[In the following essay, Doody discusses aspects of The Wanderer and Clarissa which derive from the Aethiopica.]

In 1789 there appeared a new English edition of Heliodorus's Aethiopica, translated as The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea: A Romance. This two-volume novel contains a prefatory “Advertisement” by the translator, recommending the Greek novelist:

Heliodorus may be considered as the Homer of romance, and if it cannot be said of him, as it may of the great father of epic poetry, that he has never been excelled or equalled by any of his successors, it may with truth be affirmed that he has very seldom been so. In clear, spirited, elegant narration, Cervantes is not his superior—in the just, warm, and delicate delineations of the passions, particularly that of love, he equals Rousseau or Richardson. If his work abounds not with the striking and varied representations of character which we admire so much in the works of the latter, and in those of his great rival in this, as well as in many other of his excellencies, Miss Burney, several passages of his book lead one to imagine, that it might be rather owing to the different and more confined state of society and manners when he wrote, than to any deficiency of talent.¹

This last is a rather condescending statement, which certainly gives pride of place to two of Heliodorus's recent successors. The new translator estimates how Richardsonian Heliodorus may be, or how Burneyesque. “Miss Burney” was famous at the time for Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), and, although in 1789 she was still in durance at the court of Queen Charlotte, and not writing prose fiction, two more novels were yet to come. This handsome compliment may well have come to her notice, and it is not impossible that she might have been moved at some point to look into the two little volumes. But we need not invoke a direct influence in order to pose the question whether Frances Burney, in her last novel, The Wanderer (1814), offers an example of a new Aethiopica, or at least proves herself Heliodoran.

The Heliodoran novel is of immense importance to European literature in general, and certainly to English literature in particular. It is visible everywhere in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and it was from the Arcadia that Samuel Richardson took the name—and more than the name—of the heroine of his first novel, Pamela (1741-42).² His next heroine, the central character of Clarissa (1747-48), seems a Chariclea rediviva, and the novel seems an experiment with the Heliodoran novel, an experiment that takes it into tragedy. Even the index supplied for Clarissa is after a fashion a Heliodoran allusion, modeled after Renaissance indexes to the Aethiopica. Whether or not Frances Burney was stimulated to read Heliodorus for herself, she was the inheritor of a fictional tradition stemming directly from his work.

Yet as soon as we start to consider Burney's novel in this light, we come upon the gender factor. Can a woman write—or rather, rewrite—the Heliodoran novel? Can it become a novel not written by “a good bishop,” or one thought to have been such, but a work reflecting another sort of view? What changes must be made in the Heliodoran novel if a woman is going to write it? Frances Burney's novel The Wanderer, the most gothic and most “feminist” of her works, a novel that incorporates the views of Mary Wollstonecraft and the history of the French Revolution, seems in its own strange way to offer an answer to these questions.

We should at the outset consider the beginnings of both novels—the Aethiopica and The Wanderer. Here is the opening of the Aethiopica as it appears in the translation of 1789:

The day began to dawn, the sun had already enlightened the tops of the hills, when a band of men, in appearance pirates, gained the summit of a mountain that extended nearly to the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile: here they made a stand, and contemplated the sea that was expanded before them. When they saw nothing on the water that gave them hopes of a booty, they cast their eyes upon the opposite shore; the situation of things there was as follows: A ship lay at anchor, with no soul on board of her; but in appearance laden with merchandize, as she was sunk deep in the water. The beach was strewn with bodies newly slaughtered; some quite dead, others dying, yet still breathing, gave signs of a combat recently ended. Yet it appeared not to have been a designed engagement; but there were mingled with these dreadful spectacles the fragments of a feast, that seemed to have concluded in this horrible manner.

(1:1-2)

(Note how the eighteenth-century translator makes Heliodorus sound like a writer of the eighteenth century, just as Amyot and Underdowne make him sound like a writer of the Renaissance.) We begin Heliodorus's novel by seeing a scene of confusion on a beach—a puzzle to which there is no ready solution. Our first view is implicated, contaminated; we share the view of the band of marauders, looking from a distance at the disordered scene, not with pity but with a desire for plunder. The apparent recent breakup of the “unlucky banquet” (to borrow Underdowne's phrase) contains strange echoes of the Odyssey, but this is evidently not the Odyssey. None of the viewers of the scene can make sense of it here, or relate the various phenomena.

After they notice the puzzling scene of slaughter, the bandits see the puzzling young woman: “A spectacle presented itself which perplexed them more than any which they had yet seen. A virgin of uncommon and almost heavenly beauty sat upon a rock; she seemed deeply afflicted … but … preserved an air of dignity … at her rising she appeared still greater and more divine. Her shafts sounded as she moved; her golden garments glittered in the sun; and her hair flowed, under her laurel diadem, in dishevelled ringlets down her neck” (1:4-5).

This resplendent heroine is reflected in Richardson's Clarissa; the hero-villain of Richardson's novel, Robert Lovelace, frequently refers to her as “the divine Clarissa” and describes her in terms as refulgent as those in which Heliodorus describes Chariclea. He speaks, for instance, of “the presence of my charmer, flashing upon me all at once in a flood of brightness,” and describes her physical appearance in detail: “Thou hast heard me also describe the wavy Ringlets of her shining hair, needing neither art nor powder; of itself an ornament, defying all other ornaments; wantoning in and about a neck that is beautiful beyond description” (3:28).³

If Richardson's description sounds also like Milton on Eve—why, Milton had read Heliodorus too (and the translator of 1789 had read both Milton and Richardson). Both Chariclea and Clarissa are seen at a disadvantage—each looks tremendously goodesslike but is also fearfully vulnerable. The first description of Chariclea incorporates the view of vulgarians who could destroy her. She guesses as much, and speaks to them in a speech combining hauteur and pathos, pointing out that she has been engaged in a struggle to repel the violence offered to her chastity, and begging them satirically to deliver herself and the young man she loves (Theagenes) from their sorrows by death, thus putting an end to “our drama”. It is an eloquent speech, but the brigands are unheeding, “not understanding what she said.” Her language is not intelligible to them. Throughout Heliodorus, we come upon the problem of different languages, the need for translation; the story emphasizes (in Calasiris) the value of the polyglot. The goddess-woman who is not to be understood and the injured young man she tends are both seized by yet another band of marauders; the first party, the group with whom we came in, vanish from the scene into the wilds of savage inarticulateness, matching the disarticulate and fragmented heap of bodies and bowls on the beach. Abducted before she has identified herself, participating in the action and yet remaining unknown, the girl insists on remaining a riddle. We as readers are required to sympathize with the maiden and the young man—particularly with the beautiful girl—before we know who they are. We learn eventually how to name them. But Chariclea's parentage and inheritance are not explained to us until later—indeed, there is information she herself does not possess. We are marshaled into the novel having to take much on trust, and striving to unriddle what led to the mysterious first scene. Our first relation is to violence and mystery.

In Heliodorus's novel, we learn after other puzzling accounts, Chariclea is the white daughter of black African parents, King Hydaspes and his queen, Persinna. The mother bore the daughter and secretly gave her away, not acknowledging her existence to the child's father because the child was white, and would seem to accuse the mother, by her presence, of adultery. Denied her inheritance because she was the “wrong” color, Chariclea was adopted and even “wrongly” named after Charicles, her adoptive father. It is her task (though she does not know it at the outset) to vindicate her Ethiopian inheritance. Chariclea must return “home” to a foreign place and be reconciled with parents who do not even know she is alive, and who appear to be of a different race. The end of the novel represents, as it were, a becoming-black. Chariclea's task is to reconcile blackness and whiteness, to fulfill the prophecy:

Then shall the gods reward your pious vows,
And wreaths of triumph bind your sable brows.

(The 1789 translator in a sarcastic footnote registers the puzzle: “Why sable brows? … I am not obliged to explain oracles” [1:124].) The heroine must incarnate a blackness that is whiteness, a whiteness that is blackness. Incompatible racial identities are harmonized as the answer to the novel's oracular prophetic riddle. Hero and heroine will indeed arrive at the paradoxical region, the dark land of the Sun, and be given the prize that changes them: “white garlands on dusky brows,” as Hadas translates it.⁴ Heliodorus's novel hinges on that black/white opposition, his S/Z.

Frances Burney's novel is figurally self-conscious (to borrow the allegories permitted in modern criticism). Yet The Wanderer is certainly not self-conscious in the manner of Heliodorus, who insistently points to and jests about the “made-ness,” the “written-ness,” of his story, and suggests the literary habits it may be expected to assume. When, for instance, Theagenes complains of “the deity who persecutes us,” who “makes sport, in short, with us and our fortunes, and gives them the appearance of a continually shifting scene, and sadly varied drama” (1:216), he is at one level referring to the author. The author is the hostile deity who persecutes the characters for sport, like the demonic sage enchanter complained of by Don Quixote. (Cervantes is probably the world's most attentive reader of Heliodorus.) There is, I think, a jest hidden behind the agitating dream of Charicles that Calasiris so soothingly interprets. Charicles dreams that he sees Apollo's eagle snatch his (adopted) daughter away from him and “bear her away to some corner of the earth, full of sooty and shadowy forms” (1789, 1:188). Charicles believes this means that Chariclea will die and go to Hades; Calasiris, lying, assures him the dream portends his daughter's marriage. We come to believe that the narrative logic demands that Chariclea return to Ethiopia—a far land full of dark people, hence “dark and shadowy phantoms”.⁵ But there is another meaning as well. Chariclea is, after all, captured in the Apollonian art of writing, and must take her existence in and through the “shadowy phantoms” of the written word. She is condemned to be one of the [eidôla]—not only phantasms or specters but also images in the mind. She is one of the eidôla of fancy, and leaves her “real” life as Charicles' daughter for the shady existence of a novelistic character, leaving Charicles as bereft as Keats's little white town, depopulated by the absence of citizens who became part of a work of art.

Richardson picks up some of the complicated jesting about the written, while avoiding any device that lets us dwell on Clarissa's unreality. Yet in a story in which all the characters are authors (for Clarissa is famously epistolary), the variations of point of view connect us with the idea of “written-ness.” Lovelace takes upon himself the role of sage enchanter, consciously endeavoring to write Clarissa's story for her, and acting the part of the novelist, setting himself up as a “hostile deity” who will subject his lady to new trials. Like Heliodorus, he denies his heroine a tragic ending; Clarissa speaks in a “violent Tragedy speech” that amuses Lovelace (5:89), while Chariclea initially speaks in a tragic vein not commensurate with the outcome of her story.

Burney avoids the direct question of authorial control and makes no such jokes about the structure of the novel. Yet she is quite willing to abandon “realism” for intermittent symbols, and she breaks her narrative up not only with puzzles but with puns. Her interest lies largely in the idea of woman's fate as something often determined, like what is conceived of as her nature, determined by cultural pressures that make a woman very difficult to see. Her novel works on edges, and deals with gaps and spaces—but in this, too, it adopts Heliodorus.

Heliodorus's novel opens on a seashore, a favorite setting for opening scenes or important occasions in novels; we often encounter a beach, a seastrand, a riverbank. Some sandy or muddy margin, some dirty place of clayey incarnation, seems sought by the novel (as a genre). In George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, for instance, the heroine and her narrator both stand at the beginning of the novel “at the edge of the water”; Maggie's mother complains of the child, “wanderin' up and down by the water, like a wild thing; she'll tumble in some day.”⁶ On the narrative bank, one is threatened by the humbling dirt of earthiness and by the hazards of launching out upon dangerous depths. Heliodorus insists on the violence of opening; we stand on a savage margin. Clarissa opens with great violence, with the fight between James Harlowe and Lovelace. James's passion is cooled “on seeing his blood gush plentifully down his arm” (1:2), but his father and uncles represent the crime it would be in Clarissa “to encourage a man, who is to wade into her favour … thro' the blood of her Brother” (1:3). The shore that is visibly bloody in Heliodorus becomes metaphorically so in Clarissa, but the blood and conflict, the violence and mystery, are literal again in The Wanderer. The novel begins with the sense of danger, with mystery, hostility, and multiple languages; here are its opening paragraphs:

During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission.

The pilot quickened his arrangements for sailing; the passengers sought deeper concealment; but no answer was returned.

“O hear me!” cried the same voice, “for the love of Heaven, hear me!”

The pilot gruffly swore, and, repressing a young man who was rising, peremptorily ordered every one to keep still, at the hazard of discovery and destruction …

“Oh listen to my prayers!” was called out by the same voice, with increased, and even frightful energy; “Oh leave me not to be massacred!”

“Who's to pay for your safety?” muttered the pilot.

“I will!” cried the person whom he had already rebuffed, “I pledge myself for the cost and the consequence!”

“Be lured by no tricks”; said an elderly man, in English; “put off immediately, pilot.”

The pilot was very ready to obey.

The supplications from the land were now sharpened into cries of agony, and the young man, catching the pilot by the arm, said eagerly, “'Tis the voice of a woman! where can be the danger? …”

“Take her in at your peril, pilot!” rejoined the elderly man.

Rage had elevated his voice; the petitioner heard it, and called—screamed, rather, for mercy.

(1:1-3)⁷

At first we, like the passengers, see nothing, and hear only a voice—a voice speaking French. Only as it reiterates supplications can it be identified as “the voice of a woman.” As it is identified its articulation ceases, and it is capable of forming expressive sounds rather than words: “cries of agony” and screams. This woman is implicated in whatever violence is natural to that shore, and she is certainly not in control of it, though there is a certain violence registered in herself. A slaughter seems to have been going on—people must have been “massacred,” but we do not see the bodies, as we do in Heliodorus's opening paragraphs. Yet the mystery of the corpse-laden shore is unriddled for us in the first phrase of the novel's first sentence. This is a blood-soaked, corpse-laden shore because the action is set “during the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre.” History explains—up to a point. The Terror is a phenomenon of history that all can identify, even if no one can fully explain it.

The screaming female is, after all, to be the heroine. She is taken aboard the vessel of escape, at the particular urging of the young man (Albert Harleigh, the novel's “hero”—of sorts). The woman taken aboard does not offer a clear outline to the view; she is a Chariclea obscured, as it were. She speaks, but some on board cannot understand her French language. She cannot at first be distinctly seen, and what can be made out is uninteresting: “There was just light enough to shew him a female in the most ordinary attire” (1:3). The young English lady among the passengers, Elinor Joddrel, the antiheroine (or secondary heroine) of the novel, begins to speculate on the riddle that this unknown young lady, this “Incognita,” represents: “I wonder what sort of a dulcinea you have brought amongst us! though I really believe, you are such a complete knight-errant, that you would just as willingly find her a tawny Hottentot as a fair Circassian” (1:5). Elinor's gibe that Harleigh has a “dulcinea” refers to the beloved of Cervantes' Don Quixote, who is, as Don Quixote more than half admits, the product of his own imagination; this touch reminds us of the “madeness” of heroines, who are, after all, eidôla manufactured for the purpose of story.

Elinor's words are also prophetic, for as the day begins to dawn over the English Channel, the passengers begin to discern in the stranger further alarming manifestations of difference. This female may indeed be the “tawny Hottentot” rather than the “fair Circassian.” When the unnamed woman takes off her gloves, she “exhibit[s] hands and arms of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black than brown.” The “elderly man,” rough Mr. Riley, asks the dark foreigner, “Pray, Mistress … what part of the world might you come from? The settlements in the West Indies? or somewhere off the coast of Africa?” (1:21).

Burney's as yet nameless heroine may be taken as a sort of Chariclea reversed. She seems at the outset to be an African, but is not. Chariclea's problem (from birth) is that she seems not to be an African, but is. Chariclea rises majestically upon the view of the criminal intruders who first see her, so that they wonder if she is a goddess. Burney's heroine looks at first not at all like a goddess, and her vulgar middle-class companions wonder if she is a housemaid. Chariclea has lived through what was apparently a major battle of some sort, and has escaped unscathed. Burney's Incognita has come from the scene of violence represented by France itself. (History, as Heliodorus suspected, provides all the horrifying excitement a story could want.) We see no symptoms of recent battle around the heroine of The Wanderer, and yet this girl seems wounded; she wears “a large black patch, that covered half her left cheek, and a broad black ribbon, which bound a bandage of cloth over the right side of her forehead” (1:22). These mystifying signs of pain elicit only comic speculation from the cruder passengers: “Why, Mistress, have you been trying your skill at fisty cuffs for the good of your nation? or only playing with kittens for your private diversion?” (1:23).

It can be said of Heliodorus's protagonist and Burney's that they are both unnamed in the sequence that introduces them, and that both are the objects of ruthless inspection. That last could be said of Clarissa, also—as it is said by Anna Howe in the first letter of the novel: “Every eye, in short, is upon you.” Now “pushed into blaze,” Clarissa is metaphorically watched “with the expectation of an example” (1:3-4). Both Chariclea and Burney's heroine prove to be exemplary, but the original gazers do not expect them to be so. Burney picks up, as it were, the strange humility and social unfixedness of Chariclea's position, while employing an emphatic contrast to the usual objects offered for reader gratification. We expect heroines to be beautiful and dazzling. Chariclea and Clarissa do dazzle us.

The heroine of The Wanderer may, however, be seen as borrowing in advance from Chariclea's other aspects. It is in the nature of Heliodoran heroines to go disguised at some point. Clarissa will eventually be disguised as a housemaid, and thus escape from the brothel. In disguising themselves, Burney's heroine, and Richardson's, may be seen as imitating Chariclea (among other fictional characters). Chariclea, in fact, does later go in exactly the same kind of disguise as Burney's distressed refugee. In the sixth book of the Aethiopica, Clarissa disguises herself by rubbing soot and mud on her face. (The translator of 1789 does not like these dirty facts, and merely says that the heroine “stained her cheeks with a composition prepared for that purpose, and threw an old and torn veil negligently over her face” [2:26]). The manuscripts leave it in doubt whether Heliodorus's heroine concealed one eye or both, but the old veil was not very clean. The hero and heroine, both in disguise, take their predicament in good humor: “When the metamorphosis was completed they could not help smiling at each other's appearance” (2:27).

In Burney's novel, the protagonist has no companion in her guising, and she is the occasion for the scornful pleasantries of others. Her strange attire declares her not a whole person, but rather an inarticulate or disarticulated ensemble. Nasty Mrs. Ireton sarcastically inquires “whether you always travel with that collection of bandages and patches? and of black and white outsides? or whether you sometimes change them for wooden legs and broken arms?” (1:84). As the Incognita reveals herself to be “fair” under the “black,” the other characters are disconcerted. Metamorphosis means that sense impressions prove incorrect. Eyes are untrustworthy. Mrs. Ireton complains vigorously: “You have been bruised and beaten; and dirty and clean; and ragged and whole; and wounded and healed; and a European and a Creole, in less than a week. I suppose, next, you will dwindle into a dwarf; and then, perhaps, find some surprising contrivance to shoot up into a giantess. There is nothing that can be too much to expect from so great an adept in metamorphoses” (1:85).

This young woman seems capable of multiplicity; she reminds others uncomfortably of change and possibilities, just as her languages remind them of the desirability of being polyglot. Many of the English speak no other language than their own, and detest Frenchness, as they detest unknowns. Like the metamorphosing Chariclea, this woman is a nameless riddle. She looks at first like a victim only, possessing none of the power that Chariclea the archer wields. We learn later, however, how she came to be in this plight. Much later—for we find that, as in the case of Heliodorus's novel, we really begin in medias res, and long flashbacks are necessary, as in the Aethiopica, to tell us how the heroine came to be on that beach in such distress. The heroine came to be where she was because of her heroic deed in endeavoring to protect a man: her unofficial guardian, the bishop, the uncle of her best friend. The phrase “the good bishop” in the notes of the translator of 1789 refers to Heliodorus the author (1:245); in Burney's novel it is the unseen object of the heroine's self-sacrifice. This elder priestly character is definitely not a Calasiris, protector and spiritual father of Heliodorus's heroine. Unlike such Calasiris-like characters in eighteenth-century fiction (for example, Dr. Harrison in Fielding's Amelia [1751]), he offers no advice, and does not even appear until the end of the novel. Far from being of assistance, this substitute father is a responsibility and a burden to the heroine, who must preserve him at high cost to herself—including the cost of painful and mysterious discretion. The reader knows from the beginning that the mysterious female character is good, and that she is the heroine; yet the reader cannot explain who the heroine is or what may appropriately befall her.

In Heliodorus's novel also, the reader starts in a condition of unknowing, and is required to make judgments with incomplete information. In the Aethiopica, too, the reader's view is contaminated. We share the point of view with a band of (not very bright) brigands; in The Wanderer, we share it with the ship of fools. A construct of paradoxes, the émigrée is given a name, yet it is not a “real name” but a combination of syllables based on the two letters of the alphabet under which she receives letters: L.S. Misunderstanding, a character calls her “Ellis,” and the name becomes both first and last name. In itself this no-name name seems like a riddle or pun. Elle is. She is.

As well as representing a riddle, the strange woman enacts one—a narrative riddle—during the voyage out: “the pilot proclaimed that they were half way over the straits. A general exclamation of joy now broke forth from all, while the new comer, suddenly casting something into the sea, ejaculated in French, ‘Sink and be as nothing!’ And then clasping her hands, added, ‘Heaven be praised, 'tis gone for ever!’” (1:8). The elderly man asks outright, “Pray what have you thrown overboard, Mistress?” but goes “unanswered” (1:8-9). We are left to tease ourselves with the puzzle. What is it that a woman might want to throw into the deep of the sea, into the midst of that dark blank that separates two shores?

Another novel of antiquity begins with a sea scene, and a voyage. Achilles Tatius's Clitophon and Leucippe opens with the representation of Europa's story. In this famous ecphrasis, the narrator describes the picture showing Europa's maiden companions rushing to “the margin of the sea,” while the bull “was painted in midsea, riding on the waves,” the woman riding sidesaddle, traveling “as if on board a cruising ship, using her veil as a sail.”⁸ The veil that modestly conceals becomes an instrument of power, a means of escape and movement. The figure of Europa, who gives her name to such a diverse continent, is a figure of the Novel itself, of narrative and novel-making. Richardson uses the emblem of veiled Europa on her bull (not unlike the figure painted in words by Achilles Tatius) as a printer's ornament in Clarissa.⁹ There it serves to foreshadow and comment on Lovelace's rape of Clarissa. The “rape of Europa” is not, however, a rape like Clarissa's, but a reincarnation, an exploration. It represents abandonment of the known margin, with Eros or desire of life leading the way. It is a figure of beginning.

Yet an emblem of rape of any kind, including the “rape of Europa,” is dangerous to women. It calls for radical revision and reinterpretation. Richardson reinterprets by focusing his whole long novel on rape as fact and idea, pointing out what it means to men and women to live in a rape-culture such as ours, with its consequent devaluation of human beings. The heroines of the Greek novels are righteous virgins threatened by rape and reacting heroically against that threat; one sees clearly the connection between Richardson and Heliodorus on that score. In fact, Richardson is playing upon the reader's being accustomed to the quick saves and happy endings endemic to the Greek novel, with its scenes of sexual threat. The reader is so accustomed to “this sort of story” that a “happy ending” seems securely predictable—until we find out it is not going to happen.

Frances Burney's novel, the subtitle of which is Female Difficulties, likewise includes the sort of rape threats found in the Greek novel. The heroine's real name proves to be “Juliet,” a name allying her to the Shakespearean heroine who evaded unwanted marriage and maintained her own choice of love through a sleight of Scheintod. Marriage as rape menaces Burney's heroine. The price of the bishop's life was Ellis-Juliet's marriage to Robespierre's brutal commissary. Escaping the loathsome husband, yet keeping the bishop alive by the force of the commissary's hope of her (and of her dowry), the heroine flees through a provincial English world. Seen from her ironic angle, complacent English society reveals its stultification, obtuseness, and powers of oppression. Ellis-Juliet is threatened by many dangers, as was Chariclea. (Chariclea, or Female Difficulties?) The threats to Burney's protagonist include an Arsacé in the jealous Elinor Joddrel—who is, however, no spoiled, exotic princess, but a lively young woman, bored with Sussex and fascinated, not without reason, by the new doctrines of the Rights of Man, and the Rights of Woman. Elinor, alas, can interpret these rights only as her own right to Albert Harleigh, as Arsacé thought she had a right to Theagenes. Harleigh, a much less forceful character than either of the women, is not even the second character in his own novel—but then, it is often remarked that Theagenes is barely the second character in his story.¹⁰

The most disagreeable character in Burney's novel, Mrs. Ireton, another Arsacé figure, has a summerhouse called “the Temple of the Sun.” This strange structure mocks the Apollonian order, and reminds us of power; Mrs. Ireton is as powerful in her way as Robespierre is in his, and Robespierre's power can create “the shrine of unmeaning though ferocious cruelty” (5:78), the temple and theater of the scaffold and guillotine. The story that history books tell is the Apollonian history of control, the fictions that belong to the realm of the Temple of the Sun—as indeed they do in Heliodorus, where the temple in Ethiopia is designed for the offering of human sacrifices to Sun and Moon. It takes the gymnosophist at the end to persuade Hydaspes to put an end to human sacrifice.

The Wanderer is also a plea for an end to human sacrifice—not only the sacrifice of history's cruellest dramas of torture and execution, but the hidden, dull, old story of overworked and underpaid labor. Ellis-Juliet becomes one of the working poor, one of the nameless; as music teacher, companion, milliner, seamstress, teacher in a dame school, she plunges into the depths of the inarticulate, the unhistorical history of the working poor.

The realm of hidden history in Heliodoran fiction is always the realm of the displaced or wandering woman, whose lot it is to undergo enslavement, imprisonment, even the descent into the tomb. The life Ellis-Juliet leads opens to her eyes (and to the readers' eyes) the life that is as dull or invisible as the young woman herself, who was at first merely a scream from the shore that others wish not to heed. The most powerful argument for immortality, the heroine concludes, must be the sight of the inequity and suffering in this world, in the here and now, “oppression in the very face of liberty” (4:339).

The form of the novel first suggested by Heliodorus is to be widened, Burney's work suggests, by including what is usually ignored. The heroine's postconclusion wedding is here not of great significance. Richardson in Clarissa focused our attention so fully on his shining heroine and her demon lover that we could take her tragedy as a complete story. That story is so good and so powerful that it may make us look less at the world around the heroine than Richardson himself wishes; that at least is one construction that can be put on the pile of material Richardson wishes to add to the end of the book, after Clarissa's death. The Wanderer certainly does not allow us to look at the wedding as a full consummation of the story; the bonds that connect a Theagenes and a Chariclea have been loosened. Ellis-Juliet may be in love with Albert Harleigh, and he, in his timid, anxious way, in love with her, but she can get along without him. This is forcefully suggested by the riddle that takes so long to be answered in the narrative. “Sink and be as nothing!”

What was the object Ellis-Juliet threw overboard? The answer is “a wedding ring.” Juliet threw off her false wedding ring (from the civil marriage to the vile commissary) once she was fairly launched on the deep—in an in-between place, equidistant from the hostile shores, in the middle of nowhere. At one level, the casting-off of the wedding ring can be viewed as a casting-off of the masculine story—the story of a woman as Heliodorus or Richardson might tell it. Eros is also found in this apparently antierotic gesture, casting off the notion of Woman as the object only of desire, the currency (“Ellis” = £sd?) as well as merchandise of bargain and sale. The heroine will not be passive. Here we have a new Europa coming from Europe and setting forth on some new voyage.

At the same time, the wedding ring thrown into the sea signifies that Ellis-Juliet weds the deeps, like a doge. Here is the figure of Europa the voyager without her taurine god. The possibilities for reconciliation must begin here, with the usual symbol of reconciliation thrown overboard.

There is no structure that will figure reconciliation, that will hold opposites together in concord and harmony. Heliodorus can end with a temple, a strong place, even though Hydaspes' temple needed the correction of wisdom, an enlightenment to bring it up to the level of the temple at Delphi, where the worship of Apollo has been (puzzlingly) tempered by worship of Artemis/Isis. In Richardson's novel, the temples (the churches) are strong structures with strange congregations—as at the service Lovelace attends at Saint Paul's (3:323-26).

The temple becomes Clarissa herself, as Lovelace intimates in a quotation from Dryden: “Mark her majestic fabric!—She's a temple / Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine” (3:329).¹¹ The last temple to appear in Clarissa is the church as place of burial, and we descend with the narrator and the heroine's corpse into the tomb that in this case (as not in the Greek novels) will truly confine forever the body of the heroine. It is as if Richardson were tightening the temple image found at the end of the Aethiopica—everything becomes firmly enclosed: “In that little space, said Mr. Mullins, is included all human excellence!” (8:89).

If the temple structure in Richardson becomes unduly tight, in Burney's novel it is deliberately loosened. Stonehenge is a ruin, with strong objects placed at intervals, objects that once might have made an enclosure but can do so no longer. Structure is done away with; there is only the ruined circle amid “unpeopled air, and uncultivated waste” (5:134). Stonehenge, which, as Sir Jaspar Herrington believes, was once a Druid temple, has lost its religious and hierarchical authority and has become a feminine place. The shape of the circle has been anticipated in the earlier figure of the tombeau that Ellis-Juliet's friend Gabriella made for her dead child: “a small elevation of earth, encircled by short sticks, intersected with rushes” (3:9). This is a place of the Mother, not a stone monument but a biodegradable little riddle, delicate, perishable, and humbly unauthoritarian. It is a place associated with the women and with the otherness of foreign language. (The conversation between Juliet and Gabriella beside this tombeau is conducted wholly in French.)

Circles are feminine, but Burney creates broken circles: tentative, unconstraining, incomplete. There is no assured figure for the reconciliation of opposites. Burney shows us that she desires reconciliation—the harmony of the enemies England and France. But this is a phenomenon not historically visible in 1794, or even in 1814. Burney wishes for an end to what Juliet calls “unmeaning though ferocious cruelty” (5:78), but Juliet cannot succeed like a gymnosophist in banishing human sacrifice. Heliodorus could end his story with reconciliation, “a pleasing concert at the last act and unravelment of this complicated story, where so many different interests were to meet, and so many contraries and improbabilities were to be explained and reconciled” (2:269).

Heliodorus proffers a satisfying figure in fulfillment of the riddling oracle:

Then shall the gods reward your pious vows,
And wreaths of triumph bind your sable brows.

Narrative completion is figured in the satisfactory complete circles of the crowns. Burney's intermittent circles have gaps for investigation. The important figures are of circles that do not enclose, and cannot be completed. The last word of Burney's novel is, significantly, “hope.” It is not that the righteous virgin has not triumphed in Burney's story, as in that of Heliodorus. After her disguises and flights about England, and after all her hard work, Ellis-Juliet is delivered. The man who lays wrongful claim to her is killed by the revolution whose dirty work he did. The heroine's chastity is preserved; she may properly marry the (unsatisfactory) hero. Her birth is at last acknowledged by her father's family, and she will receive her rightful inheritance. All of this is very Heliodoran, surely. Yet Burney makes us feel the degree to which these happy points of fiction are fictitious. These are the eidôla required by the necessity of making endings. The true ending, with harmony between peoples and the social institution of justice, is as far off as ever. There is no mysterious syzygy of race and race, nation and nation, class and class. Despite the hopes of the characters, differences triumph still. Yet in raising the possibility of reconciliation, and in pointing to the severity of difference everywhere to be found in our harsh human history, Burney took more than a leaf from Heliodorus's book.

Notes

1. “Advertisement” to The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea: A Romance, Translated from the Greek of Heliodorus, 2 vols. (London, 1789), 1:vi-vii. Quotations from this translation will be cited by volume and page in the text. I use this translation not because it is the best (for it certainly is not) but because it has a certain eighteenth-century charm, and there is the slender chance that Frances Burney herself read it. It might seem scholarly to use Underdowne, but later translations were the ones read in the eighteenth century; Richardson, for instance, could have read the translation by a “Person of Quality” and Nahum Tate, or the 1717 edition. For the Greek and for generally helpful material, I have drawn on R. M. Rattenbury and T. V. Lumb, eds., and J. Maillon, trans., Les Ethiopiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1960).

2. For a discussion of Richardson's use of Sidney's Arcadia in Pamela, see G. Beer, “Pamela: Rethinking Arcadia,” in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. M. A. Doody and P. Sabor (Cambridge, 1989), 23-29.

3. All references to Richardson's Clarissa are to the third edition of 1751 (8 vols.) as reproduced in The Clarissa Project under the general editorship of Florian Stuber (New York, 1990), cited by volume and page.

4. Heliodorus, An Aethiopian Romance, trans. M. Hadas (1957; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1976), 66. J. R. Morgan translates the last couplet of the oracular riddle as

   Where they will reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue:
   A crown of white on brows of black.

   See An Ethiopian Story in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 409.

5. Morgan, in Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 437.

6. G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, 1979), 60.

7. F. Burney, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, 5 vols. (London, 1814), cited in the text by volume and page.

8. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. J. J. Winkler, in Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 176-77.

9. The ornament appears at the end of the fifth volume. The figure is reproduced in Doody and Sabor, Samuel Richardson, 266, and in Stuber, The Clarissa Project 5:358.

10. “Chariclia is evidently the chief character of the ensuing Poem (for … I must call it so, tho' in Prose …) 'tis on her the Author bestows his utmost mastery, and in her he has drawn a perfect Character of the Social Virtues. Theagenes has but the second place, and is every where subservient to the setting her Excellence in a more ingenuous Light” (translator of The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia [London, 1717]). But one might argue that Calasiris is the character in second place, and that Theagenes comes in a poor third. Even Cnemon, cowardly, kind, and talkative, vies with him. Incidentally, “a perfect Character of the Social Virtues” is a splendid eighteenth-century phrase that might well be used to describe Clarissa.

11. Lovelace is quoting from a description of the heroine in John Dryden's play Don Sebastian, King of Portugal (1690), 2. 1. The idea of the body as a temple of the spirit goes back to antiquity, and is not improperly pursued in connection with ideas abroad in Christian and other circles during the age of Heliodorus. See P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988). Dryden himself approaches body and spirit from a Roman Catholic viewpoint, but he was a reader of Heliodoran novels, and almost inevitably of the Aethiopica.