[In the following essay, Fizer investigates Burney's scrutiny of paternity in Evelina, maintaining that the novel presents a crisis of the father figure because of the numerous paternal models it portrays.]

I

“I hardly know myself to whom I most belong” confesses the young heroine, Evelina Anville, at a moment of crisis, uncertain as to which of her three putative fathers she should defer.¹ In Frances Burney's Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) paternity is radically decentered. The father who should occupy the center of authority, Sir John Belmont, is not only absent but a notorious libertine. By taking up the rake father, Burney exposes the most disturbing contradiction of paternal privilege: though Belmont is carnal and negligent, he nonetheless retains the exclusive legal right to his daughter, Evelina. Into the literal space he leaves vacant enter paternal facsimiles: Reverend Mr. Villars, Evelina's guardian, and Lord Orville, her paternalistic suitor. Offering multiple models of paternity, Burney opens the figure of the father to comparative scrutiny. In turn, she structures an alternate patriarchal order: Belmont is replaced by Mr. Villars; Mr. Villars is replaced by Lord Orville. Yet her restructuring of patriarchy leaves no doubt about its limited impact: the lawless father Belmont cannot be redeemed; he can only be removed.

Evelina is Belmont's legitimate child, yet he has refused to acknowledge or “properly own her” (19). Her identity is defined by his absence; “child of a wealthy baronet, whose person she has never seen, whose character she has reason to abhor, and whose name she is forbidden to claim; [yet] entitled … to lawfully inherit his fortune and estate” (19). Though Evelina is an heiress, she is recognized only as a bastard daughter. Lacking a proper name, Evelina is most immediately effected on the level of language. Her letters circulate throughout the novel, yet none are authorized. Merely by putting signature to paper, Evelina commits forgery. Her own circulation within the world is equally unauthorized. The novel opens as Evelina, at seventeen, departs for the London marriage market.² Yet she has neither an entitlement nor an endowment with which to marry.³ She is that most desirable of commodities, a virgin, but one who moves through society outside the jurisdiction of a legal father. Unmarked as her father's exclusive property, she becomes the subject of competing sexual exchanges among men. However, Evelina's vulnerability to sexual misappropriation does not end when she retreats from society. Within the private space of the family, she is also threatened. As long as Belmont himself refuses to properly own her, the incest taboo, which should mediate their relationship, is inoperative. For Burney, then, a restructuring of paternity is essential to secure both Evelina's legal and sexual propriety.

The crisis of paternity in Evelina has a single cause: Belmont cannot be challenged by the law because he stands in its place. He had eloped with Evelina's mother, Caroline Evelyn, and then deserted her after failing to gain the fortune he expected from the match, flaunting his own superiority to the law: “he infamously burnt the certificate of their marriage, and denied that they had ever been united” (15). The pregnant Caroline, reduced to the status of an unwed mother, died in childbirth. On her express instructions, her female child was to be hidden from Belmont “till some apparent change in his sentiments and conduct should announce him less improper for such a trust” (126). Indeed, when Mr. Villars considers the prospect of Evelina living alone with Belmont, the scenario is horrific; implicitly, the daughter is raped by the carnal father: “to expose her to the snares and dangers inevitably encircling a house of which the master is dissipated and unprincipled, without the guidance of a mother, or any prudent and sensible female, seemed to me no less than suffering her to stumble into some dreaded pit, when the sun was in its meridian” (126).⁴

Evelina has been raised and educated by Mr. Villars, an elderly widower, in the rural seclusion of Berry Hill. While Mr. Villars acts as an adoptive father, given the private nature of his agreement with Caroline, he is not Evelina's legal guardian. Early in the novel, he declines to pursue a paternity suit against Belmont. As he explains, even “should the law-suit … be gained,” Belmont cannot be compelled to recognize Evelina as his heiress: “Sir John Belmont would still have it in his power, and, if irritated, no doubt in his inclination, to cut off … [Evelina] with a shilling” (128). There is, however, an underlying tension in Mr. Villar's refusal; he himself is reluctant to cede his claim to Evelina. Instead, a private petition for Evelina's acknowledgment is made to Belmont by Mr. Villar's neighbor, Lady Howard. Belmont rejects the petition.

As a result, Evelina's acquisition of a name and an inheritance can come only if Belmont himself summons her to a private meeting. And it is toward this encounter that the narrative moves. Evelina must, then, present Belmont with her claim and await his judgment. Thus the central and irreducible conflict in the novel is set into place: the lawless father must become the daughter's judge; his corrupt house—the “dreaded pit”—must become her courtroom. To circumvent this contradiction, Evelina herself distinguishes between a titular father and the real Belmont. She maintains her filiation to her father's name, while refused by Belmont himself: “I am cruelly rejected by him who has the natural claim to that dear title; a title which to write, mention, or think of, fills my whole soul with filial tenderness” (130). Yet given that Evelina needs Belmont's law and yearns for his love (a reciprocal “tenderness”) marks her danger. The encounter between the rake father and the bastard daughter is fraught with uncertainty. Will the sexually deviant father reform his “sentiment and conduct” and acknowledge his daughter legally, or will he persist in his art of seduction and claim her according to his pleasure? Will the long-rejected daughter, who wants to be taken in by the father, resist?⁵

Luce Irigaray situates her essay “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, at the juncture with which Evelina is preoccupied: the encounter between the daughter and the father.⁶ She reads Freud's conceptualization of the daughter in order to figure the father in psychoanalytic theory. Jane Gallop, in The Daughter's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, offers an incisive rearticulation of Irigaray's essay.⁷ In Freud's account of female development, the girl begins in a phallic stage, during which she overvaluates her clitoris and directs her erotic feelings to her mother. She then accedes to her castrated position and redirects her desire to her father. After her experience of loss, she seeks a compensation from the father, the one who now bears the valued, phallic term. In her compensatory fantasy, she is seduced by the father, and receives from him a phallic substitute in the form of a male child. Subsequently, the daughter's erotic and maternal desires are transferred to her husband. The Freudian father thus emerges as a remote figure around whom the daughter plays out her corporeal crises. Irigaray takes Freud's reading beyond the point of the daughter's desire to the nature of the father's response. Indeed, he is the one who must give her away in marriage. She asks: How does he negotiate this exchange?

Irigaray argues that the sexually maturing daughter throws the father into conflict, as she arouses his own libidinal desires for her. He responds with a law of prohibition:

Thus, it is neither simply true, nor indeed false, to claim that the little girl fantasizes being seduced by her father, since it is equally valid to assume that the father seduces his daughter but that because (in most cases, though not in all) he refuses to recognize and live out his desire, he lays down a law that prohibits him from doing so. That said, it is his desire which … prescribes the force, the shape, the modes, etc., of the law he lays down or passes on, a law that reduces to the state of “fantasy” the little girl's seduced and rejected desire—a desire still faltering, barely articulate, silent perhaps, or expressed in signs or body language, a desire that must be seduced to the discourse and law of the father.⁸

By prohibiting the daughter from expressing her desire, the father safeguards his own position as a proper, legal father. The girl herself learns that she can enter language only according to the dictates of her father's discourse. In Evelina this encounter between father and daughter is inscribed in reverse. Evelina first enters language in the absence of her legal father Belmont and, within this unauthorized linguistic space, she produces textuality. However, as she becomes increasingly subjected to her father's law, she is gradually reduced to silence and passivity. She becomes a text to be read.

By identifying the father's response to the daughter as a law, Irigaray both engages and revises Lacan's figuring of the Freudian father. Lacanian theory distinguishes between the body of the father, his penis, and the phallus, the symbolic term with which he is invested. The symbolic father is a function of law, not reducible or equivalent to the biological father. The force of the law is carried in the name-of-the-father—through the patronymic, patrilineage, patrimony.⁹ As Gallop describes the single standard with which patriarchy defines itself: “By giving up their bodies, men gain power—the power to theorize, to represent themselves, to exchange women, to reproduce themselves, and mark their offspring with their name. All these activities ignore bodily pleasure in pursuit of representation, reproduction, production.”¹⁰ However, as both Irigaray and Gallop contend, the phallus will always bear a problematic relationship to the penis within a social system where the male body is inherently privileged over the female.¹¹ The tacit double standard along which patriarchy actually operates allows the father to exercise his bodily pleasures outside the family, as long as he establishes his law within it. Evelina takes the problematic between the father's body and his law even further. Belmont exercises his illicit pleasures within as well as outside the family—he married Caroline in order to exploit her sexually rather than to continue his lineage. Yet he nonetheless retains all legal authority over Evelina. Thus, Burney's refiguring of paternity in Evelina reads as an attempt to eliminate the duplicitous father. Only with Belmont's removal is the sexual father finally differentiated from the legal father. The fathers who supercede Belmont—Mr. Villars and Lord Orville—are paternal in name only; they lack the body of the father.

The father's dispensation of power within the family must be read against the context of the economy of exchange. According to Lévi-Strauss's well-known terms, the institution of the incest taboo structures the change from endogamy (a closed system within which men marry the women within their group) to exogamy (an open system within which the men trade their women to men of other groups for economic benefit).¹² If one applies Lévi-Strauss's culturally variable model to patriarchy, each father must negotiate the change from endogamy to exogamy within his own family. He must repress his endogamous desire to retain control of his daughter in order to participate in exogamous exchanges with men: “the father must not desire the daughter for that threatens to remove him from the homosexual commerce in which women are exchanged between men, in the service of power relations and community for the men.”¹³ If he fails to release his daughter, he may jeopardize his ability to engage in further commerce. In Lévi-Strauss's model, the father retains a residual desire to keep the daughter to himself; nonetheless his need for economic and social alliance will win out. Irigaray insists on reading that moment of the father's ambivalence. She suggests an alternate scenario: through the model of psychoanalysis the analyst father can keep the hysterical daughter in interminable analysis and thereby legally evade the order of exchange. He can manipulate the law in order to retain the daughter and secure his own pleasure.

Belmont's profligacy throws the order of exchange into disarray. By refusing to legitimize Evelina, Belmont cannot negotiate within the economy. He forfeits his exclusive right to her and she becomes the sexual property of the male community at large. As long as Evelina does not bear his name, however, his honor within that community is guaranteed. This is a critical point as Belmont, unlike Evelina, is never compelled to live without social identity. Once, however, Belmont establishes his claim to Evelina, his own submission to the order of exchange is put into question. Belmont's rejection of Evelina leaves her vulnerable to the sexual abuse of other men, while his appropriation of her subjects her to his own violence and carnality. Burney intensifies the sexual tensions within the encounter between father and daughter by preceding this encounter with scenes of fraternal-sororal incest. J. Macartney, Belmont's bastard son, unknowingly falls in love with his sister, Miss Belmont, and his affections for Evelina have incestuous overtones. As such, the potentially incestuous closure between Belmont and Evelina is broken open only by the intervening presence of both Mr. Villars and Lord Orville. In turn, this triangular arrangement of paternity protects Evelina herself from an emotional fixation on one father. As her allegiances shift from one “father” to another, she is able to assert a limited but nonetheless decisive autonomy from their separate demands upon her.

II

Educated by Reverend Mr. Villars, Evelina is the personification of a proper young woman. Yet her innocence and purity are continually cast into doubt by virtue of her bastardy. Evelina enters the world with a disreputable name. She is a “little Eve”—a name that marks her both as the daughter of her unwed mother, Caroline Evelyn, and of the archetypal fallen mother, Eve. She enters the world to divest herself of her matrilineage and to acquire a patrilineage, a proper name. Her own surname, “Anville,” is an anagram for “Evelina.” This alias, along with a fraudulent paternal history, has been concocted by Mr. Villars to cover over the fact of her illegitimacy: “I have always called her by the name of Anville, and reported in this neighborhood that her father, my intimate friend, left her to my guardianship” (19). A duplicate—and duplicitous—paternity, consisting of the foster father Villars and the fictional father Anville, must temporarily stand in for the empty place of the one, legal father. The pious Mr. Villars is willing to perpetuate this fraud, in order to protect Evelina's “blameless self [from] the odium of a title, which not all her purity can rescue from established shame and dishonour” (337).

“Bastard” is the odious “title” suppressed by Mr. Villars, and absent from the novel itself. The word itself could “contaminate” Evelina's virginal body. Evelina describes her own status with a series of euphemisms: “outcast,” “orphan,” “child of bounty” (367-68). As a consequence of her illegitimacy, Evelina is subject to a constant anxiety about maintaining propriety.¹⁴ Any young woman coming out in society was expected to maintain the standards of feminine decorum: delicacy, modesty, reticence. Evelina has a more urgent task. If she is perceived as a well-bred woman, she will prove herself worthy of her birthright. She must remain pure, an empty slate, until her father imprints his name upon her. If, by contrast, she is perceived as an ill-bred woman, she will prove herself equal only to her fallen status. She may then be fated to remain unacknowledged by her father's law. Propriety is the only means with which Evelina can secure entrance into the world. However, in order to enter the world at all, she must take on an alias, an improper identity. Without the name of the fictional “father” Anville, Evelina would be barred from society; with it, she enters on false pretenses.

Thus, her deliberate fraud can, in itself, incriminate her. In her opening letter to Mr. Villars, her dilemma is clear; if she signs her alias, she commits forgery:

Your,

EVELINA———

I cannot to you sign Anville, and what other name may I claim?

(24).

Before leaving for London society, Evelina must confront the profound difficulty of her situation: she will enter as an impostor. Only to Mr. Villars can she appear in her true “blankness.” And, as he reminds her, she lacks the most rudimentary validation of identity: a birth certificate. In Bristol, under the scrutiny of Mrs. Beaumont, a fanatic reader of ancestry books, her falsified lineage threatens to come to light; “Mrs. Beaumont … distressed me by the questions she asked concerning my family,—such as whether I was related to the Anvilles in the North?—Whether some of my name did not live in Lincolnshire?” (284-85). Missing from the written law, Evelina's identity is entirely unauthorized by the patriarchy.

Yet, by this same token, Evelina becomes self-authorized. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have written of the daughter writer subjected to the burden of her father's prior authority.¹⁵ Without a surname or a patrilineage, Evelina writes outside the containing limits of the father's authority. Evelina is, of course, structured as a correspondence between a “father,” Reverend Mr. Villars, and a daughter, Evelina. However, Mr. Villars is not a legal father whose punition Evelina must fear. Rather, he is a father-confessor to whom Evelina can write without restraint. Indeed, while Mr. Villar's own letters to Evelina amount to a guidebook for female comportment, he urges Evelina to write him with “indulgence”: “thank you, my best Evelina, for the minuteness of your communications; continue to me this indulgence” (55). Thus, whereas Evelina quickly learns to restrain her speech in society, in her letters she is voluble, unfettered. Moreover, she is never a passive observer of the society she moves through, and is particularly critical of male pretension and arrogance.¹⁶ In a notable example, Evelina unreservedly expresses her dislike of Captain Mirvan—the only other natural father in the novel and to whom his own family defers: “Captain Mirvan is arrived … I do not like him. He seems to be surly, vulgar, and disagreeable. … I cannot imagine why the family is so rejoiced at his return. … I hope they do not think so ill of him as I do. At least, I am sure they have too much prudence to make it known” (38). Burney empowers Evelina's epistolary voice with the candor or “imprudence” of observations like these. Yet at the same time, she makes it clear that Evelina's epistolarity is empowered only so long as Evelina remains as a bastard daughter.

Evelina's writing is abruptly suspended at the end of volume 2. When her vulgar relatives, Madame Duval and the Branghtons, highjack Lord Orville's carriage in the name of “Miss Anville,” she writes Orville an exculpatory letter. She is “half-frantic” that their lack of etiquette will be imputed to her and the “good opinion of Lord Orville … irretrievably lost” (248). Her letter of apology is the first to which she signs her surname, “Anville.” Sir Clement Willoughby, the rake with designs on her, intercepts her letter and sends her a salacious response. He signs the letter: “Your grateful admirer, Orville.” Two thefts are committed: Madame Duval and the Branghtons steal the carriage; Sir Clement steals Evelina's letter. However, it is Evelina who stands to be convicted. By initiating an epistolary exchange with Lord Orville, however minimally and formally, she makes an error in judgment.¹⁷ An eligible eighteenth-century woman writing to a potential suitor on her own volition committed an act of provocation; Evelina's letter is inherently eroticized. This is what Sir Clement understands, and why his plot succeeds. In attempting to clear her name—to distinguish herself from her relatives' indecorum—Evelina herself breaches decorum. As she writes to her friend Maria Mirvan, quoting from Sir Clement's letter: “He talks of my having commenced a correspondence with him; and could Lord Orville indeed believe me so forward, so bold, so strangely ridiculous?” (259). The impact of the letter episode ultimately rests with the way in which it complicates the issue of Evelina's innocence. Evelina, like the deviant Sir Clement, has broken the law: she, too, has signed her letter with a forged name.¹⁸

The consequences of the letter episode are devastating: Evelina takes on the burden of guilt—“I have been my own punisher!” (264)—and subjects herself to severe self-censorship. Her voice is silenced as she flees from London to Berry Hill and collapses into a wasting sickness. She declares her intention to remain with Mr. Villars: “Never do I wish to be again separated from him” (260). However, if she would stay with him, she would either die or remain stigmatized by her illegitimacy. Thus, she must travel with Mrs. Selwyn, a wealthy widow, to Bristol Hotwells, the curative spa. With the entrance of the bold and forward Mrs. Selwyn, the highly-accomplished female satirist, Evelina' critical power is diminished. She increasingly begins to insert Mrs. Selwyn's satirical descriptions into her letters rather than to offer her own. Evelina's debilitation dramatizes the strict limit upon her ability to conduct—and finally to write—herself as a daughter unlicensed by the father.

As long as she writes in the private margin, under the name “Evelina,” she is immune from punishment. The moment her writing strays into the public sphere, and she writes under the “pen name” of Evelina Anville, she is immediately censored. Her letter to Lord Orville marks the beginning of the end of her writing. In Bristol, she is acknowledged by Belmont, and married to Orville. Taken to the restorative waters of Bristol, she is purified of her bastardy and forgery. Already restrained in public, she is effectively silenced in private: after producing a profusion of letters as an illegitimate daughter, she writes only one letter as Evelina Belmont and one short note as Lady Orville. The bastard daughter produces writing but she is ultimately criminalized; diseased; and threatened with death, a fatal silencing. The legitimate daughter is proper, silent, but free of contagion. Thus, Burney liberates the writing of her female narrator from the father only as a temporary strategy, and she justifies the closure of Evelina's writing as the necessary price for the acquisition of a proper identity.

Before Evelina is legitimized, however, her imposture reaches an extreme point. Her arrival in Bristol is seconded by the arrival of Miss Belmont, “only daughter and heiress of Sir John Belmont” (316), onto the marriage market. A long-standing deception is subsequently revealed: Evelina's first nurse, Dame Green, had presented her own fatherless infant, Polly, to Belmont as his daughter by Caroline. The fraud has succeeded because of Belmont's libertinism: unable to identify his children with any real certainty, he accepted the girl as his own. The duplicity of the father leads to a radical splitting of the daughter's identity. The real and the fictitious Miss Belmonts meet in Bristol but their positions are misaligned. Evelina is “bewildered” by her own “contrareity” (316): she watches from the side, at an assembly, as Miss Belmont commands the center of attention and dances with Lord Orville. Evelina's own identity is suddenly and completely nullified: she becomes both the impostor “Miss Anville”, and the fraudulent “Miss Belmont.” Yet Polly Green's presence serves, in the end, a compensatory function. When Evelina is acknowledged as Belmont's true daughter, her own criminality shifts to Polly Green. She is further cleansed of her own association with bastardy and fraud as the lower-class Polly is indicted—in Mrs. Selwyn's words—as the “little imposter” (378).

However, Polly does threaten to undermine Belmont's patriarchal and class authority. He fears the disapprobation of his ruling-class male community for attempting to exchange the “bantling of … [a] wash-woman” (378) into its ranks. He thereby insists that Polly's true identity remain concealed, and he removes her from the market by marrying her to his bastard son, Macartney. As Mrs. Selwyn observes: “I, who know the world, can see that half … his prodigious delicacy for the little usurper is the mere result of self-interest, for while her affairs are husht up, Sir John's, you know, are kept from being brought further to light” (378). It is in this sense that Belmont is finally punished for his profligacy: he must adulterate his own bloodline to protect his position within the economy of exchange. Burney redeems—elevates—Belmont's illegitimate progeny at his expense.

III

Evelina's body is subjected not only to disease, but to continual sexual assault.¹⁹ As Lord Orville notes: “this young lady seems to be peculiarly situated; she is very young, very inexperienced, yet appears to be left totally to her own direction. She does not, I believe, see the dangers to which she is exposed” (346). Evelina is conspicuous as a beautiful but unattended and naive young woman. Men insinuate themselves upon her, exploiting the absence of a mediating, male guardian in her life. As a bastard, she has neither a reputable family name nor a dowry—terms that would establish her exchange value in the marriage market. Her status thus becomes material; she is the sum total of her beauty, her body. She has use value alone—sexual availability.²⁰ Sir Clement, who plots to “trap” Evelina as his mistress, assesses her as a “a girl of obscure birth, whose only dowry is her beauty, and who is evidently in a state of dependency” (347).²¹ As yet unclaimed by her father, Evelina is taken to be a readily available commodity. Worse, as an unescorted young woman, she is taken to be sexually willing.

Burney underscores her heroine's susceptibility to assault with scenes in which Evelina is abandoned, separated from, or left behind by her guardians. Finding herself alone in ballrooms and assemblies, Evelina is harangued and pursued by men. At first, inexperienced in the rules of the dance, she is uncertain how to control men's access to her. She eventually learns how to manipulate etiquette within these enclosed spaces to reject such advances. Etiquette, however, is of no consequence when she finds herself alone in public spaces and is literally seized. Her visit to Vauxhall is particularly harrowing. Mr. Smith, a member of her own party, first endeavors “to attach himself” to her with such “impertinent freedom” that she is “quite sickened” (193). He believes that Evelina's bastardy allows him to importune her even as she refuses his marriage proposals. Subsequently separated from him, Evelina is diverted into the dark alleys of the park and encircled by a “large party of gentlemen” (192) who grab her and block her path. When yet another party of gentlemen surrounds her, Sir Clement suddenly appears and intervenes. Yet he “rescues” Evelina only to divert her into another dark alley, where he attempts to molest her in turn. Evelina is passed from man to man like a common property, in a scene that has the gruesome charge of a gang rape. Her sexual “fall” is inscribed as a perversely upward movement: she is traded from the lower-bourgeois Smith, to the higher-class gentlemen, to the baronet Sir Clement. And, in the end, the men of highest rank sort out their superior proprietary rights to her. One of the gentlemen refuses to relax his grip on Evelina and cede her to Sir Clement: “in a passionate manner [he] vowed he would not give me up, for that he had the first right to me, and would support it” (196).

Evelina's fear about being misperceived as a common woman is fully objectified in the Marybone Gardens scene. Divided from her company after a fireworks display, she is seized by an officer who conscripts her into his sexual “service”: “a young officer, marching fiercely up to me, said, ‘You are a sweet pretty creature, and I enlist you in my service’; and, then, with great violence, he seized my hand. … I screamed aloud with fear” (233). The solitary Evelina is assaulted even by a representative of the law. Terrorized, she asks for protection from two nearby prostitutes, who exert their own hold upon her, pinning her between them. While caught in this contaminating “frame,” Evelina is spotted by the omnipresent Lord Orville. Orville is Evelina's appointed suitor in the novel precisely because he discerns her intrinsic worth; he alone sees through her body. Yet even Lord Orville must pay Evelina a visit, after seeing her with the prostitutes, to settle his own “incertitude” (240)—to renegotiate her fallen value. The Marybone scene serves to mark Evelina's similarity to the whores, rather than her dissimilarity from them. The distinction between the high-born woman and the fallen woman has become blurred. As an illegitimate daughter, Evelina is also a woman without a family; who circulates alone in the city; whose value accords solely with her body; who is potentially available to any male “buyer.”

As Irigaray argues, a woman is always “no more than a vehicle for relations among men.”²² With a proper name, Evelina would be exchanged once as a sexual property between her father and a suitor. Without a proper name, she is exchanged as a sexual property among many men. Burney indicates the impossibility of a woman's status as male property by structuring an implicit parallel between Sir Clement and Belmont. Belmont, like Sir Clement, is a proven libertine: he may claim Evelina as his own, “saving” her from the assault of other men, and then molest her in private. As such, Evelina is threatened by sexual misappropriation up until the moment, in Bristol, when she is married to Lord Orville: the lecherous and inebriated Lord Merton gropes at her; Sir Clement tears at her clothes; but, more disturbingly, Belmont himself repeatedly places his hands upon her. Only when Evelina becomes the exclusive property of the proper Lord Orville is her body protected from further transaction.

Thus, the assaults upon Evelina in public have a disettling, private equivalent. Without a name to mark her identity, Evelina must present Belmont with the evidence of her body. Caroline Evelyn had secured the one hope for her daughter's paternal recognition on her physical traits. As her deathbed letter to Belmont reads: “Should'st thou, in the features of this deserted innocent, trace the resemblance of the wretched Caroline. … Wilt thou not, Belmont, wilt thou not therefore renounce it?” (339).²³ Mr. Villars has substantiated that Evelina is indeed her mother's double: “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” (337). For Evelina, uninscribed in law, her body alone can certify lineage. Thus, within as well as outside the family, Evelina's perceived value is corporeal. Her body is a text to which her father must acknowledge authorship—upon which he must imprint his name. In acknowledging Evelina as his daughter, Belmont will concomitantly confess to his crimes against her mother. Evelina herself cannot convict Belmont: he must reform himself.²⁴ Thus, Belmont's institution of Evelina's birthright and his self-recrimination are contingent upon an act of perception, and an act of assignation. He must read Evelina's body correctly and then assign her his proper name.

Evelina is “staged” for Belmont's view. She is hidden by Mrs. Selwyn within an inner apartment and then suddenly revealed to her father. Evelina herself cannot bear to look at Belmont. She instinctively covers her face and collapses: “an involuntary scream escaped me, and covering my face with my hands, I sunk on the floor” (372). Evelina hides her face—the very bodily evidence she has come to display—in a defensive gesture against Belmont's view. If he rejects her, he will destroy her true identity. Evelina expires under the power of her father's gaze but he, in an ostensible act of recognition, revives her, lifts her up:

“My God! does Caroline Evelyn still live! … if my sight has not blasted thee—lift up thy head, thou image of my long-lost Caroline! … Yes, yes,” cried he, looking earnestly into 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!” And then, breaking hastily from me, he rushed out of the room … [and] with a violence almost frantic, he ran up stairs

(372-73).

Belmont confirms Evelina's resemblance to Caroline—“never was a likeness more striking!—the eye,—the face,—the form[!]” (385). Yet, his violent and frantic reaction to her cannot be explained fully as an admission of guilt about his past. In fact, this is the explanation he himself gives for his actions. Clearly, his word is unreliable. Evelina's presence is disturbing to Belmont for another reason altogether.

Evelina has come before Belmont to receive the name “Belmont.” Taking account of the names Belmont actually assigns her, a highly irregular pattern emerges. In this initial encounter between father and daughter, Belmont never calls Evelina by her own name. Without this assignation of legitimacy, Belmont's relationship to his daughter remains unregulated by law. Instead he refers to Evelina by her mother's name. Moreover, he names her not “Caroline Belmont,” his wife, but “Caroline Evelyn,” the virginal and sexually eligible daughter of Mr. Evelyn. She is the exact duplicate of the young woman Belmont had sexually exploited and then discarded. How, then, will Belmont renegotiate his relationship with “Caroline Evelyn”? Will he retake her as his bride? If his sexual desire is revived, it will prove equally fatal to Evelina, as it will now be incestuous. Yet Belmont portrays himself as Evelina's victim. During their second meeting, he flies into yet another “frantic fury” and accuses her directly of stripping him of authority: “starting suddenly, with a sternness, which at once surprised and frightened me, ‘Child,’ cried he, ‘hast thou yet sufficiently humbled thy father?—if thou has, be contented with this proof of my weakness, and no longer force thyself into my presence!’” (383). Belmont acknowledges Evelina's threat to his patriarchal power: her body, as the site of his focalized view, may arouse his libidinal desire, rather than his legitimate interest.

The father's unlawful view of his daughter dismantles his symbolic authority. Her presence causes him to abandon the law, and discloses what the law keeps under cover—his desire for her. As Gallop writes:

The Father's law is a counterphobic mechanism. He must protect himself from his desire for the daughter. … The law of the father protects him and patriarchy from the potential havoc of the daughter's desirability. Were she recognized as desirable in her specificity as daughter … there would be a second sexual economy. … The father gives his daughter his law and protects himself from her desire for his body, protects himself from his body. For it is only the law—and not the body—which constitutes him as patriarch.²⁵

The encounter between Belmont and Evelina occurs within the endogamous “second, sexual economy.” Confronted with Evelina's body, Belmont must sublimate his own. To stave off the threat of incestuous desire, he imposes a self-defensive law of prohibition. In order to institute himself as a patriarch, and refute his identity as an improper father, he must give Evelina his law. Determined to put himself at a safe remove from her, he bars a second meeting; Evelina is categorically “banished [from] his sight” (379). Within his terms, their relationship must remain strictly legal, their corporal contact entirely foreclosed. As Lynda Boose analyzes the father's response to the sexually mature daughter: “For the father, whose unbidden desires no longer hide themselves … the assertion of new emotional and physical distance from the daughter serves as a defense against conscious recognition. In trying not to be the incestuous father, he instead becomes the rejecting one who turns away from his daughter.”²⁶ After Belmont banishes Evelina, he issues an inheritance of £30,000 “in the name of Evelina Belmont” (378). At this point, he has structured his legal relationship with his daughter. In public, Belmont becomes an upstanding father whom Evelina can now call, without conscious conflict, “the noblest of men” (387): he settles her inheritance; sends her money for a trousseau; marries her to Lord Orville; and marries Miss Belmont to Macartney. However, Belmont's institution of law takes place outside the confines of his house. In private—beneath the cover of the law—he is irresolute.

On account of Evelina's fervent requests, Belmont agrees to a final meeting with her. She seeks a private bestowal of his paternity. Daughter and father play out a disordered scene: Belmont resists the law; Evelina supplicates before it. Belmont persists in withholding the name “Evelina.” He places his daughter near a window, to view her face more closely, and calls her by her mother's name: “Poor, unhappy Caroline!” (383). And with this, he again banishes Evelina from his sight. Rather than complying, Evelina requests to be recognized by him, in person, not as his former bride, but as his daughter: “‘Oh, go, go!’ cried he, passionately … ‘leave me,—and forever!’ ‘I will, I will!’ cried I, greatly terrified; and I moved hastily towards the door: yet stopping when I reached it, and, almost involuntarily, dropping on my knees, ‘Vouchsafe,’ cried I, ‘Oh, sir, vouchsafe but once to bless your daughter, and her sight shall never more offend you!’” (383). Once more Belmont ritualistically lifts up Evelina but, in so doing, pronounces her name for the first time: “rise, Evelina” (384).

Nonetheless, the father's recognition of his daughter remains unsound. When Evelina hands Belmont her mother's letter, he becomes disoriented. Kneeling before her, he begs her as “the representative of my departed wife, [to] speak to me in her name!” (385-86). Evelina must resist her father's order and rearticulate the terms of “father” and “daughter” that he persists in withholding. She refuses to become the corporal embodiment of her mother, and compels her father to follow the law: “‘Oh rise, rise, my beloved father,’ cried I, ‘I cannot bear to see you thus; reverse not the law of nature, rise yourself and bless your kneeling daughter!’” (386). Ostensibly, by “bending thus lowly” (385) before Evelina, Belmont is ceding to her power of punishment or forgiveness. But the figuring of an empowered daughter does not hold. Rather, at this moment when Belmont has assigned Evelina a double identity—she is both his bride “Caroline Evelyn” and his daughter “Evelina”—he maintains an overriding dispensation of power. He has, at once, a sexual-marital claim and a legal-paternal claim to her. And the fact that Belmont has not remarried adds further tension to this moment. Belmont is unable to own Evelina without simultaneously perceiving her as Caroline. He can resolve his doubled ownership of Evelina only by exchanging her—he gives her to Lord Orville and makes it clear that he will never meet with her again:

“Adieu, my child—be not angry—I cannot stay with thee,—oh Evelina! thy countenance is a dagger to my heart!—just so, thy mother looked,—just so—” Tears and sighs seemed to choak him!—and waving his hand, he would have left me,—but, clinging to him, “Oh, Sir,” cried I, “will you so soon abandon me?—am I again an orphan?—oh my dear, my long-lost father, leave me not, I beseech you!” … “You know not what you ask,” cried he … suffer me, then, to leave you. … Lord Orville has behaved nobly;—I believe he will make thee happy.”

[386]

With these closing words, Belmont sublimates his desire to retain sexual control of the daughter for the greater benefit of economic control: “If the father were to desire his daughter he could no longer exchange her, no longer possess her in the economy by which true, masterful possession is the right to exchange.”²⁷

Belmont's institution of the law has instigated, rather than dispelled, the issue of incest. Meeting his daughter, Belmont cannot keep his violent passions under control. His two meetings with Evelina are characterized by his aggression and physicality toward her: he brutally rages at her, shoves her, and twice embraces her. Evelina herself characterizes her father's touch as violent. However much she seeks her father's embrace, her encounters with him correlate to her molestations by men in public. The law of the father, as the prohibition against incest, cannot become a reliable decree as long as it is linked up in this way with the father's body. Pointedly, even Belmont's tears do not sufficiently purify his corrupt body, nor do they sufficiently neutralize his excessive charge of masculinity. (Evelina, by contrast, “almost drowned in tears” [386] at her father's departure, is cleansed of her bastardy; these are the true Bristol “waters” in which she immerses herself.) Only the father's strict separation from his daughter will act to differentiate securely his law from his desire. Belmont's legal language itself is unreliable, marked by incompletions—slashes and broken words. He professes his own redemption. Burney, however, does not take him at his word and restore him as paterfamilias. Instead, she forcefully removes him. Belmont appears in the novel only long enough to give Evelina a name and an inheritance, and then to give her away. That Belmont's long-awaited appearance in the novel is conspicuously circumscribed points to the impossibility of reconciling his duplicity.

Belmont's removal secures Evelina herself from her desire for him. As the chronically devalued daughter, Evelina yearns to receive not only proof of her birth, but also proof of her father's love. “The only redemption of her value as a girl would be to seduce the father, to draw from him the mark, if not the admission of some interest.”²⁸ Evelina's reaction to Belmont is intense: she clings to him, begs him not to leave her. However, Burney structures the encounter between Belmont and Evelina so as to mitigate Evelina's emotional need for her father: when Evelina meets Belmont she is already betrothed to Lord Orville. Her libidinal feelings are shifting from father to fiancé. She even asks Orville to accompany her to her final meeting with Belmont; Orville defers, in principle, to Belmont's authority by leaving Evelina on his threshold: “I besought Lord Orville to accompany me; but he feared the displeasure of Sir John, who had desired to see me alone. He led, me, however, to the head of the stairs” (383). Assured of Lord Orville's love Evelina needs Belmont's law alone—the entitlement and endowment that will authorize her marriage. Thus, in the final scene with Belmont, Evelina's desire for a loving father is deferred. Her status as Belmont's daughter is markedly brief.

At the close of her penultimate letter to Mr. Villars, Evelina fills in the blank space of her signature:

Now then therefore, for the first—and probably the last time I shall ever own the name, permit me to sign myself,

Most dear Sir,

Your gratefully affectionate,

Evelina Belmont.

(404)

This final arbiter of legitimacy, the name-of-the-father, which Evelina has sought throughout the course of the novel, is no sooner acquired than renounced, as she takes it on the day before her wedding. Evelina's filial love is swiftly redirected away from Belmont and toward her “fathers” in name only: Lord Orville and Reverend Villars. The similarity in their names serves to mark their shared paternal qualities: Lord Orville is the “golden” (“or”/aurum) version of Mr. Villars.

Lord Orville's willingness to marry Evelina before she is legally acknowledged contravenes the order of exchange: he accepts her intrinsic virtue as a sufficient “dowry.”²⁹ (Although his perception of her “true” value ultimately accords with her economic value.) There is an implicit logic behind this structure of plot. By becoming the first man to “properly own” Evelina, Lord Orville supercedes Belmont's natural paternal right to her. He is an intervening figure who blocks the possibility that Belmont will assert an overpossessive claim to Evelina—that he might refuse to exchange her. As such, an implicit contrast is suggested between the scene of Evelina's engagement and the scene of her paternal acknowledgement. Lord Orville asks for Evelina's hand by kneeling before her, and he remains in this posture. When Belmont kneels before Evelina, in the scene that follows, the gesture reads as a perversion of betrothal. Evelina can readily refuse her father's “hand”—imploring him to get off his knees—because she is already another man's intended bride. Moreover, inasmuch as Evelina will be forever separated from Belmont, Lord Orville is a compensating figure, providing her with the legal paternity she is once again without. By merging so closely two forms of union—that of Belmont and Evelina, and that of Evelina and Lord Orville—Evelina blurs the distinction between patrimony and matrimony. Belmont, the spouselike father, is a tremendously dissettling figure, who assigns Evelina an improper name and whose love for her is adulterated with desire. Lord Orville, the paternalistic husband, is a fulfilling figure who grants Evelina a proper name and professes his “disinterested desire” for her (369).

Before their betrothal in Bristol, Lord Orville and Evelina assign each other familial names. Moreover, they already live within the same house. As Evelina cheerfully writes to Mr. Villars: “Here I am, my dear Sir, under the same roof, and inmate of the same house, as Lord Orville!” (294) Orville urges Evelina to “think of me as if I were indeed your brother” and “takes every opportunity of calling [her] … his sister” (315). He is also quick to assume a paternal title to her. When he asks for her hand and she admits to her fatherlessness, he responds with a surge of proprietary desire: “suffer me then … to hasten the time when that shall no longer admit a doubt!—when your grateful Orville shall call you all his own!” Evelina's illegitimacy allows Lord Orville to indulge his own authority. An engaged man ordinarily must live out a period of submission, deferring to the father's prior claim to the daughter. Orville himself never holds the inferior claim to Evelina.

In her turn, Evelina confesses that “as a sister I love … him” (315). But, in her most exalted praise, she compares Lord Orville to her beloved adoptive father, Mr. Villars: “I sometimes imagine that when his youth is flown, his vivacity abated, and his life devoted to the retirement, he will perhaps resemble him whom I most love and honor” (72); “Oh Sir! was there ever such another man as Lord Orville?—Yes, one other now resides at Berry Hill!” (320). Evelina seeks a husband who will be like a father to her, and she will love him best when he has been fully desexualized, his “vivacity abated.” Her acceptance of Lord Orville's proposal is concomitant with her collapse into passivity: “‘Oh my Lord,’ cried I, ‘your generosity overpowers me!’ And I wept like an infant. For now that all my hopes of being acknowledged [by my father] seemed finally crushed, I felt the nobleness of his disinterested attachment so forcibly, that I could scarce breathe under the weight of gratitude that oppressed me. ‘You little know what an outcast you have honoured with your choice!—a child of bounty,—an orphan from infancy’” (367-68). She becomes Lord Orville's weeping “infant” and “child,” gratefully submitting to his paternal authority, which Belmont has as yet denied her. These familial terms of father/daughter and brother/sister carry a dual significance. On the one hand, they annul the erotic nature of Orville and Evelina's marriage: it becomes a legal contract between a protector and his charge, rather than a pairing of impassioned lovers. On the other hand, the terms are inherently erotic; they safely fulfill the libidinal wishes of the family romance through marriage.

Lord Orville's muted masculinity feminizes him. Evelina compliments him for “so feminine his delicacy” (261).³⁰ In Bristol, he is distinguished from the rakes who are proposing a joust to determine the most “potent” phaeton. A telling comment comes from Mr. Coverley: “why, my Lord Orville is as careful,—egad, as careful as an old woman! Why, I'd drive a one-horse cart against My Lord's phaeton for a hundred guineas!’” (288). Or, as Mrs. Selwyn flatters Orville: “in an age so daring, you alone should be such a coward as to forbear to frighten women” (283). Orville lacks literal armature: a phaeton, a sword. He is marked by the absence of a penis. Yet this neutralization of Lord Orville's sexuality does not obviate his power. He, in fact, “wins” the proposed race by deferring it as too “dangerous” an idea, “to make the ladies easy” (287). Lord Orville articulates the word of law, the rule of decorum, the prohibition against excess. Identified throughout the novel by his exacting conduct—Lord Orville comes above all to stand as the decisive representative of the law. Thus he is more qualified to take the place of the father than Belmont himself. Where the elder Belmont is described “not [like] an old man, but, on the contrary, strong and able” (227), the 26-year-old Lord Orville is described as aged and sedentary. Where Belmont is defined through the language of the body, Orville is defined by the language of rationality, a “philosophic coldness” (46). Belmont is the duplicitous father who simultaneously wields a penis and the law. Lord Orville, by contrast, wields the phallic law but is corporally neutral.

Lord Orville must be neutralized to an extreme in order to become the proper suitor within a novel where “suitors” are opportunists, protorapists, or drunken lechers. Moreover, he must be neutralized to an extreme in order to become the proper father within a novel where the natural father is physically, legally, and sexually abusive. By making Orville so anomalous, Burney leaves little doubt about the true state of patriarchy: Orville is the single exceptional man within an utterly debased male community (save for the dying Mr. Villars). Nor does Burney's elevation of Orville signal a future reordering of the patriarchy. As Mrs. Selwyn notes: “there must have been some mistake in the birth of that young man; he was, undoubtedly, designed for the last age” (282). Orville's time is already past.

The novel ends without playing out its final ritual of exchange between Lord Orville and Mr. Villars. Lord Orville proposes to Evelina a postwedding plan that includes Mr. Villars: “instead of my immediately accompanying him to Lincolnshire, we should, first, pass a month, at my native Berry Hill. This was, indeed, a grateful proposal to me, and I listened to it with undisguised pleasure” (379). Lord Orville's conduct toward Evelina is controlling to an extreme—he monitors her movements and speaks for her: “allow me, my Evelina, to say we, and permit me [to speak] in your name as well as my own” (382). By underscoring Orville's willingness to “share” Evelina with Mr. Villars, Burney seeks to offset the potential tyranny of this perfect husband who claims Evelina as “all his own” (404). Mr. Villars, however, unlike Belmont, cannot compete with Orville's legal proprietorship of Evelina.

As such, Evelina's own affections remain focused on both men. She writes a brief note to Mr. Villars before her arrival: “I have time for no more; the chaise now awaits which is to conduct me to dear Berry Hill, and to the arms of the best of men” (406). The plural “men” leaves the distinction between Evelina's adoptive father and her new husband unmarked. She seems to be writing concurrently of her reunion with Mr. Villars (their expected embrace) and of her wedding night with Lord Orville (which they will spend in her childhood room). Before the moment of her loss of virginity, she belongs to both “fathers.” Following social order, Evelina has transferred her allegiance from her legal father to her husband. Having completed this required transference, Evelina can, at least momentarily, maintain her extralegal tie with Mr. Villars.

Evelina has identified the nature of Mr. Villar's paternity by comparing him to Belmont: “Oh, Sir … You commit me to my real parent,—Ah, Guardian, Friend, Protector of my youth!—by whom my helpless infancy was cherished, my mind formed, my very life preserved,—you are the Parent my heart acknowledges, and to you do I vow eternal duty, gratitude, and affection” (350). Paternity here is not a matter of bloodline: the father who rears the daughter, rather than the inseminating father, is her true parent. Belmont assigns Evelina her social identity, but Mr. Villars is her actual creator—the formulator of her inner identity. Evelina, in turn, can name Mr. Villars “my more than father” (130) as he takes on an additional, nurturing role as a mother for her.³¹

However, Mr. Villars's femininity, unlike that of Lord Orville, is unenforced by law. His private guardianship of Evelina has no external jurisdiction. His authority, like that of a mother, is bounded in domesticity. Indeed, because of this domestic limit, his prior guardianships in the Evelyn family—of Evelina's grandfather, Mr. Evelyn, and of her mother, Caroline—were unmitigated failures. Both the father and the daughter placed into Mr. Villar's care married disastrously. Mr. Villars's influence in their lives ended as soon as they reached maturity and left his home. Evelina, likewise, leaves Mr. Villar's home when she comes of age. They communicate only by frequently delayed letters. As he well knows, he would be unable to prevent Evelina's replaying of her mother's sad history: “Thus it has happened that the education of the father, daughter, and granddaughter, has devolved on me. What infinite misery the two first caused me! Should the fate of the dear survivor [Evelina] be equally adverse, how wretched will be the end of my cares—the end of my days!” (16). Mr. Villars's failure as a legislating father is a measure of his lack of the name-of-the-father. Unable to institute law, he cannot control the sexuality of “his” family. Hence, Belmont's carnal paternity is countered directly against Mr. Villars's maternal paternity—the first is excessive, the second deficient.

Yet despite his lack of paternal authority, Mr. Villars does exert his own possessive claim to Evelina. He seeks to retain her in Berry Hill, and, when she leaves, to urge her return. He admits that “she does not, even for a moment, quit my sight, without exciting apprehensions and terrors which almost overpower me” (16). Mr. Villars's fears for Evelina's security are not misplaced, on account of her illegitimacy, but he risks immobilizing her. As the novel opens, Lady Howard is urging him to allow Evelina to visit her home. When he defers the invitation for months, on account of his own ill health, she must petition him again. (Where she must petition Belmont to acknowledge Evelina, she must petition Mr. Villars to let her go.) Lady Howard politely chides Mr. Villars for his control of the girl: “I cannot wonder that you sought to monopolize her. Neither ought you, at finding it impossible” (21).

Similarly, Mrs. Selwyn must convince the reluctant Mr. Villars to allow the debilitated Evelina to travel to Bristol Hotwells. Thus, each time Evelina leaves Berry Hill, she leaves a place of disease. When Mr. Villars learns that Evelina is living with Lord Orville in Bristol, he commands her to return to him. He is certain that their domestic intimacy will soon turn to sexual intimacy: “Awake, then, my dear, my deluded child, awake to the sense of your danger. You must quit him! … his society is death to your future tranquility!” (309). Evelina apologetically but emphatically declines to return to Berry Hill, claiming to be “overpowered” (323) by Mrs. Selwyn. It is only her protracted distance from Mr. Villars that allows her to place her own needs above his desires. As Mrs. Selwyn has reminded her, Belmont soon will arrive from Paris and may settle her birthright. Thus, just as the force of Lord Orville is necessary to separate Belmont from Evelina, the combined influence of Lady Howard and Mrs. Selwyn is necessary to separate Mr. Villars from her. The father's claim to the daughter in Evelina is always excessive. If Evelina had returned to Berry Hill, Mr. Villars would neither have pursued the petition with Belmont, nor allowed her to meet with Lord Orville. He would again have had her all to himself. Thus, where Belmont's house is a site of carnality, Mr. Villars's house is a site of stagnation. Evelina must leave both houses to enter the truly proper site: Lord Orville's elevated country seat.

Mr. Villars's possession of Evelina is imbued with a subtle eroticism. He had given Caroline an oath that he would allow Evelina to wed only a duplicate of himself: “I solemnly plighted my faith, That her child, if it lived, should know no father, but myself, or her acknowledged husband” (125). There is an obvious reverse implication to this oath—that Mr. Villars himself, living alone with Evelina, is like a husband to her. However, Burney precisely defines the terms of his intimacy with Evelina. As a widowed clergyman, “weak and aged” (405), Mr. Villars is emasculated. He refers continually to Evelina's body but only as a receptacle to which he will turn in death: “my fondest wish is now bounded in the desire of bestowing her on one who may be sensible of her worth, and then sinking to eternal rest in her arms” (15); “[may I receive] the ultimate consolation of … closing these joy-streaming eyes in her presence, and breathing my last faint sighs in her loved arms!” (405). Mr. Villars's embrace of Evelina will bring him that long-awaited apotheosis, death in the arms of his daughter. While the erotization of this embrace is palpable, it poses no sexual threat to the beloved Evelina. Occurring at the moment of the father's death, it cannot go further. Mr. Villars's desire will be fulfilled and he will then properly give over the act of sexual consummation to the legal husband.

Thus, at the close of the novel, Evelina's anticipated embrace with both Mr. Villars and Lord Orville allows for an intense bond between father and daughter but without the accompanying threat of incest.³² In order for such a fulfilling intimacy to be possible, the duplicity posed by Belmont between the father's proper name and his improper body must be canceled out. Lord Orville and Mr. Villars are fathers only in name; they are both disembodied. Yet, even according to Burney's revised terms, what is the price the daughter must pay for propriety? To gain both the father's protection and love, must Evelina retreat into silence and seclusion?³³ Her withdrawal from society is rationalized by the degree to which she has been subjected to sexual assault when outside the rule of the family. However, her retreat into domesticity cannot completely close off the profound tensions generated in the novel by the figure of the debased father. Burney ends Evelina by affirming family law, but she has made it clear that the family itself can become the most treacherous enclosure for the daughter.

Notes

1. Fanny Burney, Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 353. All future references are to this edition and are cited by page number.

2. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), for a history of marriage in eighteenth-century England.

3. Mr. Villars will give Evelina a small inheritance, which may enable her to marry a man within the community of Berry Hill. Also, her grandmother, Madame Duval, offers her a dowry if she consents to marry the lout Branghton. However, neither of these potential marriages would rectify the central problem of her illegitimacy: Evelina would remain a devalued woman.

4. Mr. Villars's scenario, although imagined, accurately depicts Belmont's household in Paris. Belmont negligently leaves his daughter Miss Belmont in the care of an old, female servant. She falls into the “dreaded pit” of a corrupt familial sexuality when her brother Macartney enters the house and they begin an incestuous affair. It is important to remember that if Belmont had claimed Evelina as an infant, she would have been in Miss Belmont's place.

5. Margaret Anne Doody, although referring to Burney's dramas in the following passage from Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), provides an illuminating historical context within which to read Evelina: “If the Restoration drama had been largely interested in relations between fathers and sons, eighteenth-century serious dramas were much occupied with relations between fathers and daughters. The late Georgian period seems addicted to the pleasures of the father-daughter relationship. Officially, it is always presented as pure and holy, with the strength of heterosexual love yet delightfully innocent. Under the insistent innocence, however, emotional incest is never far away” (184).

6. Luce Irigaray, “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 13-129.

7. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 56-79.

8. Irigaray, “The Blind Spot,” 38.

9. See Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), esp. 270-84; and also Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (New York: Norton, 1982), esp. 38-44 and 55-57.

10. Gallop, Daughter's Seduction, 67.

11. As Gallop writes in The Daughter's Seduction: “Certainly the signifier ‘phallus’ functions in distinction from ‘penis,’ but it must also always refer to penis. … Lacanians would perhaps wish to polarize the two views into an opposition. … But as long as the attribute of power is a phallus which refers to and can be confused … with a penis, this confusion will support a structure in which it seems reasonable that men have power and women do not” (96-97).

12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969).

13. Gallop, Daughter's Seduction, 76. See also Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.

14. For a discussion of Evelina's fears about acting in society, apart from her fears about revealing her illegitimacy, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), chapter 2, “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney.” Spacks also analyzes Evelina's response to her lack of paternity: “Evelina makes quite explicit her desire … to find a lover or husband to fill the same role as father or guardian. She assumes the utter propriety of remaining as much as possible a child: ignorant, innocent, fearful, and irresponsible” (178).

15. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. chapter 2, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.”

16. For analyses of Evelina's narrative voice, see John J. Richetti, “Voice and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Haywood to Burney,” Studies in the Novel, 19/3 (1987): 263-72; and Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 42-44.

17. See Edward A. Bloom's explanatory note in Evelina: “It was bad form for eligible young people, not publicly engaged, to correspond” (418). In turn, the romantic fantasy Evelina has nurtured about Lord Orville is shattered when she receives the forged letter: the paragon of morality is “revealed” as yet another duplicitous male figure, a common seducer. Orville is, however, quickly reestablished as a singular figure of law in Bristol.

18. One is reminded here that Evelina herself “steals” Lord Orville's name and that he forgives her for this “crime.” At a ridotto early in the novel, she implicitly makes use of his name in order to refuse the request of a man who is pestering her to dance. When her “theft” is publicly revealed, she bursts into tears of shame and distress. In a prelude to their marriage, Lord Orville responds by granting her his name: “[he] immediately led me to a seat, and said, in a low voice, ‘Be not distressed, I beseech you; I shall ever think my name honored by your making use of it’” (47).

19. Newton, in Women, Power, and Subversion, writes of Evelina's subjection to male assault and control with extraordinary insight. However, Newton does not reflect upon the way in which Evelina's bastardy exacerbates her susceptibility to such assault.

20. See Luce Irigaray's discussion of woman's exchange and use value in “Women on the Market,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

21. As Margaret Doody writes in Frances Burney: “The social destiny of such an attractive, well-bred female bastard would seem inevitably to be some upper-class man's kept mistress, as Sir Clement Willoughby implicitly believes” (40).

22. Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 186.

23. The irresolution of Belmont's identity is brought out particularly well in the opening paragraph of Caroline's letter. She cannot find the term with which to inscribe the salutation: “I address myself to Sir John Belmont … Yet in what terms,—oh most cruel of men!—can the lost Caroline address you, and not address you in vain? … Shall I call you by the loved, the respected title of husband?—No, you disclaim it!—the father of my infant?—No, you doom it to infamy!—the lover who rescued me from a forced marriage?—No, you have yourself betrayed me!” (338).

24. Mary Poovey, in “Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing up Female,” Women and Literature, 2 (1982): 39-58, offers the only other sustained reading of the encounter between Belmont and Evelina. She reads the scene differently than I, arguing that “Evelina serves as the agent for both humbling and punishing her father [by] speaking in the ‘name’ and with the face of her mother” (46). Her remarks on the incestuous implications of the scene are cogent but very brief. I am nonetheless indebted to her reading.

25. Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction, 76-77. Also see Gallop for a suggestion of the alternate ways Belmont could have perceived Evelina—within Freudian terms—as either a “son” or a “mother.”

26. Lynda E. Boose, “The Father's House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture's Daughter-Father Relationship,” in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 36.

27. Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction, 76.

28. Irigaray, “Blind Spot,” 106.

29. Burney later inserts a “confession” by Lord Orville that he “fully intended” to investigate Evelina's background—to ascertain whether or not she was indeed a bastard and, moreover, whether or not she was indeed connected to the prostitutes in Marybone: “When I expressed my amazement that he could honour with his choice a girl who seemed so infinitely, in every respect, beneath his alliance, he frankly owned, that he had fully intended making more minute enquiries into my family and connections, and particularly concerning those people he saw with me in Marybone, before he acknowledged his prepossesion in my favour, but the suddenness of my intended journey, and the uncertainty of seeing me again, put him quite off his guard, and ‘divesting him of prudence, left him nothing but love’” (389).

30. Susan Staves noted, in “Evelina; or Female Difficulties,” Modern Philology, 73 (1976), that “Fanny Burney sympathized with the general eighteenth-century desire to feminize the masculine ideal. … The boldness, activity, independence, and aggressive sexuality which had been earlier associated with masculinity were all objects of incessant attack” (372-73).

31. The complex issue of maternity and female guardianship in Evelina deserves a separate and detailed treatment.

32. For a reading of the broader family themes in Evelina, see Toby A. Olshin, “‘To Whom I Most Belong’: The Role of Family in Evelina,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 6/1 (1980): 29-42.

33. Kristina Straub, in Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), offers a powerful model for reading Burney's writing as an inscription, but never a revision, of social and cultural contradictions. Thus, within the terms of my own argument, Burney inscribes a profoundly disturbing reality: the daughter must submit herself dutifully to a father who can readily abuse her. Yet, at the same time, Burney finally repositions Evelina under the authority of a father, rather than seeking an alternative to filial subordination.