SOURCE: “An Unerring Rule: The Reformation of the Father in Frances Burney's Evelina,” in The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 119-38.

[In the following essay, Severance proposes a psychoanalytical approach to Evelina that focuses on political rather than individual psychology. From this standpoint, Severance examines the relationship of the theme and structure of Evelina to the kingship of George III and his evolution from a symbol of illegitimate power to an impotent emblem of national unity.]

If in my heart the love of Virtue glows,
‘Twas planted there by an unerring rule;
From thy example the pure flame arose,
Thy life, my precept—thy good works, my school.(1)

For most of Frances Burney's critical afterlife, these verses dedicated to her father have served mainly to indicate her status as a daddy's girl. A recent resurgence of critical interest in Burney's life and work, however, has taken up Burney's relationship with her father and the proliferation of father figures in her fiction as part of a larger examination of women's relationships to and within patriarchy that focuses on the contradiction in these relationships.² This new theoretical turn has criticized psychoanalytic interpretations of fictional works as expressions of the psychic history of their authors, and which therefore isolated women authors within the family circle, cutting out any reference to literary or social influences beyond what could be directly imparted by the (biological) father. Instead, this work has taken a less individualistic approach that raises larger questions about the positioning of women during the Enlightenment by the “progressive” (this term is part of the controversy) social and political theories of that moment. To some extent, Frances Burney's critical revival has constructed her as an “everywoman” whose “simple honesty about her cultural circumstances as a woman and writer” can be traced “in texts divided against themselves, embodying the ideological rifts implicit in female identity as it is created and creates itself in patriarchal culture.”³

In moving away from the emphasis on and evaluation of individual psychology toward a critique of the shaping force of ideology, recent Burney scholarship has constructed a framework within which the social significance of the so-called domestic novel can be brought forward. It has also raised the question of the relation between women and the ideological discourses that act so forcefully upon them. In place of an investigation of this question, recent analyses of ideological effects tend to insert the term “patriarchy” into the breach, which provides these effects with a final cause but leads to a theoretical impasse. Roughly speaking, this question of the relation between women and the patriarchal social order has been addressed in two ways: either the woman is assumed to be autonomous and self-created, and patriarchy is said to operate as an external force, duping and/or coercing her into submission by means of false promises of happiness and/or warnings about the consequences of noncompliance, or she is theorized as a realization of patriarchal ideology, which positions her according to its specifications.⁴ The first approach searches through the woman writer's life and work for clues that explain her relationship to patriarchy, perpetuating questionable categories like “complicity” and “rebelliousness.” Once it has established the woman as a construction of patriarchal discourse, the latter approach finds it difficult to account for differences within and/or departures from the “norm” of compliance. As a result, the differences between a case study of complicity like Hannah More, an ambivalent figure like Frances Burney, and a rebellious icon like Mary Wollstonecraft are often attributed to individual temperament or personality—calling up the ghost of the earlier, individualistic criticism that has so effectively been undermined.⁵

The resolution of this impasse lies in a psychoanalytic approach that deals not so much with the psychological as with the political, one that positions Burney's first novel in the transformation from a failed patriarchal socio-political order to the democratic nation constituted when—to quote Claude Lefort—“the locus of power becomes an empty place.”⁶ I will argue that in its epistolary relationship between a “more-than-father” and his “more-than-daughter,” Evelina participates in the symbolic mutation which resulted in England's emergence as a modern nation. Through an examination of the “apotheosis” of George III, I will show that British nationalist discourse was intimately bound up with the discourse of moral education, and that the king's transformation from the embodiment of illegitimate power to an impotent signifier of national unity accomplished the reformation of the father initiated in educational discourse and carried out in the theme and structure of Burney's Evelina.

1

We could say that the narrative of Evelina traces its heroine's journey from the arms of her loving guardian and “more-than-father,” Mr. Villars, to the enveloping arms of Lord Orville, her fatherly lover and husband. In the course of this journey, she encounters two anti-fathers: Captain Mirvan, Villars' perverted double, who leaves his beleaguered wife to smooth over his boorish behavior; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a libertine nobleman whose aggressive pursuit and questionable intentions provide an antithesis to Lord Orville's virtue and delicacy. Bridging these two kinds of fathers, and providing, in the end, a satisfactory fusion, is Evelina's biological father, Sir John Belmont.⁷ This brief outline does not account for the wealth of incident and character in the novel, but it does point to the significance of father figures in Burney's narrative.

The novel opens with an exchange of letters between the Reverend Arthur Villars and Lady Howard, through which the pre-history of our heroine is laid before us: two generations fraught with romance, betrayal, and tragic death. The history of Evelina's mother is especially pathetic; it reads like the outline of a carefully cleansed version of Clarissa, complete with plotting parental figures, a libertine, (apparently) extra-marital sex, and an innocent young woman who succumbs to her oppressors and dies of sorrow. There is, however, an important factor that differentiates Evelina from Clarissa: Mr. Villars. Villars' narration of the history of Caroline Evelyn shapes its didactic impact on its readers. For instance, Villars' version of Caroline Evelyn's story revolves around money, not passion and seduction. In place of the Harlowes—who would have traded their Clarissa for an undesirable man's fortune, but who also envied her beauty and virtue—we get Madame Duval, who wanted to bestow her daughter's fortune upon her second husband's nephew. Lovelace's sadistic pursuit of Clarissa's innocence is replaced by Sir John's desire for Caroline's fortune—Villars claims that Sir John “burnt the certificate of their marriage” when he found that he was to be “disappointed of the fortune he expected” (15). In Villars' hands, Caroline's Clarissa-like tale is made fully explicable; he allows no remainder of desire or enjoyment to muddy the surface of Evelina's prehistory. Villars' conductbook-inspired editing transforms the moralistic sublimity of a novel like Clarissa into an instructive tale about flawed parental behavior and bad marital judgment, positioning Evelina's tale in the context of “the world” its heroine is about to enter.

Some have read beneath the surface of Villars' benevolence to uncover an oppressive patriarch with whom Evelina cannot afford to be honest.⁸ The history of his relations with the Evelyn family, however, provides convincing evidence that Mr. Villars' love is absolutely unconditional; moreover, his anxiety at the prospect of Evelina following the rest of her family into disaster is directed much more toward the prospect of his suffering than hers.⁹ In other words, it is his position as Evelina's “more-than-father” that is threatened by his “more-than-daughter's” entrance into the world. His past failures, instead of hardening his disciplinary resolve, make Villars all the more grateful for Evelina's correspondence. His letters often culminate with expressions of this gratitude: “I cannot too much thank you, my dearest Evelina, for the minuteness of your communications; continue to me this indulgence, for I should be miserable if in ignorance of your proceedings” (55). He frequently urges Evelina not to fear his judgment: “open to me thy whole heart—it can have no feelings for which I will not make allowance” (263).

Mr. Villars' anxiety about the possibility of interruptions in their correspondence thus seems accounted for, but what about Evelina's point of view? An examination of Evelina's letter-writing yields no evidence that is a duty she performs reluctantly or disingenuously. On the contrary, she eagerly recounts her experiences, with full assurance of her guardian's understanding exactly what she means. She looks to him as an authoritative judge of her actions and intentions, because she knows that even when she does something that other observers might well consider impertinent or improper, he will trust in her innocence. His response to her description of a dangerous carriage ride with Sir Clement Willoughby points to this faith: “O my child, how thankful am I for your escape! I need not now, I am sure, enlarge upon your indiscretion and want of thought, in so hastily trusting yourself with a man so little known to you, and whose gaiety and flightiness should have put you on your guard” (115). In the same letter, he expresses his relief at her departure from London: “the artlessness of your nature, and the simplicity of your education, alike unfit you for the thorny paths of the great and busy world” (116). His persistent belief in her blamelessness, and in the dangers that encroach upon her, keep her safe from self-doubt.

Situating her character in a cultural/ideological context, we could say that Evelina is (as Gerald Newman puts it) a “personification of Sincerity,” the all-encompassing keyword for British national identity in the eighteenth century.¹⁰ Newman defines Sincerity as a combination of five characteristics—“innocence, honesty, originality, frankness, and moral self-reliance”—which constitute “not only a psychological profile but the outlines of an heroic personality. What we have here … is the National Identity itself, a mythic collective personality with distinct ethnic and social referents” (133). Both Newman's notion of Sincerity and the novel's guarantee of innocence, however, prove to be contradictory; indeed, the contradictory nature of Evelina's innocence produces a sort of duplicity in her relationship—both thematic and structural (i.e., epistolary)—with Mr. Villars. On the one hand, Evelina's “innocence” involves inexperience and infinite malleability; her letters are peppered with apologetic disclaimers of responsibility. For instance, after an unforeseen delay in her first departure from London, she writes:

How much will you be surprised, my dearest Sir, at receiving another letter from London of your Evelina's writing! But, believe me, it was not my fault, neither is it my happiness, that I am still here. …

(49).

It would seem that nothing is Evelina's fault, and that almost everyone she encounters imposes upon her trusting nature: the Branghtons insist that she accompany them to public places she has little interest in seeing; myriad men impose themselves upon her, demanding that she dance with them, walk with them, ride with them, or marry them. Madame Duval constantly makes plans for Evelina's future without the least concern as to what Evelina might want. These demands press in upon Evelina, binding her to the will of others in a cycle of claustrophobic self-renunciation. On the other hand, Evelina is “innocent” in a precisely opposite sense: she is independent of the other wills, possessed of what Newman would call “moral self-reliance.”

It is clear that Evelina's anecdotes about the impositions upon her innocence are to be read against Mr. Villars' scrutinizing, anxious faith. However, it is equally clear that to see Villars as an authoritarian patriarch is to perform an overly paranoid reading of the novel, one that leaves aside what seems most important about this relationship. Moreover, the patriarchal reading forces the father-daughter relationship into an ahistorical model (a master/slave paradigm) that does not account for the historical shift out of which emerge both its “ideal” fathers, respected for their benevolence, and its “primal” fathers, reviled for their despotism.

Of course, in recent work on Burney there is widespread recognition of the father's shifting status in the wake of political and social changes in eighteenth-century England. Margaret Doody mentions that “the old structures were crumbling, and kings and fathers actually had less authority than previously,” but her analysis of this change is biographically specific. Arguing that “a sort of emotional blackmail is substituted for more straightforward authoritarianism,” she describes the impact of this substitution in Charles Burney's relations with his children. Julia Epstein argues on the one hand that Evelina “provides a crucial and critical delineation of the social fragmentation beginning to be effected” by the rise of the middle class and the decay of “aristocratic values and public behaviors” which left in place “outmoded” social rules that “constrained female conduct and thereby endangered the very women they were allegedly established to protect.” On the other hand, she also reads Mr. Villars as a stand-in for a “patriarchal social order that commands [Evelina's] submission and her duplicity”—and, by extension, the submission of all women in the late eighteenth century. Kristina Straub accounts for the contradiction between patriarchal authority and male impotence when she argues that women in Burney's fiction “often end up acting in a power vacuum created by male impotence without having the economic and social sanction to fill the empty space of an ostensible rather than actual male authority,” but does not explain how such a dysfunctional system came into existence or how it perpetuates itself.¹¹

As if in answer to the questions raised by Straub and Epstein's accounts, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace coins the term “new-style patriarchy” to describe a modern revitalization of patriarchal rule via an “apparently benevolent” father, whose “coercive power” is replaced by an educational authority which allows him to “educat[e] his dependents into the ways of deference and obedience”¹² Kowaleski-Wallace rightly criticizes historians like Lawrence Stone and Randolph Trumbach for focusing too optimistically on the decline of patriarchy without reflecting sufficiently upon the persistence of fatherly authority in a modern social order, but it remains imperative to attend to the decline in the political importance of patriarchal power documented by these and other historians. In other words, if we are too quick to assimilate a very real mutation of the father's role to a mere strategy by means of which he perpetuates his power, we fail to account for a shift in the nature of his authority.

Indeed, the ideal of the father as benevolent educator emerges in the political battle against the absolute monarch initiated in Locke's Two Treatises of Government, when he rejects Filmer's appropriation of the biblical Adam as a figure for absolute monarchy on the grounds that all men have a right to property, and that fatherhood is not a right based on the biological fact of begetting but a duty based on the social obligation to provide for and educate one's children.¹³ Locke insists that parental authority is legitimate only insofar as it operates in the service of the parental duty to extract from the irrational, bodily enjoyment of infancy a rational, self-governing adult. This undermining of monarchical absolutism does not, of course, institute an egalitarian family; instead, the oligarchy of law by virtue of which both the domestics and children were connected to the head of the family by relations of personal dependence is replaced by an internal hierarchy of fact, so that the father commands by virtue of his intellectual, political, juridical superiority.¹⁴ This superiority is exorbitantly established in response to the fact—as Doody, Straub, Epstein and Kowaleski-Wallace have all noted—that the father's status as the articulator of the social Law is dependent upon what Locke terms the “respect” of his wife and children for that Law, a dependence that points to his “impotence.”¹⁵

Recognizing this impotence, eighteenth-century educational discourse proclaimed it the woman's duty to construct the father's position: this is clearly the moral of Edward, in which Dr. Moore wrote admiringly that “to make her husband in reality a man of sense and benevolence was not in Mrs. Barnet's power, but she managed matters so as to make him frequently appear such.”¹⁶ While both sexes authored sentimental and didactic novels inculcating the “cult of filial obedience” and “the ethics of wifehood,” these themes were, as J. M. S. Tompkins notes, “especially characteristic of the books of women.” In these novels, wives and children are urged to make what Tompkins calls “the gesture of submission,” whether the father is worthy of it or not. This gesture is inculcated not as the capitulation of the weak but rather as “the abnegation of the strong,” as something much more active than mere obedience: the “wife faced with an unworthy husband, the child oppressed by a tyrannous father, do more than obey. By an act of will they abrogate reason, quell discrimination, and not only accept but approve the fiat they bow to.”¹⁷

As Tompkins points out, the cult of submission was exorbitantly inculcated in and through the family: “the situation is almost always domestic; these filial prostrations have no political or ecclesiastical parallels, though theoretically the submission of subject to king or penitent to confessor is not less pregnant with emotion or less capable of idealization” (87). This is because its significance is neither political nor ecclesiastical, but national; it culminated on a national scale in the late eighteenth century, when middle class women devoted themselves to the transformation of George III into the beloved father of the nation.¹⁸ How can we understand this female investment in the father's authority, if not as a shift that made the slaves responsible for the perpetuation of the master's reign? If we examine the king's transformation in the context of what Lefort calls “a mutation of a symbolic order,” we can see it—and Burney's part in it—as a democratic impulse.¹⁹

2

The paradoxical juxtaposition of fatherly authority and impotence, in other words, is a manifestation of what Lefort calls the “distinguishing feature” of democracy:

It [democracy] makes the law something which … gives meaning to human actions only on condition that human beings desire it, that they apprehend it as the reason for their coexistence and as the condition of possibility of their judging and being judged.²⁰

In a democratic order, the father articulates a Law that is not “materialized within the social space” but instead is “removed from the realm of certainty, now that no one can take the place of the supreme judge, now that this empty place sustains the demand to know” (39). The discourse of moral education positions the father as a place holder for this “supreme judge,” and he performs his duty by sustaining the possibility of moral judgment.

In its inculcation of the father's impotent centrality, the discourse of moral education performs the disentanglement the rule of power from the rule of law and the consequent delineation of two distinct and yet interdependent realms: the moment termed “the political” and the space called “the social.” Ernesto Laclau describes the “political” as the moment in which power manifests itself in a contingent act or decision in the face of a group of alternatives and establishes one alternative as “hegemonic” in a “moment of sedimentation,” a necessary repression of the contingent origins of practices and beliefs. In this moment, the “collective will” is determined via an operation of power that institutes and reconfigures “the social” as a space in which practices and differential relations maintain the appearance of objectivity. While its boundary is constantly displaced, the division between the social and political is nonetheless constitutive of democratic social relations.²¹ With this division in mind, we can recognize the two fathers delineated in Freud's Totem and Taboo—the “primal father” who rules menacingly, enjoyingly over the political, and the “ideal father” who polices the social—as “thoroughly modern.” That is to say, it is only possible to conceive of either father after the democratic evacuation of the space of power. The primal father, in short, is an embodiment of the contingent, illegitimate (i.e., political) operation of power that founds the “neutral” social Law articulated by the ideal father.²²

We can recognize a shift between the two fathers in George III's transformation from malevolent tyrant to father of the nation. Indeed, the king's apotheosis marked the culmination of Britain's negotiation of the political aftermath of the failure of monarchical power—a negotiation that took place through moral discourse. In her examination of British political and moral philosophy, Carol Kay argues that a sustained investigation into “those qualities of mankind, that concern their living together in Peace, and Unity” begins with the political science of Hobbes.²³ In the wake of the Revolution's abrogation of the monarch's political authority, Hobbes sees no resolution to what he pictures as “the dilemma of endless contentions over uncertainties” but the establishment of a new kind of sovereign authority to resolve them (38).²⁴ Kay traces the movement of moral philosophy from Hobbes' anxious response to the failure of monarchical power to Hume's complacent assertion that “the creation of a shared morality is a natural-feeling historical growth, without a single, identifiable origin” (132-33). Hume's “solution” to the dilemma posed by the Revolution's separation of (political) power from (social) law, in other words, rests upon the assumption of a shared recognition of the law (and thus, as Kay puts it, the assumption of “the stability and homogeneity of settled nations” (136)), leaving aside the question of the political power that founds the social. Hume's failure to address the question of what Kay calls “the arbitrary imposition of political authority” was shared by the nation as a whole; this failure engendered a social order permeated with the political—i.e., a virulent nationalism that insisted upon the radical innocence of British society and reviled the foreign influence at the heart of its political system, in its Members of Parliament and, most visibly, its king.

The “primalization” of the monarch was also a significant aspect of nationalist discourse in France and the U.S.,²⁵ but Britain's reconstitution of George III as a figure of national unity was unique, an outcome that resulted from its morally inflected nationalist discourse. In the early decades of his reign, royal satires conveyed an image of the king as both a usurper of power and an impotent, useless figurehead: “Although usually portrayed as a blind simpleton, kept in leading strings by his mother and her reputed lover, Lord Bute, he figured sometimes as a villain in his own right: as an oriental tyrant who just happened to rule in the West, as an auxiliary of corruption, or … as a closet Catholic.”²⁶ In one print, the king—nodding off on a divan, his legs unceremoniously spread-eagled—is discovered by a female figure representing Britain, who asks, “Am I thus protected?” The caption reads: “The State Watchman discovered by the Genius of Britain studying plans for the Reduction of America.” These satires hone in on the King's body—he is dressed in outlandish costumes (as Nero fiddling while Rome burns, a dancing master, or a child in a dress wielding a rattle), drawn as an animal (usually an ass), or pictured slumped and inert. Whether he is portrayed as a dupe or a tyrant (or, in some cases, as both), the king is castigated for pursuing “trifling amusement”—button-making, hunting, fiddling—or attacked as a false father.²⁷ In short, the king is bodied forth in the popular press as an enjoying, malevolent presence, and his “power” is figured as purely personal or private—as if it had no social effectiveness or authority.

While the monarch's inability to prevent the loss of the American colonies was a favorite topic in satires of the 1770s, it cannot be said to be the only cause of his unpopularity among his British subjects. As Vincent Carretta points out, Britons branded the king as an “unwitting tyrant” long before the colonies “discovered” that the “symbol of kingship they had cherished” was “a satanic delusion, a perversion of political values.”²⁸ As the 1760s gave way to the 70s, satirists who had been attacking the king as a deluded prince began to focus on his political corruption—at this point, as Carretta notes, “George III may still be a fool, but he is now a dangerous one whose overtly personal involvement in the struggle for power undercuts his royal dignity” (137). The king's supposed usurpation of power preoccupied every level of political activity in the early part of his reign: radicals and republicans like Blake and Paine attacked King George, equating monarchy with tyranny and alleging that the British constitution institutionalized tyranny;²⁹ popular discontent was voiced by Associationist “reformers” like Horne Tooke, whose petitions to the king asserted the people's intention to wrest their lost liberty from the machinations of both the throne and the House of Commons;³⁰ and the conservative political elite engaged in a lengthy struggle over “constitutional propriety.” In the 1760s, a segment of this political elite—the Rockinghamite Opposition—began a sustained attack on the king in the name of the British constitution and British liberties, aligning itself with “the people” in an “artificial bond newly created by George's supposed tyranny.”³¹ As “the last king who fully ruled as well as reigned,”³² in other words, George III was suspected of exercising his personal power—a usurped and illegitimate power—to jam up the political machinery of the nation.

In the 1780s, the king's image began a gradual transformation: Colley points out that “he was repeatedly caricatured as a genial, homespun farmer, or as John Bull, or as St. George, or even … as Britain personified” (210). In short, he was dignified by the very powerlessness for which he had formerly been ridiculed. While Colley attributes this shift to the humiliating defeat in the American war, Gerald Newman provides a somewhat different account that centers on the political crisis after the American war that was resolved when King George extricated himself from the corrupt and “Insincere” aristocrats and attained new popularity as John Bull. After aligning themselves briefly and opportunistically with the Associationists, the Rockinghamites reversed themselves, laying bare the artificiality of their alliance with “the people.” In 1782, forced to abandon anyone who had been associated with his failed war policy, Lord North turned reluctantly to Rockingham, provoking widespread opposition on the grounds that the Rockingham-dominated House of Commons did not represent the people—as one M.P. put it, the House “might as well call itself the representative of France as of the people of England” (211). In 1783, after Rockingham's death, the “unexpected union between North, the ex-premier, and Fox, formerly his loudest critic,” seized parliamentary control, confirming popular suspicion of Parliament's corruption. In response, King George abruptly dismissed both Fox and North and installed Pitt the younger, a highly unconstitutional act that garnered him a great deal of public support. Then, in 1784, the king “dissolved Parliament and, in effect, referred the crisis to public opinion in a general election” (215), setting up a contrast not between the king and parliament, but between his “school boy Minister,” perceived as “the embodiment of the English National Character” and Fox, the “evil incarnation of Insincerity.”³³ In other words, the king's quintessentially political—i.e., arbitrary, contingent, unconstitutional—act preserved the monarchy by emptying it of political content and instituting the position of the prime minister as the legitimate exerciser of political power.

After this, the king became associated with the prime minister's popularity: “patriotism, which nearly always till 1784 had been the earmark of anti-ministerial politics, was now being assimilated to the support of the king and his prime minister” (221). The shift in the king's status is enacted in the emergence of a new type of public ceremony, fashioned in a deliberate attempt to establish British royal and national stability in the face of the Republican splendor of (post) revolutionary France. While the French replaced the monarchical content of old ceremonial forms with “a far more nationalist and militarist emphasis,” in Britain “almost all official celebrations tended to subsume national achievement in and connect it with glorification of the monarch.”³⁴ These celebrations of British royal “tradition” were “invented” in self-conscious opposition to the radical evacuation of power from the French throne.

The orderly and civic-minded nature of the modern re-invention of ancient tradition is summed up by a remark in an 1809 article in the Times: “It is not amidst the intoxication and riotous excesses of a civic banquet, that we are to look for that steady or enthusiastic loyalty which is at once the pledge and test of popular allegiance.”³⁵ In place of fountains running with wine for the populace and/or a private feast for the corporation, these eighteenth-century celebrations commemorated the king with equestrian statues paid for by public subscription, the establishment of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals and the promotion of Bible studies, and the erection or christening of public schools, dispensaries, and public street lighting. These were, in short, local celebrations of civic order and social control, in which the king functioned as a symbol of national unanimity.³⁶ On the national level, David Cannadine points out that British hostility to the “aggrandizement of royal influence” generated suspicion of celebrations of royal power; during the latter part of George's reign, such ceremony was valorized for the ineptness with which it was carried out.³⁷ Indeed, it was not lavish ceremony but “the appearance of domestic bliss” that ensured George III's popularity and became an essential part of the formula for royal popularity thereafter; the royal “apotheosis” was complete once the royal family—particularly the women—became the source of George's popularity. In 1789, Queen Charlotte received almost a quarter of the addresses on the king's recovery—“No female ever more justly deserved it,” remarked one newspaper, “she is a pattern of domestic virtue which cannot be too much admired.” In 1817, Princess Charlotte—a “focus for sentimental attachment, particularly among women,” since her birth in 1796—died in childbirth, and a national outpouring of compassion followed. “It really was,” one opposition politician recalled, “as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.”³⁸

Once he became an exemplary father—benevolent, domestic, apolitical—George III figured heavily in the language and imagery of patriotism, which was taken up by a wide spectrum of aspiring social groups and sectional interests throughout Britain, particularly those in urbanized areas. This undeniable upsurge in national consciousness in the late eighteenth century requires the same close examination as has been devoted to radical demonstrations and uprisings in the same period; it needs to be understood as something more than a reactionary sentiment or as the tool of the ruling class. As Colley points out, the “growing involvement in politics of men and women from the middling and working classes that characterized British society at this time was expressed as much if not more in support for the nation state, as it was in opposition to the men who governed it.”³⁹ The king's popularity as a figure for patriotic displays provides convincing evidence that class and nation in eighteenth-century Britain were not antithetical but two sides of the same historical process: the emergence of the nation.

In other words, the king's apotheosis was not a resurgence of monarchical authority, an undislodgeable resistance to democracy, as Vincent Carretta and others have argued.⁴⁰ If we attend to the way the figure of the king is rewritten under Lefort's notion of democracy so that he is no longer a powerful embodiment of the state, but a poor, pathetic, and for this very reason, sometimes lovable figure, we can see him as the inner condition of Britain's emergence as a modern nation. Insofar as he functioned as an empty place holder, the king remained at the center of this nation; he added nothing in the way of content to the discourse of the groups and interests that emerged at this historical moment, but instead became a visible symbol of the Nation, for the betterment or glory of which competing interests engaged in a battle for ideological hegemony. His re-formation as father of the nation did not put an end to the “endless contentions over uncertainties” that so preoccupied Hobbes; rather, it institutionalized them For, as Lefort says, a democratic order is founded upon the “legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate—a debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end.”⁴¹

3

The morally inflected nature of British nationalism, coupled with Lefort's conception of the democratic mutation as symbolic in nature, allows us to place Burney's Evelina within the context of George III's transformation, to see that it is riven with the same conflict that characterized England's political and social transformation and that its divided structure moves toward the same resolution. Of course, Evelina's participation in the emergence of British nationalism has already been examined by Gerald Newman, who reads the novel as a piece of nativist propaganda in which Evelina, the personification of English Sincerity, triumphs over frenchified Insincerity. Newman argues, in short, that Burney preaches “a leveling contempt for the abilities, tastes and morality of the rulers of England as an alien class, together with the legendary account of the dreadful cultural crisis into which this class had supposedly led the country.” While he admits that a distinction must be made between Burney's point of view and “the unreservedly anti-French and anti-aristocratic hostility so consistently advanced through the attitudes of Mirvan,” he insists that this distinction is “only one of degree.”⁴² Unlike Newman—who reads Evelina as a successful assertion of an innocent national identity—I read the novel's thematic and structural certainty of its heroine's moral innocence as a problem that it must overcome. I argue that its positivization of the father's judgment blocks its ideological and structural progress and produces the unevenness and claustrophobia that have often been noted in both its form and contents.

In Evelina's letters, exhaustive and unassimilated detail bubbles up unpredictably—e.g., descriptions of Evelina having her hair dressed, visiting the London shops to buy a silk, or sightseeing in various parks and gardens. Because they do not refer to each other within a stable, coherent narrative structure, these incidents must be referred to an external reality if we are to make sense of them. Indeed, most interpretations refer to them as a record or reflection of “the life and temper of eighteenth-century England, as seen through the curiosity of its young heroine.”⁴³ Even the disruptions of the heroine's everyday activity—which function as tests of her innocence—are circular rather than linear. The accumulation of this repetitive incident cannot produce a narrative that progresses—on the contrary, the narrative circulates repeatedly around Mr. Villars' reassurances and exhortations.

The key to this narrative blockage is Mr. Villars, Evelina's moral guarantor. On a thematic level, Mr. Villars' protection of her innocence delays her father's symbolic transformation, so that Evelina does not assume her true identity until the end of the novel. Before they finally meet, Evelina's only knowledge of her father has come from Mr. Villars' characterization of Sir John as a hopelessly decadent libertine whose recognition would pose a grave threat to her innocence. In a letter to Lady Howard, Villars justifies his decision to shield Evelina from her father on these grounds: “to expose her to the snares and dangers inevitably encircling a house of which the master is dissipated and unprincipled … seemed to me no less than suffering her to stumble into some dreadful pit, when the sun was in its meridian” (126). Indeed, Sir John has loomed larger than life, a figure beyond the reach of Mr. Villars' feeble laws and admonitions, and beyond the reach of the narrative—he looms over the novel as an enjoying, obscene transgressor of the social and familial bonds which it polices. Instead of assuming his public, familial responsibilities, it seems that Sir John—like George III—enjoys privately; his power, though not effective within it, is enjoyed at the expense of the social order.

But after Evelina's female guardians arrange for her to meet her father, she finds that he is not at all the monstrous figure she has come to expect. Instead, as Evelina tells Mr. Villars, she discovers that “my father had been imposed upon” by a nursemaid intent on providing a good life for her own daughter. After this decisive meeting, the history of miscommunication and misunderstanding is speedily unraveled, as Evelina rejoicingly reports: “the total neglect I thought I met with, was not the effect of insensibility or unkindness, but of imposition and error; and that, at the very time we concluded I was unnaturally rejected, my deluded father meant to show me most favour and protection” (375). In and through this meeting, Sir John's image undergoes a symbolic transformation: far from the licentious libertine we had been led to expect, Sir John turns out to be an impotent old man, and therefore infinitely lovable. Moreover, we find that Sir John repented and reformed long before his reunion with Evelina, that he never was such a dissipated and unprincipled man as Mr. Villars has described. As it turns out, then, Mr. Villars, in shielding Evelina so assiduously from this encounter with her supposedly corrupted father, has literally prevented her from taking a position in the field structured by the Name of the Father, a field that—as we have seen—is indeterminate by virtue of the father's impotence.

Since Villars occupies a structural position as Evelina's addressee, his impossible guarantee of innocence also has consequences for the novel's structure: his certainty positivizes the space of judgment, blocking the indeterminacy which would organize the heterogeneous detail into an internally consistent narrative. Instead of oscillating around an empty center of authoritative moral judgment, the narrative circles around Mr. Villars' guarantee of innocence. Addressing itself almost exclusively to Mr. Villars, Evelina's narrative threatens to become locked in a closed circuit around his position in Burney's text in a search for satisfaction which always fails because “satisfaction” is always already attained in this failure: Mr. Villars already believes, no matter what she does or says, that she is innocent, but his repeated assurances do not satisfy her demand for this recognition, because the incidents that call forth his responses proliferate with escalating intensity. The narrative thus threatens to slide into a sort of mechanical automatism, finding satisfaction in its very movement, procuring enjoyment in its failure to attain its object.

But the novel avoids a slide into this mechanical state because Evelina's narrative devotes itself increasingly to the interpretation of Lord Orville's indeterminate presence. If we look carefully at Evelina's references to Lord Orville, we see that he attracts her attention not because he protects her from the dangers that surround her, but because—on the contrary—he is inactive and nonresponsive. Encountered—or, as Ruth Bernard Yeazell points out, beckoned by her searching gaze⁴⁴—at every turn, Orville sustains narrative desire by means of a gleam in his eyes or an alteration of his countenance. The text and the heroine gain a measure of stability only when the innocence of both is called into question—only in their circulation around the space of moral judgment opened up by Lord Orville's questioning gaze.

That is to say, Orville produces narrative desire because he does not pronounce judgment.⁴⁵ From the beginning, Orville's duty is to “ask no questions,” which sets Evelina to the task of scrutinizing his countenance for evidence of his judgment of her conduct. After their first meeting, she writes:

He appeared to be surprised at my terror, which I believe was but too apparent: however, he asked no questions, though I fear he must think it very odd; for I did not choose to tell him it was owing to my never before dancing but with a school-girl. … I suppose he perceived my uneasiness, for he intreated me to sit down again, if dancing was disagreeable to me

(31).

She records that he “appeared to be surprised,” that “he must think it very odd,” and that “I suppose he perceived my uneasiness,” reveling in the inaccessibility of his thoughts. The conclusion to which her interpretation points is secondary to the pleasure derived in its operation, which accrues whether the evidence points to Orville's disapproval (in their first meeting, for instance), or to his approbation—as in her description of their shared disgust at the vulgarity of a libertine conversation: “I should have been quite sick of their remarks, had I not been entertained by seeing that Lord Orville, who, I am sure, was equally disgusted, not only read my sentiments, but, by his countenance, communicated to me his own” (288).

The last thing Evelina's narrative wants from Lord Orville is certainty: this is so clearly the case that when she receives what appears to be a shockingly direct response from Orville—in the form of a lewdly allusive letter—Evelina notes that it has come from “the man in the world I had imagined least capable of giving it” (259). Evelina clings to doubt in the face of what would seem to be absolute certainty, sheltering all references to Orville's letter in the doubt produced in the form of the question: “He talks of my having commenced a correspondence with him; and could Lord Orville indeed believe I had such a design? believe me so forward, so bold, so strangely ridiculous?” (259). Indeed, she can only allude to what amounts to a definitive pronouncement of her guilt by means of a barrage of questions: “was it for him to punish the error? If he was offended, could he not have been silent? If he thought my letter ill-judged, should he not have pitied my ignorance? have considered my youth, and allowed for my inexperience?” (257). It is as if, from Evelina's traumatized perspective, Lord Orville has risen from the dead: after maintaining a “wooden presence” throughout the novel, he has suddenly become an embodied, enjoying presence, a primal father.⁴⁶ This sort of certainty, one that produces not reassurance but anxiety, is the only sort possible in a democratic order. In this encounter with certainty, Burney reveals that what is “more-than” in Villars is his impossible guarantee of Evelina's virtue, which plugs what should be an emptied space with a positive, determinate moral judgment. She reveals, in other words, the fundamental (pre)condition not only of the democratic social order but of the morality it inculcates—the flight from arbitrary, irrational political power, the act of judgment, that founds both, into the sheltering indeterminacy of the father's desire. Like British nationalist discourse, the novel's positioning of Mr. Villars insists upon the “innocence” of the social, its absolute explicability in its detachment from what Kay calls “the arbitrary imposition of political authority” (136). This insistence produces the virulent nationalism exemplified by Burney's Captain Mirvan, whose anti-french and anti-aristocratic hostility constructs the political as a foreign body eating away at the fabric of British society.

The thematic and structural price for maintaining a constitutively impossible innocence is the claustrophobic and violent incursion of “foreign influence,” bodied forth in the novel's final scene by the monkey's bloody attack, the climactic instance of Captain Mirvan's virulent nationalism.⁴⁷ In the act expelling the apish externalization of antagonism, Orville performs his fatherly duty. Once the space of enjoyment/power has been dis-embodied, emptied of its positive, frenchified contents, the social gathering can coalesce around the father as the mark of that which is, as Lacan puts it, “at the center only in the sense that it is excluded”: the political.⁴⁸ Thus begins the (un)erring reign of the father.

Notes

1. Frances Burney, Evelina; or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (New York, 1990), 1. Page numbers of subsequent references noted in the text.

2. Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: A Life in the Works (New Brunswick, 1988); Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions (Lexington, 1987); and Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen (Madison, 1989).

3. Straub, 3.

4. In many cases, both logics are at work simultaneously. For instance, Kristina Straub argues that male authority “bounds and defines the action of female subjectivity, often limiting and even harming the female subjects within its control through the misworkings of its own impotent, castrated, power” (214), which suggests that “woman” already exists in some unlimited, unharmed state, before (or outside the field in which) ideology defines the action of her subjectivity (i.e., constitutes her).

5. This tendency is revealed in Burney scholars' attribution of Wollstonecraft's revisionism and Burney's conventionalism to a difference in their “creative energies” or “characters” which inadvertently echoes criticism that would attribute literary greatness to greatness of personality or creative genius—and, conversely, that would look to Burney's “prudish” or “repressed” personality for the source of her “domestic” novels. See Straub, 107-8, and Epstein, 231.

6. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis, 1988), 17.

7. Most recent readings emphasize the vulnerability of the young woman in Evelina's world and/or the paternalism represented by characters like Villars and Orville. Judith Lowder Newton argues that Mr. Villars, “by always correcting or affirming Evelina's judgments, commending or gently censuring her behavior, reminds us all the while that she is a young woman merely on leave from fatherly supervision and paternal protection”: “Evelina: A Chronicle of Assault,” in Bloom, ed., Fanny Burney's Evelina (New York, 1988), 77. For Straub, Villars and Orville provide the protection of male authority, into which Evelina gladly enters in the end: “both afford release from the ambiguities of power used within an ideological context—the public sphere—that assumes her powerlessness” (174-5). In “Evelina; or, Female Difficulties” (Bloom, 13-30), Susan Staves argues that Mr. Villars makes “the roots of Evelina's anxiety” clear when he warns that the slightest breach of decorum can turn a woman into “a sort of outlaw who has lost her claim to the protection of society, protection which young women desperately need” (28).

8. This is Julia Epstein's argument: Mr. Villars “represents the source of all permission. If [Evelina] angers or offends him, all is lost—on his approval rests her tenuous foothold in polite society. We cannot expect, then, that her letters to this guardian … will be straightforward. She has no choice but to edit them carefully” (98-99).

9. In a letter to Lady Howard, Mr. Villars expresses this anxiety: “Should the fate of the dear survivor be equally adverse, how wretched will be the end of my cares—the end of my days!” (16).

10. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York, 1987), 136.

11. Doody, 24-25; Epstein, 6, 118; and Straub, 210.

12. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters (New York, 1991), 16-17.

13. In Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government (New York, 1991), Locke provides his interpretation of Filmer's argument: “This sovereignty he erects … upon a double Foundation, viz. that of Property, and that of Fatherhood. One was the right he was supposed to have in all creatures, a right to possess the Earth with the Beasts, and other inferior ranks of things in it for his private use. … The other was the right he was supposed to have, to Rule and Govern Men, all the rest of Mankind” (204). Against this, he argues that every man, by virtue of “the desire … of Preserving his Life and Being having been Planted in him, as a Principle of Action by God himself,” has a “right to the Creatures” only insofar as these provide for his subsistence (206). This right is extended to Adam's children—“For children being by the course of Nature born weak, and unable to provide for themselves, they have … a Right to be nourished and maintained by their Parents” (207).

14. Even Sir Charles Grandison's perfection stems from his adherence to principle, as he repeatedly reminds us. When his sister Charlotte asks, “who can come up to you?”, Sir Charles replies: “Anyone may, Charlotte … who will be guided by the well-known rule of Doing to others, as you would they should do unto you”: Sir Charles Grandison (New York, 1972), vol. 3, letter 16, 90.

15. I am indebted to the work of Alain Grosrichard, who develops a similar argument about the father's significance for “bourgeois society” in “le Prince saisi par la philosophie,” Ornicar? 26-27 (Summer 1983):133-49; and “L'enfant et le domestique,” Ornicar? 19-40.

16. Quoted in J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (Lincoln, 1961), 157.

17. See Tompkins' discussion of the cult of filial obedience (87-89), and the “ethics of wifehood” (155-60).

18. Linda Colley examines the female investment in George III's reign in Britons Forging the Nation (New Haven, 1992); cf. 217-19 and 236-81, passim.

19. Lefort, 13.

20. Lefort, 39.

21. In New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York, 1990), 33-36, Laclau introduces this distinction between the social (as sedimentation) and the political (as reactivation), in terms appropriated from Husserl.

22. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York, 1992), 159.

23. Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 11, 160—quoted in Carol Kay, Political Constructions (Ithaca, 1988), 20.

24. In Linda Colley's account, this was accomplished in the Hanoverian Succession: “To legitimize the rule of these new, assertively Protestant monarchs, apologists abandoned appeals to the divine right of kings … and took their stand instead on both divine providence and the people's will. They argued that William of Orange had vanquished James II in 1688, and that the Hanoverian dynasty had succeeded to the British throne in 1714, because Divine Providence had willed it. … But God favoured the Protestant kings in this manner only because they had agreed to carry out their responsibilities to their subjects, as the Stuarts had so lamentably failed to do. A religious foundation of monarchy and the idea of a contract between ruler and ruled were thus, at least in theory, satisfactorily squared.” See Colley, 46-48.

25. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is obsessed with George III's tyrannical usurpations; near the end of a long list of “Facts submitted to a candid world,” we find a singularly “primal” usurpation: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our people.”

26. Colley, 209-10.

27. Cf. Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, GA, 1990). The king is drawn as Nero (94, 132); as The Queen's Ass (151); as the Royal Ass (236); as a mangy whelp (237); blowing bubbles (62); blindfolded (91); asleep or inert (70, 72).

28. Carretta points out that during “the first decade of the king's reign, Americans tended to be more loyal than their British cousins to their government and king” (100).

29. Carretta deals extensively with Blake (154-241) and with Paine's “desacralization of the king's royal body” (99-153).

30. Newman, 179-206. He describes Horne Tooke as a perfect illustration of the “links between ambitious merchants, disgruntled freeholders, alienated men of letters, and the political volatility current among them all” (181).

31. Ian Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1984), 37-46, and Newman, 176-77.

32. Carretta, xv.

33. Newman, 201-21.

34. Colley, 216.

35. Leading article in The Times, Sept. 22, 1809.

36. Colley, 222-25.

37. Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1983), 108.

38. Colley, 170-71.

39. Colley, 372.

40. Carretta writes: “The ‘apotheosis’ of George III was far more than a simple public-relations success of Pitt and his successors. Rather, it was a natural development, albeit officially encouraged, of the reservoir of support for the king's two bodies that had existed since his accession” (245).

41. Lefort, 39.

42. Newman, 138.

43. Cf. the back cover of the Oxford paperback edition.

44. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty (Chicago, 1991), 128-29.

45. Psychoanalytical desire is not defined as lust or sexual attraction; it is not a desire for someone or something. In fact, desire has no content whatsoever; it is produced, as Joan Copjec puts it, “not as a striving for something, but only for something else or something more”: “Cutting Up,” in T. Brennan, ed., Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (New York, 1989), 238. It is—to make clear its necessity for narrative movement—“nothing but the movement of interpretation, the passage from one signifier to another, the eternal production of new signifiers which, retroactively, give sense to the preceding chain”: Slavoj Žižek, “‘In his Bold Gaze My Ruin is Writ Large,’” in Žižek, ed., Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (New York, 1992), 228.

46. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 180.

47. Newman also reads this scene as the apex of Mirvan's nationalist assimilation of the “frenchified” Mr. Lovel and Madame Duval with monkeys (137-38).

48. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York, 1992), 71.