SOURCE: “Writing Home: Evelina, The Epistolary Novel and the Paradox of Property,” in ELH, Vol. 60, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 419-39.

[In the following essay, Tucker explores the epistolary nature of Evelina, concentrating specifically on the paradox of the ownership of letters.]

On June 4, 1741, Alexander Pope filed suit against Edmund Curll, the prominent London bookseller who had just published Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence, for Twenty-Four Years, a volume comprised of letters written by Pope as well as those he received from such literary luminaries as Swift, Gay and Bolingbroke.¹ Pope claimed rights over not only his own letters, but also over the letters he had received from Swift, and, on the basis of this claim, sought to prevent Curll from continuing to sell the book. Because he had never relinquished his rights to his writing, authorial rights established thirty years earlier by the 1710 Statute of Anne, Pope argued that his rights as author had been violated by Curll's failure to get permission to publish the letters.² For his part, Curll maintained he had received the letters included in the volume from “the several Persons by whom & to whom they severally Purport to have been written & addressed,” and argued that, as a result, “the Complainant is not to be Considered as [both] the Author & proprietor of all or any of the said letters.”³

In his decision, handed down two weeks later on June 17, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke ordered Curll to halt sale of the book, partially upholding Pope's claim to the letters. In awarding Pope control over only the letters the poet himself had written, Hardwicke rejected Curll's contention that a letter constitutes a gift from sender to receiver. Still, the strange quality of Hardwicke's ruling, which awarded the recipient control over the material contents of the letter—the ink and the paper written on—while giving the author control over the intangible ideas and expression contained within, strikingly highlights certain contradictions implicit within the liberal notion of property that otherwise escape notice. Hardwicke writes, “It is only a special property in the receiver, possibly the property of the paper may belong to him; but this does not give a licence to any person whatsoever to publish them to the world, for at most the receiver has only a joint property with the writer.”⁴ What Mark Rose argues, persuasively to my mind, is that the Hardwicke decision, through its deliberate splitting of the material and ideal qualities of the letter, marks the creation of a new form of property—immaterial, intellectual property. The force of the ruling not only invests Pope with the right to control the fate of his writing, but, in separating the author's ideal “text” from its material manifestation as a particular “manuscript,” the Hardwicke decision delineates the otherwise obscure relations of the concept of copyright by creating the legal and ontological justification for the mass production and circulation of a potentially infinite number of these manuscripts.⁵ But, paradoxically, this material/ideal bifurcation threatens to subvert the very notion of property it is designed to shore up. If the material and the ideal can be separated from one another, then the possibility of acting willfully to change the material world—a possibility central to the liberal conception of property, as I will explain—is revealed to be contingent; a text happens to appear in the form of a manuscript, but need not necessarily do so.⁶ In attempting to secure property by freeing it from the limitations of its materiality, the concept of intellectual property created by the Hardwicke ruling opens up the terrifying possibility latent in all forms of liberal property—that actions performed, when not limited by the material world, are finally and fundamentally irrelevant to that world.

The natural rights personality theory of property set out by Locke in The Second Treatise of Civil Government has long served as the theoretical basis of liberal thought. According to Locke's formulation, individuals' rights to property are based upon their natural and inalienable right to their own person. Humans gain rights over materials outside the boundaries of their individual bodies by virtue of this self-ownership, since by acting on nature with the labor of one's body, one changes nature, and, in so changing it, one effectively produces this newly-reborn nature into an extension of oneself:

The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.⁷

Locke here posits a model of property in which the self represents itself in the form of its productions and then owns these productions. Property is thus an extension of the self and the right to property is figured as being just as “natural” and “inalienable” as the right to own one's self.

Locke seizes upon the peculiar, part-literal, part-figurative quality of metonymy in order to develop his argument here. The central metonym of the passage, that relating labor to the body, enables Locke to move from the material to the ideal and back to the material—from the body that is owned by the self to the labor that is “mixed” (but only figuratively) with the material world back to the material world having been transformed by labor (and hence “owned”)—while eliding the oscillation between literal and figurative, between material and ideal. But since the possibility of acting upon nature with one's labor presupposes the separation of that nature from oneself, property marks not only the extension of the self but its limits as well. One asserts control over property by sending it away; the potential alienability of property paradoxically becomes the only possible proof of the inalienability of the right to it.⁸

Viewed within the Lockean context, the 1741 debate over the ownership of letters seems particularly scandalous precisely because it threatens to expose the paradox implicit in the natural rights conception of all property. If property not only serves as self-representation/self-production but also marks what is not the self, then the paradox of the ownership of letters serves as a dramatic literalization of the paradox of property. Pope's fascination with the possibility that he might lose property rights over his letters by sending them away from himself dramatizes the compelling irresolvability of the natural rights model of property, a model in which the moment of self-representation is simultaneously the moment of self-loss.

Frances Burney published her epistolary novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World in January 1778, thirty-seven years after Hardwicke rendered his decision in Pope v. Curll. Insofar as Hardwicke's verdict had been simply a restatement of, rather than a solution to, the paradox of property, the question of the ownership of letters seems to have remained a source of considerable interest. In choosing the form of the epistolary novel to tell the story of Evelina, Burney generalizes the paradox of owning letters into a paradox about property, representation and, ultimately, the nature of the self. Burney, in offering the story of a young, half-orphaned, incompletely owned woman who leaves her guardian in the provinces to go out into the world, seizes upon these very paradoxes as instruments for delaying the inevitable closure of the marriage plot she nonetheless feels compelled to weave.⁹ Moreover, Burney, who published the novel anonymously, refigures her relationship as author to her own artistic production and to the audience that would receive it in ways that generalize the particular vulnerabilities of her position as a woman writer into a critique of the liberal notion of property.

If the relationships among the writing self, the letter and the recipient of the letter are complex, the complexities of those relationships multiply exponentially when the selves and the letters in question are part of an epistolary novel. In his introduction to a special edition of Yale French Studies on literary letters entitled, “Men/Women of Letters,” Charles Porter analyzes the components of a letter that characterize it as letter.¹⁰ While Porter's analysis is an attempt to describe actual letters as opposed to letters within an epistolary novel, it nonetheless offers a detailed structure from which to begin to analyze both the particular representational paradoxes of the letter form and the ways in which these paradoxes are complicated by being placed within the frame of a novel:

1) The letter has an author known to and readily identifiable (even if vaguely) by the intended reader. Likewise the letter is addressed by that author (even if at times only implicitly) to an identifiable person or collectivity, sometimes well-known to the author, and is usually addressed only to that person or collectivity. Porter contrasts the letter with its related forms, the diary, which is normally addressed only to its author, and the autobiography, which does not have a single, identifiable addressee.

The epistolary novel departs most strikingly from its “real-life” counterpart with regard to the identities of author and reader. The form of the epistolary novel is characterized by an implicit doubleness of both, since along with the writer and addressee of any given letter within the novel there exists a second writer and addressee—the author of the novel and the novel's readers.¹¹ If we recall the ways in which the presence of a letter's recipient within the representational economy of the letter draws attention to the paradoxes and limitations of property as a form of representation, then the presence of a second writer and a second, largely undefined audience within the epistolary novel makes the representative relationship between writing self and letter even less tenable. Within the epistolary frame, the letter is limited as an act of self-representation of its author within the text not only because it must be received and read before it can effectively represent, but also because it is literally the representation of another author—the author of the novel.

2) The letter is written out of its author's experiences or wishes or aspirations. “I” refers to the author, even if it is not fully identifiable with that author. Within the epistolary novel, the fictionality of subject position is both emphasized and complicated by the fact that the person behind the “I” is a fictional construction of the novel's author. Furthermore, the novel most often boasts a variety of “I”'s within its implicit wholeness, simultaneously depending upon and subverting the identification between letter and writing self.

3) Letters are dated or presumably datable. While the dates of actual letters are intended to identify the time of composition and, in so doing, emphasize and implicitly privilege the act of writing, dates in epistolary novels, when they are present, serve primarily as an ordering device. Dates also serve to ally the narrative movement of the story with a certain inexorability associated with the passage of time. At the same time the dates within an epistolary novel draw attention to the coincidence of a “natural” passage of time and the novel's narrative motion, however, the juxtaposition of the two time frames also accentuates the differences between the two. The temporal disjunctions created by the epistolary form suggest the extent to which human action (and the [autobiographical] representation of that action) depends upon the disruption of the “natural” passage of time, or, further, the way in which that passage of time only gains meaning through its disruption.

In apparently privileging the moment of writing, the presence of the date hides the temporal doubleness of any letter—the gap between the time a letter is written and the time it is read. If a letter is an act of self-representation, at what time precisely can that act of self-representation be said to occur? The temporal gap opened up by the act of transmitting the letter is the paradox of property converted into narrative terms, the function of property as both extension and limitation of the self mapped across time. The temporal doubleness implicit in the form of the letter is further complicated by the doubleness of the epistolary novel's author/reader structure. As readers of the novel, we can never be certain whether we are reading the letters as they are written, as they are being read by their recipient within the novel, or at some moment entirely independent of either of the two events.¹²

4) A series of actual letters is written “forward,” but the author of the letters lacks certainty about the future. These letters are thus unable to forecast or trace out a destiny, making them by nature discontinuous, multi-directional, fragmented. Porter contrasts the discontinuity of a series of letters with the implicit continuity of diary entries, arguing that while each letter is designed as an independent entity, created around a precise intention, a diary entry is supposed to be a state in an overall narrative of self-understanding.

In an epistolary novel, the fragmented quality of the letter form is consciously placed in tension with our knowledge as readers that the letters are part of a progression that, by virtue of its status as the production of a single author and as a formal whole, is meant to be understood as more or less unified. This tension subverts any clean opposition between the unified and the fragmentary. Within Evelina, this collapse of the unified/fragmentary opposition is manifested by a simultaneous recognition of the inevitability of the marriage plot that characterizes the eighteenth-century novel and the temporary subversion of that plot figured by the discontinuity of the individual letters.

5) Letters are identifiable by certain material forms (salutation, address, stationary, seal, etc.). These material forms are simultaneously present and conspicuously absent in the epistolary novel, since the novel invokes some of these forms—the salutation and structure of letter—in order to identify the letters in the novel as letters, yet in so doing, makes obvious the absence of other forms (the fact that the letters are printed rather than handwritten, that there are no envelopes or seals). This splitting of material and ideal forms of the letter—the idea of the letter is invoked, while many of the material aspects are held in abeyance—recalls Hardwicke's strange decision in Pope v. Curll to preserve the letter writer's rights of ownership by separating the material and ideal aspects of the letter.¹³ The status of Evelina as a published, copyrighted work ought not to be ignored in this context. The materiality of the book comes into being only by the act of separating the text from the matter of the letter. Textual property exists at the vanishing point of matter, but it is precisely at this point that material transformation can occur.

If the epistolary novel as a form serves to highlight the contradictions intrinsic to a natural rights theory of property and, more fundamentally, the pitfalls associated with traditional forms of self-representation, then Evelina, as a particular example of the epistolary form, seizes upon these contradictions with a vengeance. Writing as a woman within a society whose system of patrilineal inheritance made the relation between identity and property oblique at best, Frances Burney creates in Evelina a protagonist whose position as disowned heiress places her at the center of the contradictions regarding property and identity.¹⁴ Evelina first appears surprisingly late in the novel that bears her name; her appearance (in the form of her first letter) is delayed by a protracted exchange of letters in which Evelina's guardian, the Reverend Arthur Villars, resists then finally yields to the urgings of a female representative of Evelina's maternal grandmother to allow his ward to leave his home in the provinces in order to visit the grandmother in London. Evelina's initial identity within the novel is thus produced in her absence; in order for her to acquire the voice necessary for self-representation, she must absent herself from the site of this initial making.

As the letters are presented in the novel, each one labeled with its author and recipient, they are clearly established as the self-representations of their authors, yet the unavoidable presence of the recipient in the identification of the letter introduces the limitations of the letter as a form of self-representation at the same moment its possibilities appear. Moreover, as the opening epistolary dialogue of the novel makes clear, Villars views not only the letters he writes but the ward whose fate those letters negotiate as instances of his own moral production. Because Evelina is unclaimed by her own father, she is free to be appropriated by her guardian as his representation.¹⁵ Thus the prospect of sending Evelina away from the self-enclosed paradise in which the two of them have lived strikes him much as the prospect of sending off a carefully crafted letter might; the act of self-representation is only able to function by being made public, yet the step of making that representation public means that it is no longer fully Villars's own:

The mind is but too naturally prone to pleasure, but too easily yielded to dissipation: it has been my study to guard [Evelina] against their delusions, by preparing her to expect,—and to despise them. But the time draws on for experience and observation to take place of instruction: if I have, in some measure, rendered her capable of using the one with discretion, and making the other with improvement, I shall rejoice myself with the assurance of having largely contributed to her welfare.¹⁶

Evelina's behavior becomes, within the terms her guardian sets out, the possibility of Villars's celebration of himself. Furthermore, the movement into time—into narrative and into experience—manifested by both the letter and Evelina herself is figured simultaneously as a necessary precondition for Villars's self-representation and as a condition that guarantees the impossibility of complete, owned self-representation.

In the letter immediately following, the contradictory elements of the letter as a structure of self-representation are made even more evident as they begin to be wrenched apart from one another. As she leaves Villars's home in the provinces bearing the letter that gives her permission to leave, Evelina effectively stands as the bearer of the letter of permission and that letter itself. That she has completed her act of delivery necessarily indicates that she has been allowed to leave, yet the fact that she functions both as the representation of Villars's authority as a moral educator and as the bearer of that representation testifies that she is fully neither. The language of Villars's letter marks his growing alienation from his ward that necessarily accompanies the sending of the letter, as the progression of appositives reveals the increasing tenuousness of his claim to Evelina. “This letter will be delivered to you by my child,—the child of my adoption,—my affection (20, emphasis added). Within this structure, it is the sociality of the letter form and, by extension, of the act of self-representation that brings about Evelina's fall into narrative, into experience and history, into the material. Without the demands of the social, both Evelina and the letter she carries might remain within their provincial glade, forever unaffected by “the experience and observation [that] takes place of instruction.” Granted, the moral instruction Villars imparts unto Evelina within the privacy of his own estate is itself a social relation, but it can only be of limited consequence as long as that instruction remains outside of the public eye; Evelina can only function as Villars's representation once he consents to allow her to be seen within a wider public sphere. Only retrospectively, from a position outside Villars's enclosure, can the sociality of his relationship with Evelina be recognized and made to mean. (Significantly, it is not until Evelina leaves home that we hear anything of her own voice, since she has no need to write letters until she is separated from acquaintances.)

The doubleness of the novel's title pithily encapsulates the tension between Villars's prelapsarian fantasy—the promise of a perfect, transcendent identity implied by the concept of the name—and identity as a narrative, socially produced and historically contingent. But even the terms of the opposition between name and narrative laid out within the title Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World are immediately set into motion. The reference to “entrance” suggests the way in which both Evelina's and Villars's identities are formed by the process of moving away that mutually marks the outer limits of the selves, yet the transformation of that process into an entity called history that is itself the history of a type—“a Young Lady”—further suggests the fundamental inextricability of the two aspects of identity.

I am proposing that Burney establishes the letter from the outset of the novel as the emblem of the paradoxes implicit in both identity and in property as a form of self-representation. It is important, then, to examine the ways in which the form of the letter changes over the course of Evelina, for these shifts can be read as an attempt to trace the outer edges of the apparently opposing models of identity. While the letters at the opening of the novel are relatively short and “letter-like,” as the novel progresses and Evelina begins to establish a social world for herself apart from the one that had been defined for her by her guardian, the letters lose much of their letter-like quality, becoming considerably longer than the early examples and taking on many of the characteristics of non-epistolary narrative forms.¹⁷ (Many of these later letters are labeled, confusing if tellingly, “Evelina in continuation.”) A short, letter-like letter is necessarily more fully characterized by its “Sender to Recipient” label, suggesting a model of the self that becomes representative in being presented to, and hence limited by, an other. But, importantly, the shorter the letters are—the more completely they are identified by their label as the self-representation of their author—the greater the significance of the time gap created by the letter's transmission. The shorter and less narrative the letters are—the more like letters they are—the more they become subject to the temporal gaps brought about precisely by their status as letters—the time necessary for them to travel from London to the provinces and back again. Conversely, while the long, more narrative letters are proportionately less affected by the fact of their transmission, their narrative qualities at the time undermine the claims they might make to identify their authors, insofar as identity is most purely expressed in the form of an isolated name. Authorship, then, is figured as an assertion of control over interpretation—here, the interpretation of how the space of time is to be understood. This opening out of time introduces the possibility—clearly a frightening one—that the letter won't be read, that a reply will not be forthcoming.

But we ought to keep in mind that, in an epistolary novel as opposed to an actual letter, the author and reader of any given letter are not only the people whose names are affixed to the letter's text, but the novel's author and readers as well. Not only does this doubleness serve to undermine the simple notion of letter as self-representation to which Villars would willfully cling, but it draws our attention to the temporal doubleness implicit in the epistolary novel. Since we as readers are never certain at exactly what point in its circuit of production we gain access to a given letter, the authority—both in the sense of authorial identity and in the sense of force of law—that any letter commands is called into question. This subversive potential made possible by the form's temporal doubleness is most clearly manifested near the middle of the novel, when Villars condemns his ward's growing intimacy with Lord Orville, a man she has become acquainted with in London. When, having already read Villars's condemnation of the connection, we read Evelina's description of her continuing pursuit of the relationship, we are led to believe that she is willfully disregarding her guardian's wishes. Soon enough we learn that Evelina's apparent disregard of Villars's desires is merely an illusion created by the temporal doubleness of the epistolary novel: we have read Villars's letter before she has. Nonetheless, the lesson of the incident is marked indelibly. Once again, the very sociality of the construction of identity—whether the identity takes the form of authority, property or written self-representation, that makes it necessary for the letters to be transmitted to gain their meaning—also figures the limitation of that authority.

Thus far we have traced the trajectory of the novel according to the way it calls into question with increasing force Villars's authority and structures of identity. But the novel's development can be figured equally well in terms of Evelina's developing voice as a letter-writer, even as the valuation we normally lend such a development is called into question. Most obviously, Evelina's letters to Villars stand as a sign of her growing distance from him, both geographically and ontologically. Initially, Evelina is reluctant to write, recognizing that writing signals her ontological break from him:

My dear Sir, I am desired to make a request to you. I hope you will not think me an encroacher; Lady Howard insists upon my writing!—and yet I hardly know how to go on; a petition implies a want,—and have you left me one? No indeed.

(23)

Here, as in the novel's opening pages, Evelina serves both as message and as the means of transmission for that message. The parallels between these two moments ought to alert us to their crucial difference, however: while in the first instance Evelina is sent away from Villars as if she were a letter, here, the letter returns to Villars as if it were Evelina. The substitution of the ideality of the letter for the materiality of Evelina's actual body hence becomes a necessary condition of her developing autonomy. The act of self-definition is explicitly figured as a definition of the limits of property; it is her conception of a want, of the possibility of lack, that marks her break from Villars. Still, just a few paragraphs later in the same letter, Evelina has already begun to conceive of her relationship to her erstwhile guardian differently, with his authority over her desires transformed into a legal control rather than a control emerging from their mutuality of identification or desire. She asks him, “Ought I to form a wish that has not your sanction?” (23). She marks the transitory state of her identity at this moment by refusing to mark, signing her letter with a blank space whose significance will become clearer later.

Villars responds, not unexpectedly, with an attempt to assert his imaginative authority to recreate the time in which the unity of their identities—his moral, emotional and financial possession of Evelina—produced the illusion of satiation, of limitlessness. “To see my Evelina happy is to see myself without a wish” (25). But Villars clearly, if reluctantly, recognizes the increasing untenability of his position, an untenability brought on by the fact that his self-representation in the form of Evelina has already been made public. To the extent that Evelina has become a writing subject, someone engaged in her own self-representation, she has become irreducibly different from Villars. His solution, acknowledgedly ideal, is to cancel her identity as letter-writer by eliminating the geographical (and, implicitly, the temporal) space that separates them. “To follow the dictates of my own heart, I should instantly recall you to myself, and never more consent to your being separated from me; but the manners and opinions of the world demand a different conduct” (129). Even this ideal, admittedly unachievable, solution is a fallen one, however, as Villars figures the unity between them as consent given or withheld rather than as a form of organic identity.

What is crucial to keep in mind is the way in which, throughout most of the novel, the paradox of identity and property is inflected differently across gender lines. If Evelina is schooled in the possibilities for subversion by witnessing the forms her own movement away from Villars takes, she is nonetheless, as a woman, placed differently from her guardian within the conflicting and intersecting lines of power that define identity and property. As the novel makes clear, Evelina's vulnerability to being appropriated as the site of Villars's moral self-production—her appropriateness to being made both the material and limit of others' self-representation—depends in large part upon her status as orphan, or, more accurately, as unowned heiress. Paradoxically enough, however, while her unconnectedness is what allows her to be seized as the stuff out of which others' self-production is made, Evelina nonetheless needs to imagine an absence of connection (at least of connection to men) as the foundation of her own identity. Faced with an array of competing suitors at her first public ball, Evelina tells each of them she is engaged to another to avoid having to commit herself to any of them. Where Villars uses his (and Evelina's) isolation from the world to justify his appropriation of her as a representation before the world, Evelina's fiction is a negative one, one that describes something that is not there. If the paradoxes of property and identity make clear the way in which the oppositions of autonomy and sociality tend to collapse into one another, men and women within the novel still begin at different places within the ever-intertwining set of terms. Rather than using control over others to represent identity before the world as Villars does, Evelina creates a fiction of connectedness in the form of her story to the suitors, intended to create for her the possibility of an autonomy that otherwise would not exist. To the extent to which personal autonomy is either possible or desirable (Burney is clearly wary on both counts), women seem only able to approach such autonomy under the cover of sociality.

The threat posed by Evelina's lie at the ball resounds throughout the novel. Just as Evelina's lack of familial connection both allows her appropriation by Villars and figures her identity as possible (and, from Villars's point of view, threatening) in its very fluidity, her social fiction-making, her telling of stories deliberately unrepresentative of and unconnected to her social reality, creates in part the possibility of her selfhood. Evelina clearly recognizes the power of the threat presented by her capacity to lie, particularly as that capacity remakes her relationship with Villars. She deliberately sets that threat into motion as she withholds information from Villars and then flaunts that act of withholding:

Will you forgive me if I own that I have first written an account of this transaction to Miss Mirvan?—and that I even thought of concealing it from you?—Short-lived, however, was the ungrateful idea, and sooner will I risk the justice of your displeasure, then unworthily betray your generous confidence.

(249)

Here, the capacity to lie that Evelina first demonstrates at the ball is clearly associated with the structure of temporal doubleness associated with the letter in the epistolary novel. Evelina demonstrates her acumen as a reader of Evelina. To write letters is to prove that one is capable of lying. Evelina, who is characterized in the early sections of the novel explicitly by her lack of guile, learns to lie by coming to understand the operation of the letter. Inasmuch as her mendacity marks a deviation from her early character, writing letters would seem to serve to make Evelina less, rather than more, herself. Clearly, however, Burney holds no stock in the possibility of personal “essence”; not only do the novel's letters signal Evelina's growing independence from Villars, but autonomy in general, to the extent to which it is possible, is shown to be borne of the capacity to misrepresent. In Evelina, the act of lying becomes an assertion of the possibility of choice.¹⁸

Even more fundamentally, the association between lying and letter writing points up the extent to which the fact of human distance and separateness—the distance between London and the provinces that compels Evelina and Villars to communicate by letter and opens the temporal gap that makes it impossible for either to own their communication—coupled with the sociality of meaning, creates the possibility, indeed, the inevitability, of misrepresenting. There seems no position from which letters may be owned, from which they can even confidently be read. To assert that one is capable of either owning or reading is therefore to assert a fiction, to write a letter, to lie. Within the novel, sending, withholding and receiving information are not fundamentally different acts, but simply different moments in a single circuit. But as our experience as readers of the epistolary novel teaches us, we can never know exactly where in the circuit we are.

For Evelina, such undecidability is opportunity. Toward the end of the novel, as the inexorable marriage plot narrows around her, systematically closing off all avenues of escape, Evelina seizes upon the temporal undecidability made so evident by the epistolary form in one final, desperate effort to postpone the closure of marriage. When Lord Orville proposes marriage, “to make [his] devotion to [her] public,” Evelina begs for more time, asking his deference to a secret she is not currently in a position to reveal. “There is nothing, my Lord, I wish to conceal;—to postpone an explanation is all I desire” (354). Her secret is, of course, the mystery of her personal history, the explanation of her status as “orphan,” and the ostensible purpose of her delay is to await an opportunity for presenting herself to her father, Sir John Belmont, to be owned. Evelina invokes the conditions of her dependence as a further means of delaying her marriage. She informs Lord Orville she must write away to Villars for permission to marry:

I told [Lord Orville] I was wholly dependent upon you, and that I was certain your opinion would be the same as mine, which was that it would be highly improper should I dispose of myself forever so very near the time which must finally decide by whose authority I ought to be granted.

(370)

Reading her situation as a woman in a world in which autonomy and dependence are not distinguishable ontological conditions but, rather, names for discursive strategies, Evelina invokes the impropriety of “dispos[ing] of [her]self,” as a means of buying more time as she waits for Villars's response to arrive by the mails.

That the novel raises no question regarding Belmont's status as Evelina's real father is crucial, since the presumption of their relatedness shifts the issue to be resolved from one of determining natural connection to one of determining ownership. As Evelina sets off to meet her father, the question at hand is not whether Evelina is her father's daughter, but, rather, whether her father will own her as such. As the novel describes the encounter, Belmont could just as easily own her as not, a fact that explicitly empties the act of any ontological significance. As a result, Evelina's receipt of the patronym is not, as we might have expected, a moment at which her freedom to act is shut down, but, rather, one in which the strictures that might limit her action are revealed to be at their most arbitrary. Clearly, for this novel, there is nothing “natural” about owning or being owned.

If Burney labors both within and by means of the novel to represent the denaturalization of paternal ownership, she does not do so in opposition to Locke, but squarely within his terms. Until now, I have been discussing the concept of paternal property—the relationship of paternal ownership, authority and identity—as though it can be accommodated unproblematically within the general liberal model of property. While it is the Second Treatise's natural rights theory for which Locke is best known, the political and philosophical context for this model is laid out in the largely ignored First Treatise, in which Locke explicitly refutes Sir Robert Filmer's identification of the authority of absolute monarchs with the “natural” authority of fathers over their children. What becomes clear in examining Locke within the context of Filmer is the extent to which Evelina's strategy of postponement is an accord with Locke's own project to pry apart property, paternity and political authority. Insofar as this separation depends upon both the ambiguous materiality of the “labor” metaphor and the oscillation of alienability that the metaphor implies, such a move threatens the liberal form of property at the very moment it constitutes such a model; within this view, Evelina's status as disowned daughter becomes not perverse but paradigmatic.¹⁹

Indeed, “being Belmont” marks, if anything, the freedom that for Evelina accompanies undecidability, since her life as Evelina Belmont is almost perfectly coextensive with the period of time during which the letters requesting and granting permission for her to marry are en route. Within the structure of relations suggested by the names in the book, in fact, Evelina is figured as least “owned” when she has received the patronym Belmont, insofar as the surname Villars had chosen for her—Anville—linguistically emphasizes her links with both himself and with Orville. The association between her life as Evelina Belmont and her freedom from ownership is further extended through her letter to Villars in which she describes the arrival of his letter granting her permission to marry:

Open it, indeed, I did;—but read it I could not,—the willing, yet aweful consent you have granted,—the tenderness of your expressions,—the certainty that no obstacle remained to my external union with the loved owner of my heart, gave me sensations too various, and though joyful, too little placid for observation. Finding myself unable to proceed, and blinded by the tears of gratitude and delight which started into my eyes, I gave over the attempt of reading, till I retired to my own room: and, having no voice to answer the enquiries of Lord Orville, I put the letter into his hands, and left it to speak both for me and itself.

(404)

This letter, which she signs Evelina Belmont, “for the first—and probably the last time I shall ever own the name” (404), appears at first glance to mark, in the form of the arrival of Villars's letter, the final closing down of the structure of postponement that has heretofore enabled her limited freedom. Evelina is unable to read or speak, and if it was her movement beyond the status of Villars's “letter” that marked her initial break from her guardian, here she is explicitly returned to the status of his letter, “which speaks for both [her] and itself.”

But in this closing section, as in the rest of Evelina, nothing is quite as simple as it seems, no divisions quite so easily upheld. While the force and immediacy of the description may lead us to forget the context in which it is written, we ought to keep in mind that this passage is composed by Evelina retrospectively as part of a letter to Villars recalling precisely the moment of his letter's arrival. Once again, the acts of receiving, reading and writing letters collapse into one another, so that the primacy that might otherwise have been accorded the moment of writing is transferred to this complex knot of activity in which all acts become the same act: Villars reads Evelina's writing about her reading of his writing, all of which is further complicated by the fact that we as external audience enter the circuit at some undefinable point to read Fanny Burney's writing about this knotted complex of reading and writing, sending and receiving. Not only is the moment of Evelina's apparent voicelessness and self-dissolution at least partially recuperated by our knowledge that Evelina herself has represented this disempowerment, but the act of representation itself is shown to be one that gains its meaning only in being received and read.

Viewed within the structure of the letter laid out by Evelina, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke's creation of the concept of intellectual property by granting copyright to the writer rather than the recipient of a letter threatens to unravel the intertwined concepts of material property and personal identity on which intellectual property right is founded. It makes no sense, in understanding the functioning of the letter, to separate the act of writing from the acts of receiving and reading; thus the legal privileging of writing has the effect of pointing up the incoherences implicit within the notion of private property. The Lockean notion of property that grounds ownership in the “natural” ownership of the body, figuring the objects of possession as extensions and representations of the self, must ignore the fact that those objects must necessarily be defined as already alienated, already different from the self, in order for them to be owned. Evelina is able to transform the letters intended to secure her ties first to guardian, then to husband into an instrument for postponing her links to either; similarly, Fanny Burney, as a woman novelist, seizes Pope's attempts to extend his control from material to immaterial property as a means of challenging his right to property in any form. In refusing as illusory the legal separation between property as self-extension and property as self-difference, the structure of the letter in Evelina challenges the natural rights notion of property by exposing the contradiction at its core.

But ought we to read Evelina simply as critique? Far from simply pointing up the paradox of property as self-representation, Burney attempts in her novel to figure a new model of authorship that implicitly suggests new relations between self, production and property. In the dedicatory poem that opens the volume, “To ——————,” Burney once again uses the doubleness implicit in the epistolary novel to extend a discussion focused historically around the ownership of letters to apply to published writing in general as part of her larger attempt to imagine a kind of authorship that is not based on the model of possession. The blank place of the recipient, which recalls the blank signature of Evelina's first letter to Villars, most explicitly refers to Burney's status as anonymous author of the novel. Directed to the “author of my being” (1), the poem is offered as an explanation from the author to her father for her decision to publish her work anonymously.²⁰ “But since my niggard stars that gift refuse / Concealment is the only boon I claim; / Obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse, / Who cannot raise, but would not sink, your fame” (1). Clearly, if Burney has chosen to publish anonymously, as she claims in the poem, in order to avoid sinking her father's fame, then she cannot name him as the recipient of the poem and the novel without revealing his identity. But like Evelina within the body of the novel, Burney also seems to refuse the social structures that define the daughter as “recorder of [her father's] worth” (1), as his self-production and representation. Likewise, it is possible to read the character of Evelina as the speaker throughout the poem (the blank in Evelina's first letter to Villars helps validate such a reading), addressing to Burney her own reluctance to stand as “recorder of thy worth.” With the blank place of the recipient holding both readings in suspension, Burney and Evelina, author and production, become indistinguishable from one another, an apparent fulfillment of the Lockean fantasy.

But clearly Burney has more than utopian wish-fulfillment in mind. While the blankness of the dedication conflates Burney and Evelina, if the two readings are considered at once, Burney becomes simultaneously both speaker and listener—the speaker of her address to her father, the listener of Evelina's address to her author. As soon as the validity of a natural rights notion of property is suggested by the conflation of author and artistic production, that validity is undermined by the collapse of speaker and listener that effectively challenges any move to privilege the speaker/author. The risks of such a strategy for Burney are at least equally as pronounced as the potentially liberatory effects of her subversion.²¹ The possibility of self-representation is made available only with the acknowledgement that any self that might be represented has already disappeared, replaced by a system of relations uniting reader and writer, sender and recipient, speaker and listener. Finally, however, the blankness allows each of the novel's readers to become the recipient of the dedication, to take his or her place as “author of [the speaker's] being.” In assuming her position as anonymous author and uncovering the infinite openness of the position of recipient/author that is implicitly characteristic of the relationship of all authors to their reading public, Burney figures a notion of authorship that is the production of all involved in the reading/writing process.²² In sending Evelina, like a letter, to everyone, she belongs to no one.

Notes

1. Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1992): 475-493. Rose cites Pope v. Curll as the first case in which a major English author went to court in his own name to defend his literary rights. As such, the case marks a transitional moment both in the concept of authorship and in the notion of literary property more generally.

2. Some standard works on the Statute of Anne and on the development of copyright generally are Harry Ransom, The First Copyright Statute (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1956); John Feather, “The Book Trade in Politics: the Making of the Copyright Act of 1710,” Publishing History 8 (1980): 19-34; Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1968); Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967); and Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1939).

3. Quoted in Rose (note 1), 484.

4. Public Record Office C11/1569/29, quoted in Rose (note 1), 485-86.

5. While the Statute of Anne certainly initiated a concept of literary property, Rose, following Kaplan, contends that the statute operated within terms presumed by the economic structure of printing rather than that of authorship. That the statute mandated that violators of the law forfeit all offending books to their rightful proprietors, who were in turn, required to “Damask and make Waste Paper of them” points up the statute's emphasis on the book as a physical entity (Rose [note 1], 487).

6. In his provocative discussion of the intersections of narrative and critical literalism in Clarissa (“Taking Clarissa Literally: The Implication of Reading,” Genre 21 [Summer 1988]), Stephen Melville comments that “nothing can stop this suspicion of art, fiction, reflection, once it has started. (And isn't that just the fear close reading always provokes, the fear internal to criticism that always turns its theoretical debates back into matters of detail, the accidental and essential of reading?)” (143). Indeed, Evelina seems to undermine any claims it (or its critics) might possibly make for the novel's representative status in its strategic exposure of the contingency signaled by the material. Evelina as example—whether it be as representative or unrepresentative text, whether its meaningful context be the epistolary novel, eighteenth-century fiction, or the history of women's writing—always threaten to veer into Evelina as random sample, with such randomness marking the point of intersection between significance and insignificance. The relationship between the historical claims I make in this paper and the evidence I adduce to support those claims, that is, a fairly detailed reading of a single novel, bears a striking resemblance to the text/manuscript knot Hardwicke tried unsuccessfully to unravel: a theoretical point happens to appear in the form of a novel, but need not necessarily do so (although, within certain professional contexts, it is only of interest insofar as it does). Finally, I think a clue to this puzzle lies in what Melville calls the epistolary novel's “seamlessness of mimesis,” the fact that “we can know [the epistolary novel] to be a fiction only if we are assured in advance or by some third person that it is such” (138). The difficulty we might have in distinguishing foreground from background with regard to the relationship between the history of the Hardwicke decision and the text of Evelina seems to me an analytically helpful one, the difficulty of the epistolary novel's “seamless mimesis,” since it suggests that such distinctions are achieved only by the intervention of either authority or personal interest.

7. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 287-88.

8. For some discussions of the paradox of the natural rights theory of property in other contexts, see Catherine Gallagher's “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 39-62; Walter Benn Michaels's “Romance and Real Estate,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 85-112; and Howard Horwitz's “O Pioneers! and the Paradox of Property: Cather's Aesthetics of Divestment,” Prospects 13 (1988): 61-93. I am interested in exploring here the ways in which the structure of the letter, within both Burney's adaptation of the tradition of the epistolary novel and the contemporary debate over the ownership of letters, makes the relations of the Lockean paradox particularly evident.

9. Mary Poovey argues that Burney identifies the courtship period as a moment at which the interests of fathers and husbands potentially come into conflict, but that she then retreats from the implications of such an analysis. See Poovey, “Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing Up Female,” in Fanny Burney's “Evelina,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 85-98. While Burney does seem particularly interested in this period for precisely the reasons Poovey suggests, I intend to argue that, far from backing away from such a conflict, Burney dramatizes the ways in which young women may employ it strategically to their own ends.

10. Charles A. Porter, “Forward: Men/Women of Letters,” Yale French Studies 74 (1986): 1-14.

11. In “Of Readers and Narratees: The Experience of Pamela,” L'Esprit Createur 21 (Summer 1981): 93, Susan Rubin Suleiman identifies convincingly an additional level of narration implicit in the epistolary form—that of the editor (and editor's reader). This narrative level may be emphasized to a greater degree (as in Les Liasons dangereuses and Pamela) or to a lesser extent (as in Clarissa or Evelina). While Suleiman argues that narrators and narratees within the same narrative levels remain stable in relation to one another, the relations seem to me to get more tricky at the extra-narrative levels. While the distinction between author and editor remains clear, for example, the condition of author's narratee is to aspire to become editor's narratee through the willing suspension of disbelief demanded of most realism's readers. That this relationship between narratees is so unstable, in addition to the fact Burney identifies an editor in the Preface only immediately to subsume the role of that editor within the functions of an explicitly imaginative author, suggests that she is eager to minimize the distinction between author and editor. As I will argue, possession and authorship are figured in terms of one another and are plagued by the same incoherences.

12. Janet Gurkin Altman points out that epistolary novels conventionally emphasize the immediacy of their narration, what she terms the “pivotal, yet impossible present.” The only event that can be represented with the presence the form of the epistolary novel claims for itself is the act of writing. See Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1982), 129. Paradoxically, the materiality of writing, the same materiality that is threatening insofar as it limits the transparency (hence, the completeness) with which writing can function as a means of self-representation, is the only thing that can be represented completely (the completeness of the representation contingent upon the transformation of writing from an act into a thing.)

13. Altman (note 12) terms the two uses of the letter “metaphoric” (by which the “message” of the letter stands in for the sender by virtue of its immateriality) and “metonymic” (by which the materiality of the letter becomes the conduit of physical contact between sender and recipient) (19).

14. Susan Staves, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Judith Lowder Newton all trace a preponderance of physical violence within the novel. See Staves, “Evelina; or, Female Difficulties,” in Bloom (note 9), 13-30; Spacks, “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney,” in Bloom, 31-57; and Newton, “Evelina: A Chronicle of Assault,” in Bloom, 59-83. This excess of violence seems to testify to the anxiety produced by these contradictions within and between property and identity.

15. Since Evelina is without a patronym, Villars has created a surname for her—Anville, an obvious variation on his own name, as well as an anagram both for Evelyn (Evelina's grandfather and Villars's pupil) and for Evelina's own name. Not only does Evelina's lack of a patronym allow Villars to construct a lineage based strictly on their legal ties to one another, but the explicit linking of Evelina's first name to this fictional ancestral line would seems to suggest the impossibility of preserving any aspect of her identity from association with this line. Still, this collapse of given name and surname into an undeniably artificial genealogy suggests that Evelina might possess, in the absence of actual family ties, an extraordinary opportunity to fashion her own identity. This oscillation between discourses of complete determinacy and a complete absence of referentiality returns repeatedly throughout the novel and seems to function, both for Evelina and for Burney, as a means of creating actual, if temporary, freedom in the world. I will discuss this pattern in greater detail below.

16. Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 18. All further page references to the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text.

17. This retrospective, narrative (as opposed to dramatic) quality stands in sharp contrast to the forms of narration characteristic of Richardson's epistolary fiction, the narration of “writing to the moment,” a phrase Richardson coined in his Preface to Sir Charles Grandison. “The nature of familiar letters, written, as it were, to the moment, while the heart is agitated by hopes and fears, or events undecided, must plead as an excuse for the bulk of a collection of this kind” (Richardson, quoted in Altman [note 12], 141).

18. Altman argues that the epistolary novel became a favorite eighteenth-century form within a cultural milieu that saw authentication as a form of “presentification … whereby the writer tries to create the illusion that both he and his addressee are immediately present to each other and to the action. … Such tendencies suggest an eighteenth-century reading public whose dominant esthetic is contemporaneity; one might speculate on the dialectical relationship between the epistolary novel so popular in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the historical novel focusing on more distant events that ushered in a new kind of narrative in the nineteenth century” (202). If we understand Evelina, in its tendency toward retrospectivity and postponement, to be a movement away from the classic epistolary form identified by Altman, then we might see the beginnings of a new form of authority here—the authority of fiction, of the lie. We would thus understand the emergence of this new aesthetic of fictionality as a response to the particular conditions of disempowerment that made immediacy insupportable for Burney and for Evelina—propertylessness and daughterhood.

19. Along these lines, Richard Swartz argues that the concept of patrimony—the right of fathers to will their property to their children—was frequently employed in eighteenth-century debates over perpetuity of copyright in an attempt to resolve the tension between the literary artifact's status as unique creation and its status as commodity. While Swartz's reading of the Miller v. Taylor (1769) copyright case tends to emphasize the diachronic aspects of the contradictions within the Lockean conception of property in distinction to my focus on the synchronic aspects, these differences, rather than being understood as opposing positions, might productively be read as offering insights into Locke's complex use of time in his natural rights model. See Swartz, “Patrimony and the Figuration of Authorship in the Eighteenth-Century Property Debates,” Works and Days 7 (1989): 29-54.

20. For detailed biographical accounts of the nature of Burney's relationship to her father, see Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988) and Poovey (note 9).

21. Burney writes in her journal on the occasion of the publication of Evelina, “I have an exceeding odd sensation, when I consider that it is now in the power of any and every body to read what I so carefully hoarded even from my best friends, till this last month or two,—and that a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy of my bureau, may now be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms” (Burney, quoted in Jennifer A. Wagner, “Privacy and Anonymity in Evelina, in Bloom [note 9], 99-109).

22. Inasmuch as books must be bought and postage must be paid, such infinite openness is only theoretical. Nevertheless, because, before the establishment of the penny post in 1840, most postage was paid by recipients of letters rather than senders, the analogy between recipients and readers still holds. See Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 332. I am thankful to Elizabeth Young for asking this question and Cheri Larsen for her help in tracking down the answer.