SOURCE: “Writing Innocence: Fanny Burney's Evelina,” in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 43-57.

[In the following essay, Cutting-Gray studies the significance of Evelina's journal and assesses her “calculated innocence and concealed experience.” The critic concludes that Evelina's writing is an effort to portray herself as “an entity,” but this version of herself is in fact a narrowly-defined product of the patriarchal code.]

Fanny Burney explained the “original” innocent character of Evelina, protagonist of her famous novel of 1778, to her sister Susan by saying that “she had been brought up in the strictest retirement, that she knew nothing of the world, and only acted from the impulses of Nature.” Quoting from her own preface, she added that the heroine was the “offspring of Nature in her simplest attire.”¹ According to the precept of common sense, innocence is a state of unreflective union with a world complete in every moment. Such a state of unselfconsciousness contrasts with a succeeding stage of irretrievable loss in which the emergent self stands separate from the world. The fact that innocence can only be seen from this perspective beyond innocence, that innocence is a reductive concept within the broader, reflective context of experience, is an important clue to the conduct of Fanny Burney's first heroine. As if from the limited, cultural stereotype of her female innocence, Evelina authors her journal-diary and retrieves in the act of writing a richness of experience otherwise denied to her.

Though Evelina incarnates artlessness in a world of duplicity and evil, she nonetheless requires “observation and experience” to make her “fit for the world” (p. 7). Her private innocence is disrupted when she sallies forth into a disjunctive, public world where, affronted by male assertiveness, she, as female, becomes a problem to herself. Unless one hears in Evelina's discourse a misguided effort to maintain the “simplest attire” of innocence, one will see only female compliancy. Yet as long as she insists upon preserving her Innocence-passivity (a symbol for the stasis of her being) she cannot be compelled to assimilate experience fully. Compliancy thus becomes for her a modestly prudent, though not necessarily practical ethics. J. M. S. Tompkins argued that “prudence is essentially self-government in the interests of the community, and it is well to use [or accustom] ourselves to this liberal interpretation of the word in dealing with the ethics of the women writers and with their ideal of womanhood.”² While reading the novel as exemplifying the value of prudence satisfies the notion of self-governance in the interests of the community at large, it does not discriminate the finer nuances and contradictions arising from applying this standard to women as well as men. Overlooked in the binary economy of female innocence-male oppression is Evelina's calculated innocence and concealed experience. Only at a point of crisis, when she is forced to write on her own behalf, does Evelina begin to understand that concealment does not prevent her from revealing herself—to herself as well as to others.

In the gap between her speech and action, that is, between her disclaimers of experience and her writing of a journal-diary, one can hear a frustrated desire that seeks to be recognized; what will emerge as both problem and promise is Evelina's namelessness and absence of place in patriarchal discourse from which she can speak.³ Paradoxically despite and through her namelessness, Evelina discovers that both she and her history are constituted by her own act of writing. Writing an account of her experiences also re-forms the conventionalized definition of woman that she begins with.

Before looking into the significance of Evelina's journal, it is important to consider how, at first, she relinquishes experience for the sake of concealing herself in innocence. In her early forays into the world, the assailed heroine's intentional focus upon an authentic artlessness obscures the transparency of self that she wishes to project and contributes to her own oppression.⁴ The novel opens with the cultural definition that circumscribes Evelina's innocent character:

This artless young creature, with too much beauty to escape notice, has too much sensibility to be indifferent to it; but she has too little wealth to be sought with propriety by men of the fashionable world.

(p. 8)

The “peculiar cruelty of her situation” is that as the unacknowledged child of a wealthy Baronet (Sir John Belmont), she is forbidden to claim his name even though she is entitled lawfully to inherit his fortune. More than a social deficiency, the “nameless” functions symbolically for the patriarchy that constitutes the “named.” Namelessness as a metaphor for woman stands in the way of Evelina's social acceptance and inhibits her ability to name herself other than within the category of innocence, the “character” given to her by her culture. But artlessness and beauty without wealth and name is not only Evelina's global condition; it is also the charm of her appeal, the only marketable asset she has, and the greatest danger to maintaining her character. Her position as a nameless, female minor—a form of social silence—generates the conflict of the novel.

Evelina's character is not contained entirely, however, by either her cultural namelessness or her innocence. Evelina, the novel, confronts us with crucial questions of character and its rival conceptions. Is Evelina to be described as a traditional fictional entity created and controlled by an author—even an author in the form of a dominant culture who authors her? Is she an autonomous person, a “real identity,” who speaks and acts by her own authority? Is she a purely linguistic construction?⁵ Each of these notions of character fails to describe adequately the generative power of naming that multiplies Evelina within the free play of writing.

Preserving Evelina's singularly innocent name is a mandate shared by all those in the novel concerned with the continuity of that culture. For example, the wish of Villars (her country-parson foster father) to have Evelina returned from her social experiences unchanged, still “all innocence” (p. 10), entails sacrificing the seasoning of practical knowledge on the patriarchal altar of pristine ignorance. Launched into the world, Evelina should somehow expand her experience, but without the loss of her intrinsic, encapsulated innocence. “The world,” says Villars to Evelina, “is the general harbour of fraud and of folly, of duplicity and of impertinence” where “the artlessness of your nature, and the simplicity of your education, alike unfit you” for its “thorny paths” (pp. 104-05). A proper feminine “education” assures one of a perspective “unfit” for the intrigues of society. But we will see by Evelina's own account of her first social forays that she is not as devoid of practical wisdom or as unfit for society as she and everyone else assumes.

In writing about her first ball to Villars, Evelina finds male behavior so “provoking” that she determines not to dance at all rather than “humour” male condescension (p. 18). Her reaction is more than the shock of innocence at the disportment of behavior outside the bounds of her experience, for she interprets what she sees as an assumption of superiority by males toward women. Rather than lacking awareness about the situation at hand, she lacks information about social propriety in this instance.⁶ In this respect, her response is spontaneous but not discriminating, intuitively just, but not socially correct.

Evelina is not a tabula rasa of innocence upon which experience is engraved, for she has the reflexive ability to read more than one possible meaning in otherwise socially correct behavior. She quickly shows us that she recognizes hypocrisy (Mr. Lovel), bad taste (the Branghtons), male impertinence (Willoughby), and female constraints (codes of propriety). Nonetheless, time and again she retreats into self-conscious confusion, silence, and the posture of innocence, as when she meets Orville:

How will he be provoked, thought I, when he finds what a simple rustic he has honoured with his choice! one whose ignorance of the world makes her perpetually fear doing something wrong!

(p. 19)

But while castigating her behavior, Evelina exhibits an assimilative, interpretive grasp when the thought occurs to her that Orville did choose her “insignificant as I was, compared to a man of his rank and figure” (p. 23). This ready adaptability to fit herself to new social situations is belied by the way her letters attire her in innocence. Furthermore, correct social appearance itself includes a contradictory comportment of innocence: unworldly enough to appear guileless or diffident, yet sophisticated enough to recognize dissimulation and artifice, subtle enough to discern deception and fraud, and poised enough to withstand male aggression.

Whenever Evelina is abashed with shyness or outraged at male impropriety toward her person, she cloaks her feelings in the more artless raiment of silence even as she discloses them in her writing: “But I was silent, for I knew not what I ought to say” (p. 141). As she enters an already established symbolic order and submits her desire to the pressures of that order, adopting a conventional conceptual wardrobe, furnishing herself with a language that has already determined who she is, she allows her reflections to be covered over by the veneer of naivete. Reciprocally she will eventually learn that an uncalculated modesty and reserve are uninterpretable to others without concomitant signs of reflection and understanding in her that would prevent their censure. But while straining to recommend herself to males, posturing in the language and comportment of the idealized female for whom discrimination is forbidden, she herself fails to distinguish the difference between acquiring the accouterments of innocence and being innocent. Her presumed innocence gradually forces her into an anxious mode that wears away her spontaneity.

Evelina's awareness, significantly, does not extend to sexual-social dangers in accepting, although under some duress, the offer of Willoughby (a rakish nobleman) to drive her home unescorted or in accompanying the Branghton girls (her cousins) into the darkened alleys of Vauxhall. This gap in her understanding points to the broader issue of how the conceptual model of vulnerable innocence conceals from a female not only her own sexual desire but her sexual power as well. The patriarchal model for female virtue appears to posit innocence merely in order to assault it, so that lecherous Willoughby can silence Evelina's objections by referring to the code designed to protect her: “I cannot think of trusting you with strange chairmen,—I cannot answer it to Mrs. Mirvan [Evelina's chaperone] …” (p. 85). Thus, when Orville discovers her alone with the rake, she “was not at liberty to assign any reason” for her ambiguous behavior (p. 89). Silently deferring to male authority encourages misinterpretation, accedes to an unconscious presumption of her own innocence, and attests to the ambiguity inherent in consciously maintaining a peculiar form of female virtue: permanent naivete.

Doomed to fly from one dangerous and improper situation into another, Evelina persists in her struggle to live up to the female “name” she has adopted, in spite of growing experiential evidence that this name does not serve her best interests any more than namelessness does.⁷ Any practical wisdom she gains seems siphoned away by strenuous efforts to persuade others, and herself, that she is powerless and deficient in thought. Seeing herself as a victim only, that is, as an unaccountable participant, however involuntary that participation may be, reduces any richer model for herself that would fit Evelina for the world and not just to it. To Villars, she deplores her lack of “presence of mind” (p. 222), forgetting that presence of mind responds spontaneously to the situation at hand, while persistently believing what she ought to say supersedes what she needs to do.

In the social arena where she must display herself as a nameless commodity until she can acquire nameability, Evelina is often overwhelmed by the harshness of a world based upon a conceptual model that categorizes her by gender, calculates her visible worth, names her as nameless, and condemns her to a passive silence by speaking for her. Concealing the strength of her own desires and intelligence diminishes her; she remains one-dimensional because the representative model has ordained she be so.

The Evelina so named in the journal, however, does not intrigue us as much as she who narrates and orders events by writing about them. As John J. Richetti argues, as a narrator, Evelina reveals “linguistic superiority” to an “impressionable and fanciful sentimental heroine.”⁸ The Evelina who writes reveals a more evaluative knowledge of her world than the Evelina she writes about. As the account of Mrs. Stanley's ball has shown, Evelina may be ignorant of rules of social etiquette, but she is not without judgment, wit, and quick intelligence. Her accounts of the Branghtons show that she is brighter, more sensitive, and perceptive than they could ever hope to be. Her journal reveals that the most intelligent men, Willoughby and Orville, appreciate her understanding in spite of her inexperience. When describing the witty Mrs. Selwyn's satirical forays, the Evelina who writes is more discriminating than the older lady who seems unaware of the censure her bent for irony invites.

A central episode, involving the use and authority of Evelina's name, marks a turn in Evelina's understanding of herself, a turn away from self understood as a singular entity, and will also mark the intersection between the Evelina narrated and the who that narrates. The Branghtons learn of her acquaintance with Lord Orville and take advantage of that relationship in order to usurp her social meaning, when they call on Lord Orville to solicit his business for the family shop. This threat is even more serious than the sexual dangers she has encountered. Until now, Evelina's own essentialist awareness of herself as an innocent has prevented her from fully recognizing the self-objectification enforced by that definition. The overt reification of her as a device available to the utility and consumption of bourgeois economy (another form of namelessness),⁹ presses upon her what she would otherwise wish to conceal from herself. She cries out: “By what authority did you take such a liberty?” and “who gave you leave?—who desired you?” (p. 233). For perhaps the first time in the novel, Evelina claims her own right to the disclosing as well as concealing power of name and discourse. To speak importunately to Orville, “as comes from one Miss [Evelina] Anville” (p. 233), makes her name an item in the Branghton trade. It forces her to act, to lay aside the disguise of female passivity. “Half frantic,” driven “wild,” suffering an “irreparable injury,” Evelina eschews all female codes and writes to Orville directly (p. 234). Forced to assert herself to prevent reification, she is nonetheless impeded when her status as a nameless female undercuts her authority to name, that is, to articulate and interpret herself to others. To the Branghtons she may insist, “I must take the liberty to request, that my name may never be made use of without my knowledge,” but in experience her name as female consists of those qualities and traits attributed to her rather than by her (p. 236).

This usurpation and reification of Evelina's name graphically illustrates how a narrowly defined, passive female character but poorly serves her, causing her to forfeit Orville's good opinion and giving him “reason to suppose I presumed to boast of his acquaintance!” (p. 232). Evelina closes her letter by acknowledging to Orville that she was used as the “instrument however innocently, of so much trouble” (p. 235).

This episode also introduces the purloined letter and the forged reply. Her letter never reaches Orville because Willoughby steals it, forges an impertinent answer, and signs Orville's name. Woman's letter, her “name,” is purloined through Willoughby by the patriarchal “name of the father.”¹⁰

When Evelina's letter is diverted from its path, it becomes purloined in another sense (as in the French pur-loigner, to put aside or put amiss, to suffer), a letter in sufferance, trapped in a discourse it does not initiate, a letter effectively silenced.¹¹ Nonetheless, when the letter is diverted from its “proper” course, it does not cease to function. Evelina's letter overreaches authorial intention and male possession, initiating a chain of unpredictable changes in whoever comes to read it. She intends her letter to represent her “truely” to Orville, whereas Willoughby intends his letter persuasively to present Orville as different from the man himself. In each case, the one who comes to possess the letter is determined by it in unexpected ways. While the forged reply delights Evelina (at least at first), Evelina's letter comes to possess Willoughby. In holding her letter, Willoughby hides her and her possibilities and becomes possessed by what he possesses without authority. In holding the false letter, Evelina comes to a clearer understanding of Orville. The letter stirs desire, and in some sense, rewrites all their lives.

At first perusal, as Evelina ruefully admits, the forged reply delights her. She marks only its expressions of regard because they answer her own desires:

It … gave me no sensation but of delight … I only marked the expressions of his own regard … repeating to myself, “Good God, is it possible?—am I then loved by Lord Orville?”

(p. 242)

In a second reading, “every word changed—it did not seem the same letter.” She recalls, furthermore, the circumstances surrounding the receipt of the letter:

Had this letter been the most respectful that could be written, the clandestine air given to it, by his proposal of sending his servant for my answer, instead of having it directed to his house, would effectually have prevented my writing.

(p. 245)

In the forgery, Willoughby speaks for Orville in his name, to discredit his authority and to conceal Evelina's “capacity”: “I concealed your letter to prevent a discovery of your capacity; and I wrote you an answer, which I hoped would prevent your wishing for any other” (p. 370). It bears a “clandestine air” because it tries to divert her response, to prevent her from writing (p. 245). Thus the forged letter requests Evelina to conceal herself once again, to hide behind her innocence, and to open herself to danger. In purloining her letter he silences her, denies her voice and name.

Nevertheless, words are changed by changing contexts, and when she and Orville meet in Bristol, Evelina rejects the forgery, rejects Villars's abstractionist advice about character, and lets observation guide her judgment. She can accordingly interpret the letter more accurately when writing about it. Writing opens to her a horizon of experience beyond the literal reading of “Orville's” letter, beyond the sense corresponding to her desire, beyond the presence of the Orville presented to her. Although the words in the forged letter remain unchanged, the meaning of them does not. When she rethinks the situation by writing about it, Villars's reply and Orville's past actions change the significance of the false letter.

When Evelina meets Orville face to face, her proper, intended coldness and reserve melt away and she writes Villars:

It was my intention, nay, my endeavour, to support them with firmness: but when I formed the plan, I thought only of the letter,—not of Lord Orville!

(p. 264)

In rejecting the false letter as a misrepresentation of Orville, Evelina acts from the conviction that she knows him through a broader context of experience—character, regard, comportment.

The meaning, then, of the letter resides in the relations between sender and receiver, a communal bond that enmeshes in its web whoever comes in contact with it. When Willoughby purloins Evelina's letter, he is only the most outrageous (and hence useful) instance of a social order that in speaking for her, in owning the signs that signify her, purloins her letter. In The Rape of Clarissa, Terry Eagleton conjoins writing and woman:

The problem of writing is in this sense the problem of the woman: how is she to be at once decorous and spontaneous, translucently candid yet subdued to social pressure? Writing, like women, marks a frontier between public and private, at once agonized outpouring and prudent stratagem.¹²

Through the dialogic agency of a letter, both “agonized outpouring and prudent stratagem,” and of her own journal, “decorous and spontaneous, translucently candid yet subdued to social pressure,” Evelina better understands the consequences of her misrepresentation. Moreover, she recognizes that silence does not prevent her from self-revelation when she admits that behavior, mood, and other non-verbal gestures create a horizon of possible meanings for Orville to interpret: “I tremble lest he should mistake my indignation for confusion!—lest he should misconstrue my reserve into embarrassment!” (p. 259). And again, “I could not endure he should make his own interpretation of my silence” (p. 281).

Writing discovers meaning for Evelina. She does not simply record what she sees in London, her spectatorship. In writing, Evelina learns that she is capable of thought and therefore capable of speech, and she says this in the very process of denying it: “I will talk,—write,—think of him no more!” (p. 247). She may pretend to use the literal and unambiguous language of an innocent narrator: “Pray excuse the wretched stuff I write” (p. 17). But her disclaimers cause Villars to miss the strength and achievement of Evelina's letters. He unwittingly acknowledges their authority by accepting them as representational, as veridical accounts. The persuasive power of her narration compensates for the confusion and distress that a predetermined innocence causes her. She corresponds because her experiences do not—discordia concors.

In writing Evelina finds the connections, the parallels, and the patterns of events that shape her experience for herself and for her co-respondents. In writing, Evelina can explain and defend how she behaved at her first ball, although she could never do so by speaking directly to those who received a wrong impression of her. In a letter she can discuss her disapprobation of people, places, and events, expressing attitudes and opinions that she must otherwise hide or dissemble.

At times, when Evelina falls back upon the reductive concept of female innocence, even Villars warns that such comportment can by a “too passive facility, risk the censure of the world, or your own future regret” (p. 149). To discover that writing uncovers what has been carefully concealed from oneself can be very disconcerting: “I will not write any longer; for the more I think … the less indifferent … I find myself” (p. 13). Writing begins to find for her, her self. What she cannot see, perhaps what at times she will not see, is that transparency, innocence, is available only within experience. The greater her vocabulary of experience, the broader her perspective on a situation, the more she understands the power and attendant dangers of innocence. Writing thus enables Evelina to share in the composition of her own destiny, to see that the role of innocent bystander is often complicitous with that of active participant.

Writing as act precludes her from being a passive spectator: she is enmeshed in a web of discourse that calls for her response, that connects her to her particular place in culture. Writing reliably guides or opens her to possible modes of female conduct. When Villars warns Evelina against “those regions of fancy and passion whither her new guide conducted her” (p. 290), he also implies that writing informs experience since her new “guide” is her imaginative pen—not patriarchal advice.

With the help of this new guide, Evelina discovers how she can resist any plot ready-formed for her. It enables her to speak for herself in spite of cultural limits upon her discourse. Similarly, the episodic movement of epistolary narrative resists the overarching structure and closure of a conventional plot. The epistolary shapes pathos, terror, emotion in such a way as to discourage the reader from building theoretical analyses upon it. Her letters are not a form for imperatives, statements of facts, or assertions. Through the epistolary mode, the indirection of the culturally unsayable opens channels for her feelings.

Still, Evelina's feelings are less a subject she takes up than an affective condition that takes her: “I made a resolution, when I began, that I would not be urgent; but my pen—or rather my thoughts, will not suffer me to keep it—” (p. 13). Writing does not merely record her feeling for Orville, it shapes it, gives space for the feelings that draw her into dark alleys. Writing reveals to her—and others—the pattern of her desires. Villars, Maria (her friend), and we are sure she is in love, even though she has never admitted to it openly. Villars says, “Long … have I perceived the ascendancy which Lord Orville has gained upon your mind” (p. 290). Evelina writes to Villars but finds herself addressing Orville:

Oh! Lord Orville!—it shall be the sole study of my happy life, to express, better than by words, the sense I have of your exalted benevolence and greatness of mind!

(p. 369)

She indirectly criticizes her culture when she, like Burney, deliberately conceals her authority by editing, or merely recording, events in the form of private letters. Evelina allows the dialogue to speak for her rather than playing author in the patriarchal sense. Her letters soften the impertinence of their own intimate revelation, especially when that intimacy reveals a female.¹³ The intimacy of the letter creates the impression of saying what was not intended to be heard, what she is not authorized to say. Thus, she can use writing as a form of cultural power to disarm cherished notions rather than wresting them from the grip of the opposition. The patriarchal authorities, those “magistrates of the press, and Censors for the public” (Original Dedication, n. pag.) merely assert what ought to be, while Evelina describes what is or, rather, what appears.

Evelina's authority becomes a viable alternative not only to the power exercised by the males, but to that of the other women. Madame Duval's access to society rests entirely upon patrilineal name and money for which she is tolerated more than accepted. Lady Howard can speak with the authority of the patrilineal name, money, and position. She therefore does not test the limits of masculine authority. Though Mrs. Selwyn thrives on satirical challenges to authority, she too is indulged for the sake of name and position. These versions of female power rely on an idea of identity coextensive with patriarchy. A forced race between the two nameless, old female servants, so often puzzling to readers, demonstrates the plight of woman without recourse to male legitimation. The argument here is that Evelina, by contrast, opens up a non-patriarchal concept of identity and authority.

The novel is about sendings, letters, hence a novel without author(ity), only an editor.¹⁴ In both Burney's preface and Evelina's narrative, authority is renounced. What is true of the letters is true of the novel: neither Evelina, the one narrated and the one narrating, nor Burney authors it in the sense of origination. They send letters—one sends to Berry Hill, one into the world—but they do not speak for others. They let others speak for themselves. They listen to the world and send letters as a function of listening. In narrating, Evelina lets the others speak and thus must listen and understand better perhaps than they understand themselves. She makes Mrs. Selwyn's irony her own and makes Branghton vulgarity part of her world even as she dismisses it; she even assimilates the aggression of the male and the displacement of woman to this narrated world.

Narrating names her character long before her father or husband gives her an authorized, patrilineal name. But the narrative is not public, otherwise it could not be written—or it is public only by editorial intervention.¹⁵ Like Evelina's unauthorized being, her letters are unauthorized, private appeals to another, protected by an internal censorship:

I gave over the attempt of reading … and, having no voice to answer the inquiries of Lord Orville, I put the letter into his hands, and left it to speak both for me and itself.

(p. 356, emphasis added)

Otherwise they would be indecorous, even impertinent.

Burney may edit Evelina's letters, and we may eavesdrop. Like Willoughby, we may be claimed, drawn into the narrative web, by overhearing Evelina, but she does not intend the world to hear what she is not authorized to say. Instead, Evelina's authority is revealed as that of character in the ancient sense of ethos. It is based on everything we as readers know about her: her represented and representing selves, her shrewdness in oscillating between those two poles. Ethos emerges as a provisional identity, in-between the narrator/narrated, in-between the author/editor Burney, between the different sendings.

Burney's narrative about Evelina writing a narrative about herself thus is not properly named or “fathered”; like that of Evelina, it is “without name, without recommendation, and unknown” (Original Dedication). Evelina's letter was purloined at birth and her search is for a “legitimate” name, a voice that is authentically her own. Evelina unnamed cannot authenticate her own narrative according to the patriarchal standards for authority and legitimacy. To do so would open her to dangers that patrilineal name, position, and money would otherwise circumvent. It would also open her to the censure that Mrs. Selwyn's irony receives. Jean-François Lyotard helps us say what is at stake in this narrative at a high level of generality, and hence at a broad level of applicability. Legitimation, he observes, is the process of narrating the true and false.¹⁶ Representation and its rational criterion of adequacy or accuracy are masculine—an Enlightenment ideal. In the Enlightenment culture of Burney's age, narrative knowledge per se lacks legitimacy and belongs to “fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children” (Lyotard, p. 27). However, narrative knowledge lies behind, is presupposed even by, rational discourse. Such discourse reveals the significant shape of human life in that all questions of truth are situated in events that have enough coherence to be told as a narrative. The events and their connections are not veridical; rather they are events of vision, the a priori context for representational discourse.

It is no accident that women like Evelina—who lack authority and lack the presumption of patriarchy that can authorize, represent, control signification and inheritance of name—write letters that forestall closure and prevent determinant meaning. Instead of closing the world in with patriarchal discourse, these generative women—Evelina, Caroline Evelyn, Fanny Burney—give it birth, even beyond their own mortality.

Woman's purloinable letter, like an unnamed child without a legitimating birthright, reveals that there is no fixed identity at either end of the correspondence. Even by patriarchy's rules, Evelina's birthright cannot be subject to a public claim, for if it were, it would violate the rule of female propriety and damage her father's honor. She must rely instead on private intercession by others who speak on her behalf. Yet what convinces Sir John Belmont that Evelina is his daughter is not Mrs. Selwyn's argument, not a legal claim, not even an appeal to pathos. It is Evelina's resemblance to her mother, a “truth” that destroys his narrative by substituting another—by refiguring his life. That is, her most convincing proof is neither a document nor a form of patriarchal speech that bears the authority of a truth statement. She “posts” a likeness of her mother that lacks any of those patrilineal seals of legitimation. Her mother's (Carolyn Evelyn's) letter, read by him years after her death, is shattering: “Ten thousand daggers could not have wounded me like this letter” (p. 367). Evelina's legitimacy rests on a revolutionary displacement of the criterion of legitimacy inherent in patriarchal culture. It rests upon her own renunciation of the patriarchal authority that insists upon power over discourse. Though she seems to sink into the conventional patrilineal family and ends her story, “I have time for no more [writing]” (p. 388), her lack of name and means by which her name is recovered opens a counter-cultural possibility for narrating ourselves without the authoritative subject at either end of the writing process.

We have seen that Evelina's efforts to represent herself as an entity are subverted by the act of writing. In writing, the represented Evelina is exposed as a reductive concept, a product of the narrowly mediated, patriarchal code. When patriarchal discourse fails her, it speaks indirectly of her inexhaustibility and opens the possibility of an ongoing disclosure of an incomplete and incompletable identity. Writing, more than marks upon a page, calls forth the generative power of name, all that woman is and can be and is not yet, all that has been overlooked and is yet to be said about her.

Notes

1. Fanny Burney, 26 March 1778, The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768-1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (1889; rpt. London: George Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1913), II, 216; and Evelina (New York: Norton, 1965). Further citations are to this edition of Evelina and will appear in the text.

2. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1700-1800 (London: Constable, 1932), p. 141.

3. See Julia L. Epstein, The Iron Pen (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989) for an account of how Evelina thwarts the language of suppression, pp. 93-122. Also see The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), and Hemlow's The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), for an account of Burney's reception by the reviewers.

4. While it is of great sociological interest that females have been oppressed by the constraints of men, it is important to remember that in the prevailing theoretical discussions of the term “patriarchal,” the father function is not limited by gender. The patriarchy under question here is the entire Western locus of authority and origin. In contrast, Patricia Meyer Spacks writes that “female innocence, then, is male oppression,” in “‘Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (Fall 1974), 27-46, 31. See also Spacks's The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975). Myra Jehlen proposes that “impotent feminine sensibility” is a basic structure of the novel. She also sees interiority as metaphorically female; since the novel demands interiority, the hero who is sensitive is repeatedly described in feminine terms; consequently, the “interior self” represented in novels is the “female interior self in all men,” in “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 214, 212.

5. The notion of character as a permanent, stable, psychological subject or as a similarly autonomous literary or linguistic entity has been challenged on many fronts: Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray in psychoanalysis; Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault in philosophy; Habermas, MacIntyre, Arendt in political theory and ethics; Bakhtin, Lukács, J. M. Bernstein in literary theory; Kuhn and Richard Bernstein in science. Foucault summarizes this autonomous subject as the “author-function,” which is “tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses.” See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 130.

6. See Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 241. Rogers cites Evelina as an example of enforced passivity because she is forbidden to take any initiative to encourage Orville or discover his sentiments (p. 164).

7. Catherine Parke distinguishes between the “I” who cannot simultaneously note itself and write and the “Name” signifying the “functional counterpart of the third-person” and “appearance in a world of appearances,” in “Vision and Revision: A Model for Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel of Education,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16, No. 2 (1982-1983), 165.

8. John J. Richetti, “Voice and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Haywood to Burney,” Studies in the Novel, 19 (Fall 1987), 269. Also see Mary Wollstonecraft, who remarks that “purity of mind … is something nobler than innocence, it is the delicacy of reflections, and not the coyness of ignorance,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 122-23.

9. In using terms like “commodity” and “bourgeois economy” I wish to acknowledge the force of Marxist critique of quantification, reified persons, and social relations, without taking materialist theory as the basis for my argument about this novel or making a specifically economic argument. Evelina's lack of wealth and name are not simply material conditions; her situation in life is already interpreted in cultural discourse. Hence my position is a hermeneutic one. For a social critique see Judith Lowder Newton in Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 23-54, 50.

10. Theft, according to the Promethean myth, makes the one who steals feel he is a god, in control, author of the word. Patriarchal authoring fails to signify difference, here the female unsaid. Lacan labels the unsaid as the other or the desire of the other mediated by linguistic modes. Man's desire (lack) of the other finds form in language; language is the displacement of desire, the Derridean textuality where the perpetual restructuring of the subject takes place. Any construct of woman will always be subverted by other discourses that exceed it. See Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 39-72. See also Barbara Johnson's discussion of Lacan, Poe, Derrida in The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

11. Luce Irigaray relates the concept of woman to women's suffering (neurosis) and woman's lack of discourse in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); the publisher's notes on Irigaray's key terms are especially helpful here (pp. 219-22).

12. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 17, 46.

13. For a discussion of the epistolary form, see chapter 2, “Richardson's Sources,” in Cynthia Griffin Wolff's Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1972), pp. 14-58. See also Eagleton's discussion of the epistolary, based upon Wolff's work (pp. 49-51). Eagleton states that a decorum of who may write to whom, and under what conditions, provides an internal censorship since the epistle is at heart an appeal to another.

14. For the “sendings” of letters as the play of alterity or différance, see Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), in particular “Le Facteur de la Vérité” (pp. 413-96) on Lacan and Poe.

15. On the binary axis of private-public, self-world, etc., see Katharine M. Rogers, “Fanny Burney: The Private Self and the Published Self,” International Journal of Women's Studies, 7, No. 2 (1984), 110-17, and Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988).

16. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 6-9. Further citations will appear in the text.