such relative to the abstracting promise of print. As the agent of a Swiftean attempt at the “phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity,” however, Evelina occasions pronominal confusion, disabling the organizing logic of Butler's account. That a gendered distributional logic shows its terminal confusion in Evelina becomes clearer in light of Madame Duval's opposing failure of modesty, the satirist Mrs. Selwyn, whom Evelina can only reciprocally reject, not as too nasty, but as too masculine.

Mrs. Selwyn, “a lady of large fortune” (291), appears in the novel to chaperone Evelina. She is, like Madame Duval, a single, older woman. Unlike Madame Duval, she is of the upper class, definitely British, and extremely articulate. This latter quality opposes her to Madame Duval while establishing that she too will be some kind of irritant to Evelina's narrative:

She is extremely clever; her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine, but, unfortunately, her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying to acquire the knowledge of the other sex, she has lost all the softness of her own … I have never been personally hurt at her want of gentleness; a virtue which, nevertheless, seems so essential a part of the female character, that I find myself more awkward, and less at ease, with a woman who wants it, than I do with a man. She is not a favorite with Mr. Villars [Evelina's guardian], who has often been disgusted at her unmerciful propensity to satire.

(300)

This condemnation of Mrs. Selwyn's “want of gentleness” recalls Burney's adolescent efforts to extinguish her own literary propensity.²⁰ In Mrs. Selwyn's case, the discrepancy between knowledge and softness is made generic, and irreparable, by satire. What might seem a contingent problem—one resolved by a soft practice of knowledge—is made irreducible by Mrs. Selwyn's “masculine” tendency to make herself up of hard words. Mrs. Selwyn is an ambivalent character, who represents and even defends the propensity that Burney herself cannot squelch at the same time that her “masculine” practice of discourse renders her unfit to participate in a legitimizing circuit of desire.

Like Madame Duval, Mrs. Selwyn immobilizes Evelina's narrative, but this time because her presence verges on pure commentary:

“It has always been agreed,” said Mrs. Selwyn, looking round her with utmost contempt, “that no man ought to be connected with a woman whose understanding is superior to his own. Now I very much fear, that to accommodate all this good company, according to such a rule, would be utterly impracticable, unless we should chuse subjects from Swift's hospital of ideots.”

How many enemies, my dear Sir [Mr. Villars], does this unbouonded severity excite! … Mr. Lovel, after biting his lips some time, said, “Pon honour, that lady—if she was not a lady,—I should be half tempted to observe,—that there is something,—in such severity,—that is rather, I must say,—rather—oddish.”

(401)

Evelina's condemnation of Mrs. Selwyn's “unbounded severity” is only weakly echoed by Mr. Lovel: Evelina herself fills the narrative void occasioned by Mrs. Selwyn's address. The difficulty raised here is not one of male character, which in this instance well deserves Mrs. Selwyn's attack, but rather her recourse to a practice that falls outside the idiom of sociability itself. In flouting the rule that she cites, Mrs. Selwyn renders herself superfluous to the economy of understanding it prescribes. Thus at the moment when her critique of these assembled rakes and fops is most trenchant, she is least assimilable to the grammar constituting most of the action in Evelina. For her most articulate rebuttal comes from Evelina herself, who demonstrates her own power of understanding only in condemning Mrs. Selwyn's display of it. Falling outside of a regime whose reach extends to Evelina, Mrs. Selwyn is something like the muddied Madame Duval's equivalent, an extrusion whose command of textual space is fascinating, isolating, and unladylike. If the vulgar Madame Duval borders on a nasty mass, the literate Mrs. Selwyn turns into print, improperly assuming a “masculine”—or Swiftean—privilege as her own. Mrs. Selwyn can also be read in reference to Swiftean satire: this time, figuring not its object, but the transparent masculinity of its enabling subject.

Madame Duval and Mrs. Selwyn coincide with the terms orienting Habermas's history of the bourgeois public sphere, but not without some accommodation. Habermas's history is diachronic, taking the displacement of embodied spectacle by print as the crucial condition of modern sociability. He opposes embodied to abstract formations of the self in order to mobilize a historical progression: “The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced.”²¹ The ability to produce oneself in print becomes, for Habermas, both the imagined and the real correlate of modern selfhood. Yet the accommodation that Burney's text demands of Habermas would transform the relation of these two forms of selfhood from a diachronic to a synchronic one. Rather than reifying the poles of a historical trajectory, Madame Duval and Mrs. Selwyn impose themselves upon Evelina with equal force as gendered failures of publicity: they affirm the confusing imminence of “what [s]he represented” (bemattered femininity) and “what [s]he produced” (occasionally satiric discourse) as constitutive of Evelina's entrance into the world.²²

Madame Duval and Mrs. Selwyn thematize the “limit” conditions of Habermasian publicity as lapses of femininity. The Swiftean verb “bematter,” gleaned from “A Lady's Dressing-Room,” thus retains its importance to Evelina in summoning these apparently incommensurable limits—redundant materiality and evasive, transparent subjectivity—with mutualizing insistence. “Bematter” is a word claiming and disclaiming a feminine subject, whose hostility fails to mask fully the productiveness of its confusion. In sustaining the synchrony of “she represented” and “she produced,” Swift's verb keeps open the mediatory site of a confusion that (publicly) occasions Evelina.

II. LOCATING GENDER: EVELINA'S TWO PUBLICS

Over the course of her entry into the world, Evelina is exposed to the scrutiny of the London public, summed up in the itinerary through which Burney puts her: Drury-Lane Theatre, Covent Garden, the Opera House, Ranelagh Pleasure Grounds, the Pantheon, St. James's Park, Kensington Gardens, Vauxhall Gardens, Marylebone Gardens. This tour is consumed by anxiety, discomfort, and embarrassment, well-documented by Burney's readers as the substance of a young girl's response to a rigorous and stifling set of social codes. Most distressing of all is the fact that Evelina enters the world “a young woman of obscure birth, but conspicuous beauty” (8), whose elevated paternity remains unacknowledged by her apparently dissipated and callous father. Because her marital value is unintelligible, Evelina cannot fully annex her conspicuous beauty to the conduct-book exigency of modest show. This difficulty defines her uneasy tenure in London and Bath, appending to Evelina, despite herself, a residue of predatory male attention. As Doody states: “In the eyes of any inquisitive stranger, Evelina, ‘this deserted child’ as Villars calls her, must be identified as a bastard … The social destiny of such an attractive, well-bred female would seem inevitably to be some upper-class man's kept mistress.”²³ Enforcing the threat of irrecuperable femininity posed by Madame Duval and Mrs. Selwyn is Evelina's own potentially irrecuperable lack of a family name.

Throughout Evelina, Evelina experiences the uneasy synchrony of femininity's limits, (self) representation and (literary) production. In the following passage, she is bullied by Madame Duval into attending the opera with her vulgar relatives, the Branghtons. Evelina is dressed up for the pit, and they force her to sit with them in the gallery:

If I had not been too much chagrined to laugh, I should have been extremely diverted at their ignorance of whatever belongs to an opera. In the first place, they could not tell at what door we ought to enter, and we wandered about for some time, without knowing which way to turn: they did not chuse to apply to me, though I was the only person of the party who had ever before been at an opera; because they were unwilling to suppose that their country cousin, as they were pleased to call me, should be better acquainted with any London public place than themselves. I was very indifferent and careless upon this subject, but not a little uneasy at finding that my dress, so different from that of the company to which I belonged, attracted general notice and observation.

(99)

Here Evelina proves herself an apt satirist, lampooning both the Branghtons' lack of cultural competence and their inability to recognize it in herself. Yet this sketch is nested within a larger debacle that renders Evelina “too much chagrined to laugh”: her conspicuously elevated dress. The alienation from the Branghtons that her deft satire prescribes is at the same time a measure of Evelina's own chagrin, because, as she reminds her reader at the close of this passage, she serves as a sartorial marker of the difference between literary cultivation and boorish “ignorance.” Evelina's epistolary capacity to be “indifferent and careless upon this subject” is simultaneous with the event of her “different” dress, the inflamed visibility that attracts “general notice and observation.” Her experience at the opera is funded by the confusion of satire and chagrin, the coincidence of an indifferent critical voice and an embarrassingly different practice of fashion.

Evelina's spoof of the Branghtons is uneasy because in this passage she presents herself to two different audiences: the cultivated reader who will sympathize with her dismayed distinction and the opera-going crowd that registers her lapse in fashion (Evelina's admirer Orville locates her in the gallery because he “distinguished me by my head-dress” [103]). The synchrony of Evelina's epistolarity and her spectacularly adorned materiality is exacerbated when, during a rare moment in the novel, she trains her satiric voice upon herself:

At the milliners … what most diverted me was, that we were more frequently served by men than by women; and such men! so sinical, so affected! they seemed to understand every part of a woman's dress better than we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbands with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them …

I have just had my hair dressed. You can't think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell for I fear my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.

(30)

In Swiftean terms, Evelina's depiction of the milliners registers shock at a division of labor that places men in service to the intimate, even repellent, work of feminine embodiment. Such service entails an “understanding” that troubles Evelina, it would seem, with the event of gender: not only do these men understand how she is put together, but there seems nothing to prevent them from manifesting that understanding better than she.

At the milliner's, the staging-area of gender, the Swiftean roles of satirist and embodied object circulate unexpectedly. Thus the event of her hairdressing does not let Evelina establish her deeper claim upon “women's dress,” but fades into something like her own experience of drag. If the milliners open the possibility of bemattered men, Evelina's own voice emerges from a comically extroverted mass of hair that severs epistolarity from the gendering of “my head.” The extension of her epistolary agency that doubts “when I shall be able to make use of a comb” splits off for an instant into a phantasmatically degendered self, limning a referent that, in acting “for myself,” opens out the site of epistolarity interiority precisely through its incomplete internalization of women's dress. In this dissociation of her epistolary self—the “me” Mr. Villars, recipient of this letter, “would hardly know”—from her “frizzled” head, Evelina's narrative leverages the gap between sex and gender out of the gap between discursivity and display.

Yet there are later instances in the novel where Evelina's satiric self-reference is overtaken by the specular appeal of her body. Madame Duval falls into the mud twice over the course of Evelina: Evelina is twice taken for a prostitute. If Madame Duval references a Swiftean least common denominator, the scenes in which Evelina is addressed as an “actress” (220) pursue an equally dire trajectory, shedding ekphrastic stasis to assume a nasty practice. This possibility emerges at about the mid-point of novel when Evelina, having been brought to Marylebone Gardens by her maternal relatives the Branghtons, gets lost and is waylaid by prostitutes. She then encounters Lord Orville, one of the suitors whom she attracted while under the protection of a socially elevated London family. Here, in this refurbished site of bourgeois leisure, Evelina experiences the incoherent effects of her potential illegitimacy. Claimed very “cavalierly” (262) by the prostitutes as one of their party, at the same time that she is recognized by Orville as a genteel young lady of his acquaintance, Evelina represents two potential endpoints—Richardsonian and Hogarthian ends—of unnamed female beauty at once.

In a letter to her childhood guardian Mr. Villars, Evelina describes her state of mind as Orville sees her in the company of “unhappy women” (262): “Indeed, my dear Sir, I thought I should have fainted, so great was my emotion from shame, vexation, and a thousand other feelings, for which I have no expressions” (263). Evelina can find no expressions for feelings that so emphatically fall outside the domain of polite letters. Her “thousand other” sensations can be foregrounded only as epistolary absence, marking the collision of cultivated abstraction with opaque, even obscene, embodiment. This scene stresses the conjunction about which Mr. Villars worries as he sends his ward off to London: “[T]his artless young creature, with too much beauty to escape notice, has too much sensibility to be indifferent to it” (19). The anxious redundancy of Mr. Villars's “too much” is realized, then, in Evelina's “no expressions.” The drama of her interpellation by the prostitutes—that, as nobody, Evelina will become all body—leaves its trace not in the minute elaboration of virtuously shocked feeling, but in her abrupt falling-away from the field of cultivated parity itself. If the hairdressing scene holds the medium of Evelina's epistolarity apart from the gender she would embody, the density of the body she occupies here can be inferred only in its utter resistance to epistolary re-telling.

The events of Marylebone Gardens mark the significant difference of Evelina's sensibility from the aptitude that Habermas ascribes to a newly interiorized bourgeoisie. Sensibility enables the abstractness of the bourgeois public subject because of its relation to the letter and the epistolary novel. Letters, for Habermas, serve to define a psychological self that is both private and “already oriented to an audience,”²⁴ a self that, as it realizes a political sphere, will oppose the principle of supervisory publicity to that of absolute power. Elaborated discursively, feeling hollows out this self: “through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity.”²⁵ Under the pressure of an indecent notice, however, Evelina's literary interiority abruptly modulates into the single affective attribute that counteracts the subjectivizing effects of all the rest, “guilty” (261).²⁶ Evelina's lack of a legitimating patronym throws the discursive category of feeling into charged continuity with the embodied category of guilt.

Evelina's illegitimacy elicits Habermas's most topical bearing upon the plot of Evelina. The condition of possibility—the Habermasian “audience”—for an interiorized self is the family: “In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private sphere of their economic activity—as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another. The literary form of these at the time was the letter. It is no accident that the eighteenth century became the century of the letter.”²⁷ Family, for Habermas, both mystifies and concretizes the relation of individual to society, a relation no longer visible in lines of absolute force: “As an agent of society it [the conjugal family] served especially the task of that difficult mediation through which, in spite of the illusion of freedom, strict conformity with societally necessary requirements was brought about.”²⁸ Family enables the crucial illusion of the “purely human,” which will not so much split the domain of economics away from that of psychology as naturalize their coincidence. But because of the potentially obscene vagaries of her conjugal situation, Evelina, despite all of her efforts, can never achieve “strict conformity” with the requirements of Habermas's history.

The Habermasian family remains an undifferentiated agent of modern conformity. The work of David Hume, however, offers an alternative, more highly resolved trajectory, compelling my second juxtaposition of Evelina and an earlier text that imagines the stakes of feminine publicity. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume evokes the centrality of women's last names to the transmission of human passion, throwing into relief the incongruity of Evelina's situation relative to the consolidation of a rationally and passionally economized (male) self. The Habermasian recapitulation of a modernizing process would find itself fueled by the inner reserves of the Humean conjugal family, whose gendered fund of modest materiality is political economy's key resource.

Humean passions have been evoked as a solvent that dissolves economic rationalism into the field of the purely human, effecting “the generalization of political economy.”²⁹ This diverges somewhat from the assessment of Hume offered by Gilles Deleuze, who writes of Humean sympathy as a passion which disseminates economizing desires, but a partial one, which does not transmit evenly across the social field. This is because “What we find in [Humean] nature, without exception, are families; the state of nature is always already more than a simple state of nature. … The problem of society, in this sense, is … a problem of integration. To integrate sympathies is to make sympathy transcend its contradiction and natural partiality.”³⁰ The distinction between a state of nature composed of families and some prior state of nature enjoins the modifier “simple,” opening a vista along which a fanatically natural (Hobbesian) state recedes away from the Humean family unit. Burney situates Evelina somewhere in this gap.

Hume illustrates his principle of passional transmission by invoking the provenance of last names:

The idea of the servant makes us think of the master; that of the subject carries our view to the prince. But the same relation has not an equal influence in conveying us back again. And on this is founded that reproach of Cornelia to her sons, that they ought to be asham'd she shou'd be more known by the title of the daughter of Scipio than by that of the mother of the Gracchi. This was, in other words, exhorting them to render themselves as illustrious and famous as their grandfather, otherwise the imagination of the people, passing from her who was intermediate: and plac'd in an equal relation to both, wou'd always leave them, and denominate her by what was more considerable and of greater moment. On the same principle is founded that common custom of making wives bear the name of their husbands, rather than husbands that of their wives.³¹

Hume's example is ingenious. Cornelia's first name clears only enough subjective space for her to proclaim herself fully constituted by a second. The limits of her self are defined by “that reproach”: as the occasion for the fame of either her sons or her grandfather, she serves as a principle of mutual exclusivity, and can indicate only one quantum of male illustriousness at a time. Thus Hume does more than simply claim that our ideas are cued with varying facility from one personage to another; he installs Cornelia as a litmus between two variably famous sets of men. Nested within familial difference is Cornelia's own, fundamentally enabling difference, which bears confirmation of the principle organizing Hume's political economy. Wives and daughters thus enable the dynamics of Humean passion because, whatever their own passions might be, they are extra-discursive. Female subjectivity surfaces only once in the Treatise, as Cornelia, because only in this venue can she figure discursively at all.

Cornelia's difference recalls, again, Gregory's “be rather silent”: her silence is, for Hume, sanctioned as a name-bearing function. The public function of modest show is thus subsumed in the distributional function of the patronym. Hume's vision of female functionality is not the inverse of Swift's, which bestows upon women the burden of grotesquely dissimulated embodiment. Hume is supremely uninterested in Cornelia's body, but this does not give her license to enter print as a Mrs. Selwyn. If, for Swift, women are absurdly able to figure male subjectivity's residue of corrupt spectacularity, for Hume feminine publicity is removed altogether from this emphatic binary. In bearing the renown of the patronym, Cornelia is, as Hume says, an “intermediate,” facilitating men's passage into political economy through her modest display of their names. It remains for Evelina to expose this Humean model of feminine intermediacy as, to borrow Fredric Jameson's phrase, “the very caricature of a dialectical resolution.”³²

Evelina cannot occupy the intermediate position that makes Cornelia a model Humean woman. If Cornelia, as conduit, does the work of supporting Hume's distributional system, Evelina poses a problem: male passion cannot pass through her. With no name to direct male attention to its proper (male) object, she is unintelligible, a block in the Humean circuitry whose directives are facilitated by one principle of subordination, that “making wives bear the names of their husbands.” Because of her obscure birth, Evelina's conspicuous beauty is a dangerous asset, soliciting a brand of male notice foreign to the order of political economy. As her recourse to the sole qualifier “guilty” intimates, such notice cannot be elaborated from within the realm of letters occupied by Hume and by Burney. Burney's task, then, is to render Evelina subordinate to a name even while she has none. To redeem Evelina's beauty, Burney must make it legible.

Installing Evelina within the subjectivizing domain of the “purely human” (purely Humean) requires an integrating move whose violence is foregrounded by Burney. This has nothing to do with sympathy or persuasion: Evelina's real father, Sir John Belmont, is weirdly impervious to all long-distance appeals, and we learn finally that Burney has installed the obstacle of a false daughter, one whom Evelina must supplant in order to gain her proper title. Evelina's acquisition of her legitimate birthright would be finally stymied by the daughter who has displaced her for sixteen years, if Evelina's beauty did not, in fact, serve a proper purpose. Before the event of her confrontation with John Belmont, Mr. Villars tells her, “Let not your timidity, my dear love, depress your spirits: I shall, indeed, tremble for you at a meeting so singular, and so affecting, yet there can be no doubt of the success of your application: I enclose a letter from your unhappy mother, written, and reserved purposely for this occasion. … But, without any other certificate of your birth, that which you carry in your countenance, as it could not be effected by artifice, so it cannot admit of a doubt” (374). Evelina carries two things for her father to read: a letter from her mother Caroline Evelyn, saved expressly for this event, and her own face. Evelina bears testimonial text, but, more importantly, she is testimonial text. Significantly, no letter will vindicate her until she bears it in person: represented in letters, she proves no different from Belmont's wrongly appointed daughter.

Here Burney stresses the artifactual or genetic integrity of Evelina's face in opposition to some more abstract medium of legitimation. In an act of de-modernizing alchemy, Burney transforms what would be the most abstractly contractual of Evelina's public selves, the “certificate of your birth,” back into the medium of Evelina's spectacular countenance. This transformation buttresses the legal interests which, since the start of Evelina, have been poorly represented on paper: Belmont, whose rash marriage to Evelina's mother lost him the Duvals' fortune, “infamously burned the certificate of their marriage, and denied that they had ever been united!” (15). Not only, then, is Evelina's countenance devoid of the “artifice” that Villars implicitly ascribes to print; it renders inflammable her claim upon her father. Burney herself may famously dissolve such a claim into the “——————” to whom she dedicates her anonymous novel, but the event of Evelina's legitimation is emphatically excluded from such abstracting play.

The scenes in which her father reads his daughter as a legitimate woman show Evelina's transformation to be abrupt, punitive, almost killing:

I found myself already before him.

What a moment for your Evelina!—an involuntary scream escaped me, and covering my face with my hands, I sunk on the floor.

He had, however, seen me first; for in a voice scarce articulate he exclaimed, “My God! does Caroline Evelyn still live!” …

“Yes, yes,” cried he, looking earnestly in my face, “I see, I see thou art her child! she lives—she breathes—she is present to my view!—Oh God, that she indeed lived!—Go, child, go,” added he, wildly starting, and pushing me from him, “take her away, Madam,—I cannot bear to look at her!” …

“[S]he has set my brain on fire, and I can see her no more!”

(413-4)

In this scene of reading, the discipline undergone by Belmont is violent and agonizing. We might begin to assess its historical force by turning to the final text that I will place in relation to Evelina, Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. This is an important predecessor to Burney's novel, largely because it so strongly makes a claim for the legitimizing appeal of epistolarity—not only do the servant Pamela's letters enable her integration into a titled family, but, even within the microcosm of the novel, they convert the stubborn materiality of rank into the cultivated parity of a virtuous circle of readers. Nancy Armstrong, in affirming the modernizing trajectory of this outcome, has argued that Mr. B's aristocratic prerogative is tamed by Pamela's conversion into a “written self.”³³ Both Richardson and Burney would, then, rely upon the power of discourse to defuse a delegitimating notice: but if Pamela, “a self-enclosed body of words,”³⁴ is roughly equivalent to the text she becomes, Evelina's legitimate self is composed of only one word, the patronym Belmont.

The reformatory discipline imposed upon Mr. B is a gradual and pleasing process of absorption in Pamela's written self; here, however, Burney makes of reading a “moment” of reflexive punishment so unbearable that Evelina must be taken away. This is a finite discipline, whose devastating effects promise neither to elevate other unnamed women nor to reform a class of natural fathers. It is an exceptional moment, one in which Burney saves Evelina by fiat, making of her for an instant a hybrid of countenance and certificate. Evelina does not affirm the transformation realized in Pamela, which is easy, imperceptible, and, insofar as it promises the consolidation of the bourgeois subject, permanent. As such, Pamela will never revert to her prior condition as material body lacking psychologizing, moralizing, and scrutinizing words.

The finally bourgeois Evelina can never sublime into text because her body is harnessed to it as its immediate and punitive referent. For Belmont, Evelina's presence is the iteration of a punishment fusing impression (the mechanical process of seeing a face) and idea (name): “oh Evelina! thy countenance is a dagger to my heart!” (428). In contrast to Pamela, where Mr. B's readings in the primer of Pamela's self are too pleasing to be stopped, Belmont can only promise Evelina that “I will try to frame my mind to less painful sensations at thy sight” (428). Belmont does not gain access to a written self, but to a recombination of face and name whose sensational immediacy offers no lessons in the redemption of aristocratic guilt. Of course, Evelina's Mr. B(elmont) is not a potential husband, but a potential father. He has been “imposed upon” (414) by the nurse who, instead of bringing him his deceased wife's daughter, substituted her own. Belmont's conversion is vectored differently than Mr. B's: if Mr. B slowly turns his attentions from Pamela's outside to her inside, Belmont registers the singular impact of Evelina's face, which recuperates sixteen years of rejected letters in the mechanical imperative of filial resemblance.

Belmont's false daughter has a place-holding function, serving solely to flesh out a good paternal intention that could not otherwise pass as empirical proof. Her purely instrumental materiality is countered by Evelina's deeply particularized countenance; the false daughter is deposed by the daughter whose face recalls physiognomic “certainty.”³⁵ Yet their exchange has terminal effects upon Evelina: in realizing Evelina's claim to what Villars calls “a place to which you have a right indisputable” (373), Burney shows the novelistic benefit of misassigned place, whose plot accrues in the equivocation between sensational “right” and a benevolent but misplaced paternal intention. Indeed, Evelina's daughterhood has a short half-life because, instead of finally affirming the discrepancy between sensational and abstract rights, both daughters are effaced by Burney, as Mrs. Selwyn states: “[T]he most eligible scheme for all parties would be to have both the real and the fictitious daughter married without delay. Therefore, if either of you have any inclination to pull caps for the title of Miss Belmont, you must do it with all speed, as next week will take from both of you all pretensions to it” (418). After so forcefully dramatizing Evelina's right to bear her father's name, Burney has the satiric Mrs. Selwyn pronounce its easy dissolution. The opposition of “real” and “fictitious,” mechanical and abstract, is lost in the playful indeterminacy of “pulling caps.” Evelina has gained a name: for Mrs. Selwyn if not for Hume, which one no longer signifies.

III. EVELINA'S ENDS

Evelina's daughterhood and, finally, her title are authenticated by her face. She cannot, therefore, exclaim at the end of the novel, as Pamela does to a faithful servant: “I must always value you; and you don't know how much of my present happiness I owe to the sheets of paper, and pens and ink, you furnished me with.”³⁶ It is not clear what, in the end, Evelina “owes” to her epistolarity. Unlike Pamela, the bourgeois self that Evelina eventually becomes is not so straightforwardly ratified by her letter-writing.

Evelina imposes the conditions of Evelina's unsanctioned femininity upon the binary possibilities of publicity that frame her entrance into the world, showing that she is constituted from a crisis of adjudication between them. Family—the realm in which the Habermasian subject unfolds in his transparency—thus operates for Burney as the occasion of an alternatively subjectivizing crisis. Indeed, the novel's closure reveals a final symmetry in Evelina's being mis-taken for a prostitute and being taken for a daughter. Either of these ends shut down her adjudication of self, whether through the force of the strangely embodied qualifier “guilty,” whose obscene effects would finally exclude her insides from the domain of polite letters, or through the force of the Humean imperative that leaves, in Evelina's wake, her self as name-bearing function. I have been attending to the relation of epistolarity and spectacle sustained in Evelina's extra-familiality: in finally redeeming Evelina's certificate/countenance, Burney shuts down that animating relation. Thus Evelina opens the possibility of a gendered supplement to the modernizing agent of family. This supplement does not only take the space of a novel; for Burney, it is the novel.

If Habermas abstracts the modern subject into the medium of the “purely human,” Burney suspends Evelina between cultivated epistolarity and its material referent, opening up, as a function of Evelina's uneven claim upon the abstracting promise of letters, the terminally unstable medium of gender. Thus I close by claiming another feminist meaning for “contradiction” in Burney's Evelina, that entity with which I began. In the contradiction that is Evelina's public face, we find the revisionary interest of her entrance into the world.

Notes

1. Margaret Anne Doody, “Beyond Evelina: The Individual Novel and the Community of Literature,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): 364.

2. Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago, 1984), in theorizing the trade-off of (“feminine”) sexuality for writerly professionalism, orients many biographical readings of Burney's career and work. See Gina Campbell, “How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina,” ELH 57 (1990): 557-84; Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney,” in Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch (Oxford, 1988), 455-88; the four major essays in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): Amy J. Pawl, “‘And What Other Name May I Claim?’: Names and Their Owners in Frances Burney's Evelina,” 281-99; Susan C. Greenfield “‘Oh Dear Resemblance of Thy Murdered Mother’: Female Authorship in Evelina,” 301-20; Gina Campbell, “Bringing Belmont to Justice: Burney's Quest for Paternal Recognition in Evelina,” 321-40; David Oakleaf, “The Name of the Father: Social Identity and the Ambition of Evelina,” 341-58.

3. Julia Epstein, “Burney Criticism: Family Romance, Psychobiography, and Social History,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): 277.

4. Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington, 1987), 33. Other readers who stress Burney's critique of the repressive practices of manners and morals most powerfully embodied by her father, simultaneous with her adherence to precisely those practices, include Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion (Athens, 1981); Mary Poovey, “Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing Up Female,” in Men by Women, ed. Janet Todd (New York, 1981); Judy Simons, Fanny Burney (NJ, 1987); Joanne Cutting-Gray, Woman as ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville, 1992).

5. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

6. Fredric Jameson states of the critical enterprise of “mediation”: “Mediation is the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationships between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground.” The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 39. In the context of Burney's critical revaluation, “mediation” becomes an explicitly feminist methodological problematic.

7. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, 1991), 17.

8. Habermas, 54.

9. Frances Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (London, 1994), 8. All further citations from this edition will be noted parenthetically in the text.

10. Cited in Campbell, “How To Read Like a Gentleman,” 559 and “Bringing Belmont to Justice,” 324.

11. Doody states, for example, that Burney does not mention female novelists in the list of predecessors cited in Evelina's Preface because “any such reference would have unveiled the gender of the new author.” “Beyond Evelina,” 366.

12. Jacques Derrida defines the Rousseauistic ideal of speech: “The ideal profoundly underlying this philosophy of writing is therefore the image of a community immediately present to itself, without difference, a community of speech where all the members are within earshot.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), 136.

13. For a helpful contextualization of Madame Duval and her tormentor Captain Mirvan, see John Hart, “Frances Burney's Evelina: Mirvan and Mezzotint,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7 (1994): 51-70. Hart places these two characters in relation to contemporary mezzotints caricaturing the French. The prints' violent dismantlings of female (and male) ornament or foppery establish their cultural continuity with both Burney and Swift.

14. Citations from “The Lady's Dressing Room” are taken from The Writings of Jonathan Swift, eds. R. A. Greenberg and W. B. Piper (New York, 1973), 535-8.

15. Divided Fictions, 15. Straub states of Swift (and Pope): he “use[s] the employments of the woman of mode as metaphors for what is mindless, nasty, and dangerous in human nature. The nastiness that the satirist sees in female employments is an explicit form of the ugliness implicit in many milder estimations of women's use of time” (14).

16. Burney frequently uses the word “nasty” to evoke Madame Duval and her relatives the Branghtons; in the eighteenth century this word connoted disgusting filth.

17. See Nancy Fraser's “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, 1993) for one discussion of Habermas that stresses the gendered division of domestic versus public spheres.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari coin the “becoming-” prefix to indicate that: “We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), 238-39. This formulation suggestively evokes the “consistency” of the muddied Madame Duval.

19. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London, 1993), 49.

20. See Doody, The Life in the Works, 35-38, for a discussion of Burney's early efforts to stop writing. Burney states: “[O]n my fifteenth birth-day, I made so resolute a conquest over an inclination at which I blushed, and that I had always kept secret, that I committed to flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper” (36).

21. Habermas, 14.

22. In “Evelina and the Culture Industry,” Criticism 37 (1995): 559-81, Timothy Dykstal reads Burney's novel as it critiques the cultural sphere of Burney's London, largely through the figure of Mrs. Selwyn. Dykstal concludes that “Burney associates the culture of reading in her novel with enlightenment” (574). Yet by affirming “reading” as opposed to a debased “culture as spectacle” (560), Dykstal, to my mind, sidesteps precisely the conflict that Burney establishes at Evelina's entrance into the world, a conflict of mediation between “reading” (or discursivity) and spectacle (or embodiment).

23. Doody, The Life in the Works, 40.

24. Habermas, 49.

25. Habermas, 48.

26. The full citation proceeds: “Never shall I forget what I felt at that instant: had I, indeed, been sunk to the guilty state, which such companions might lead him [Orville] to suspect, I could scare have had feelings more cruelly depressing” (261).

27. Habermas, 48.

28. Habermas, 47.

29. Jerome Christensen citing Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison, 1987), 43.

30. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, 1991), 39-40.

31. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1984), 392.

32. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 169.

33. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987), 120.

34. Armstrong, 116.

35. Epstein states: “[F]rom the outset she [Evelina] is fundamentally legitimate, a character in search not of a name but of name recognition, of public acknowledgment.” “Burney Criticism,” 279. Yet Evelina has no name until her face is recognized: this is even more true because of the false daughter who holds “her” name. Thus while Evelina is “fundamentally legitimate” as a virtuous and cultivated letter-writer, that abstract legitimacy remains unsanctioned until the event, not simply of “name recognition,” but of face recognition.

36. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (London, 1985), 479.