:: The Young Enthusiast ::

From T’s class:

Burney wrote four novels during her lifetime. She also wrote plays but her father would not allow them to be produced. She also kept an enormous diary. We know more about her than any previous woman who wrote in English. There is a very contradictory record; she was very private and shy but we have a voluminous record of her social and private lives.

She was married to a French emigre while in her 40s and she supported them both with her writing.

The consensus on Burney criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries was that Burney is good when she is transparent. Evelina is a transcription of the life of an adolescent girl and her trivial concerns like fashion, etc. It is a monument to the trivial. There are ways in which women writers are considered monuments to the minor. When she tries to write more seriously, to masculinize her pen, she gets into trouble.

Her novels get progressively darker, and males get more and more predatory and violent. Critics say her first novel is good because it’s innocent and artless but she gets pretentious later on.

There is a connection between comedy and violence and comedy and aggression. The division is along age lines; young women are courted, old women are beaten up and laughed at.

We have to remove the feminine protagonist from her mother in order to have an adventure. She has to be an orphan or have an idiot for a mother. The protagonist is a floating signifier: she has no social value.

The plot is deeply conservative.

Evelina distinguishes her own independent decisions from Rev. Villars; he is the counterpoint to her.

The effect of Evelina seeing London for the first time is utterly transparent, sheer objectivity. She sees London as it is with a strong sense of contemporeneity. Evelina has more subjectivity and depth than Pamela. There is more of an attempt at motive, etc.

But still there are tons of stock characters; Captain Mirvan has no depth, motivation, subjectivity, neither do Madame Duval, Lord Orville, the prostitutes, etc. There is an odd mixture of the theatrical and the novelistic. Some characters have depth while others are cartoons or charicatures.

Psychological depth and the visual narrative technique are separable; they don’t develop at the same rate and they are not necessarily tied to one another.

There is a disconnect between crime and punishment, and this is deliberate. Burney is exploring pleasure and paid. Willoughby teasing Evelina becomes torment. Men don’t have to physically torture women to make them miserable. You can tease them to make them miserable. Willoughby plays with her like a cat and mouse. This is a predatory relationship based on female vulnerability and a male world that takes its pleasure in tormenting and taking advantage of women.

Over the course of the novel there is less pain and less torture. It gets domesticated, placed into the courtship pattern. The little bits of cruelties and tortue are set into the take and start to look more like wish fulfillment.

Lord Orville is supposed to do his research and realize that there is a lot more to Evelina than he thought at their first meeting. Willoughby only looks at the surface; he sees her as a sexual play.

Vulnerability: Evelina suffers well, has a capacity to suffer; this is what makes her a good girl.

Madame Duval has no sensitivity; would not suffer as well as Evelina; insensible.

Evelina is a creature almost without skin; every slight, every public event is tormenting, embarassing, etc. She is defined as a feeling subject; registers feeling, in a way that Roxana and Pamela don’t.

What is Evelina’s virtue? Obsessiveness with artlessness, innocence. Evelina is valued for experience she doesn’t have, stuff she doesn’t know. Like Sophie in Rousseau’s Emile; Sophie is an innocent toy who is raised for Emile’s pleasure.

Evelina is raised in a laboratory; she has no experience. You can be sure that if you marry Evelina your children will be yours.

Aristocratic birthright: does Evelina have it? Is it inherited? Innate morality, sensitivity, etc., or is it education? Something she learned from Villars?

At least some of it seems to be innate. She has some grounded good sense. Seems to know innately, all she needs is a book of rules to teach her the finer points, particularities of London dances, etc.

But the book is ambivalent about the aristocracy; 1/2 or 2/3 of aristocrats in the book are fools, knaves.

Swooning is how Evelina acts; this is the model of feminine action.

Difference between male and female bildungsroman: males do something, go out, fight wars, etc. Females stay home, wait for someone to come to them, do nothing.

Orville has almost a feminine delicacy. Mrs. Selwyn is masculine.

What is feminine is good; and that doesn’t have to do with gender; men can be feminine. Masculinity in its most violent–Willoughby and Captain Mirvan–moves down the scale to Selwyn’s harmless masculinity. On the feminine end of the scale, femininity runs the gamut from Orville to Mrs. Mirvan to Evelina.

There are also characters who show the folly of excess: bad femininity: male fops who are obsessed with clothes and appearance (Lovel).

Selwyn contrasts with Villars. Villars spends 17 years wringing his hands and doing little or nothing to restore Evelina to her birthright. Selwyn is like a warrior who gets things done, who doesn’t take no for an answer. Has proper male attributes and uses her power to help Evelina.

Selwyn calls bad men fops, predatory men, etc., based on their behavior, forces the issue. Lord Orville, by contrast, lets tehm get away with their behavior even if he doesn’t agree with it. Selwyn is demonized in the novel for things we approve of, she is smart, educated, gets things done, protects Evelina, accomplishes things, etc.

Selwyn is a peculiarly Utopian figure in the novel. Shows all characteristics that you have to believe Burney wishes women could display, but she is demonized for these characteristics. Wish fulfillment character. Wouldn’t it be fun to live in a world in which you wouldn’t be insulted for being smart?

Burney’s family was always telling her not to be so smart, not to put herself in the public eye, not to publish her writing, not to put her name on the title page, etc.

You have a good girl at the center of the novel who does nothing; she is passive, innocent. However, there is an endless series of characters who act out her fantasies; she is surrounded by aggression, vengeance, people getting theirs, but she remains spotless by never acting.

For example, Madame Duval subjects Evelina to humiliation, Captain Mirvan shows up to slap Madame Duval around, Lovel insults Evelina, a monkey bites him, etc. Selwyn is fundamentally different from those other characters because she never hurts anyone.

Perpetuates fairy tale courtship plots at the same time that it questions them. Striking discontinuity between the way men treat young women (when men want something) and the way they treat old women (beat them, rip their clothes, humiliate them, get them to run races, laugh at them).

The first part of the novel is a feminine utopia at Howard Park; no men (no masculine men; Villars is feminine). Maybe life would be great without men.

Generic mixture of fairy-tale romance and satire, but the mixture is unstable. Satire qulifies or complicates the tale of romance.

Evelina with prostitutes: should be unimaginable; domains that aren’t supposed to be contiguous; not suppposed to see them together so you can’t think about them together. They are supposed to be completely separate.

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