The contention centering on Lady Delacour’s injured breast stems from the contemporary debates on women’s rights. As Mary Wollstonecraft pro-claims in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), the basis for women to become “really virtuous and useful” is independence in terms of laws and finance. She warns bourgeois women not to emulate their social betters for they themselves play a pivotal role in the “revolution of female manners,”
which is the preliminary stage of a general reform. Only when duties are bal-anced with rights, individual men and women can fulfill their upmost poten-tials. Following William Cadogan’s advice to men to reclaim their authority in the household with the right notion of happiness, Wollstonecraft exhorts women to choose wisely between “artful wonton tricks” and the spectacle of suckling their infant for the latter shall secure the long-lasting affection of their husbands:
Cold would be the heart of a husband, were he not rendered un-natural by early debauchery, who did not feel more delight at see-ing his child suckled by its mother, than the most artful wanton tricks could ever raise; yet this natural way of cementing the mat-rimonial tie, and twisting esteem with fonder recollections, wealth leads women to spurn. To preserve their beauty, and wear the flowery crown of the day, which gives them a kind of right to reign for a short time over the sex, they neglect to stamp impres-sions on their husbands’ hearts, that would be remembered with more tenderness when the snow on the head began to chill the bosom, than even their virgin charms. The maternal solicitude of a
reasonable affectionate woman is very interesting, and the chas-tened dignity with which a mother returns the caresses that she and her child receive from a father who has been fulfilling the se-rious duties of his station, is not only a respectable, but a beautiful sight. (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 142, my emphasis)
Here Wollstonecraft employs the Utilitarian calculation of happiness (long-term vs. short-term) to promote maternal suckling in a rational manner.
The “beautiful” picture of familial bliss can be maintained only when both father and mother fulfill their respective duties, implementing a social pro-gram grounded in aesthetic appeals and expedient performance. Comparing this scene of domestic happiness with “the sight of insipid grandeur and the slavish ceremonies” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 142), Mary Wollstonecraft prefers the “artless picture” (143) of mother nursing her children. This com-parison seems to provide a sketch for Edgeworth’s Belinda. In this fictional site, Edgeworth exploits the polemic options of Wollstonecraft’s treatise.
4.5 Two-pronged alignment: Freke vs. Delacour
Edgeworth adjusts her alignment with Wollstonecraft in two aspects:
portraying Mrs. Freke in a grotesque caricature and allowing the autonomy of Lady Delacour to remain unaffected. First of all, Mrs. Freke sports men’s out-fit to scoff at gender boundaries. But her brash feminism remains a garbled version of Mary Wollstonecraft’s campaign for the rights of woman. Mrs.
Freke intrudes upon the idyllic household of the Percivals by appearing at night under a mask. Her disguise leads Juba, Mr. Vincent’s West Indian ser-vant, to mistake her for an obeah woman, a “Man-woman” (B 219), who pur-sues him from his homeland. Andrew McCann amplifies this association to highlight the subversion wrought by both the Jacobin masculine-woman and the Caribbean sorceress related to native insurrection, updating on Burkean nightmare of Parisian women (190). However, I refute with Andrew McCann’s view that Edgeworth positions herself close to the Burkean alliance of national duties and filial ties, “echo[ing]” Richard Polwhele’s diatribe, “The Unsex’d Females” (1798), which associates women writers’ Jacobin sympathy with sexual deviance (McCann 190). In the end, Mrs. Freke represents the extreme of unconventional womanhood that Lady Delacour would not embrace.
The reform of Lady Delacour centers on her breast. First she has to open the boudoir to her neglected husband, thereby stemming the rumors of
hiding secret lovers in the boudoir. Indeed, this private feminine space with a back door accessible via a secret passage, as lifted from the Gothic conven-tion, visualizes Lady Delacour’s trauma.13 Persuaded by Belinda to seek for proper cure and to restore her family to happiness, she foregoes the secrecy surrounding her illness yet without giving up her heavy make-up. After her wound is diagnosed as not cancerous, she reaches for reconciliation with her husband, daughter, in-laws, and finally arranges the denouement of com-prehensive bliss of three households.
In the end, Lady Delacour assumes the right of an author in asking
“shall I finish this novel for you?” as she starts to arrange the “proper atti-tudes for stage effect” (B 477-78):
‘. . . What signifies being happy, unless we appear so? Captain Sunderland—kneeling with Virginia, . . .at her father’s feet. You are in the act of giving them your blessing, Mr. Hartley. Mrs. Or-mond clasps her hands with joy. . . Clarence, you have a right to Belinda’s hand, and may kiss it too. Nay, miss Portman, it is the rule of the stage. Now, where’s my lord Delacour? He should be embracing me, to show that we are reconciled. . . . Enter lord Delacour, with little Helena in his hand. . . .There! quite pretty and natural! Now, lady Delacour, to show that she is reformed, comes forward to address the audience with a moral—a moral!—yes,
Our tale contains a moral, and, no doubt,
You all have wit enough to find it out.’ (B 478, my emphasis)
The final tableau vivant rounds up the novel as an assortment of perform-ances with the boudoir as its center piece. In this finale, the way in which Lady Delacour directs the new relationship within and between households suggests its being modeled on the neo-classical genre of the conversation piece, in which the arrangement of elegant figures illustrate their relationship.
This staged conversation piece counters the previous one featuring Lady Ann Percival and her children.14 As Susan Bolet Egenolf points out, one of the abstentious purposes of this genre is to display material possession (346 n.
15). The familial piece of Lady Percival best illustrates what Marcia Pointon
13 For a historical account of the development of the boudoir as an exclusively feminine space in the nineteenth household arrangement, please see Reynolds 103-30.
14 For a thorough discussion of the two portraits, of Virginia and Lady Ann Percival, and the dénoue-ment, see Egenolf 323-48.
contends as the manifestation of the father’s presence in the commission of the very artifice that represents his power, even in his absence. Pointon fur-ther emphasizes that in the eighteenth century family is a “shifting concept,”
not a “fixed formulation,” and that one of the functions of the conversation piece is to “enable the psychic and mythic security of family status and con-tinuity to be sustained” (qtd. in Egenolf 340-41). The denouement in Belinda exposes the ideological artifice inherent in conversation piece, with all the attitudes arranged to appear “natural,” and with a riddle-like moral to tease the reader.
In Belinda, Edgeworth is self-consciously writing a fiction about how to write a fiction, blending in elements of sentimental novels, conduct manuals, education treatises, Gothic fictions, conversation pieces, etc. All the self-reflexivity recoils upon Lady Delacour as the chief story teller in the fashion of Scheherazade from the Arabian Nights, with an inset romance called “The Mysterious Boudoir” duly intercepted by Belinda (B 126). Like a modern celebrity, Lady Delacour is constantly maintaining her public image as transmitted via society gossip channels (B 10). This preoccupation with one’s social profile is ridiculed as the narrator allows proponents of other texts of authority to create clashing viewpoints.
Allowing Lady Delacour to issue the final word, as Marilyn Butler ar-gues, departs from Edgeworth’s previous practices, in which a figure identi-fiable as her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, appears as the wise parent (qtd. in Egenolf 344). The gesture itself indicates defiance at patriarchal strictures. Edgeworth’s collaboration with her father in educational treatises, the most important of which is Practical Education (1798), places her in the conservative camp. But Belinda shall serve well to remove that taint on her reputation. The intertextual quality of this novel,15 so central to its message, reveals her nuanced deployment of the performative nature of bourgeois femininity.
5. Conclusion
The women protagonists in Ennui and Belinda suffer different fates. El-linor’s decision to deprive both herself and her child of love creates a chain of events that not only endangers the happiness of each but distorts the nature of the mother-child bond (Costello 187). Ellinor does not know how to be a
15 For implications of intertextuality in the novel, please see Macfadyen 423-39.
mother to her real son when he publicly acknowledges their relationship. In-stead she allows herself to waste away. Though the association between milk/speech/blood in Ennui underscores the progress from Glenthorn to Glenthorn via O’Donoghoe and Delamere, the death of Ellinor dispels the redemptive myth of the wet nurse insisted by Katie Trumpener. In the end, the program of “culture” wins over untainted “nature,” as Glenthorn reclaims the title for the purely Irish by incorporating English professionalsim. In contrast to Ellinor who relinquishes her authority in the new social structure, Lady Delacour re-affirms hers in staging the façade of familial bliss. Lady Dela-cour’s final advice to Belinda, allowing Hervey to kiss her hand as “it is the rule of the stage” (B 478), crystallizes for the last time the performative di-mension of sentiments. It runs deeper than what a “satirical novel” would allow, as insisted by Marjorie Lightfoot (118). Its emphasis on the staged ef-fects and mutual reflection of life and art may be inherited from the comedy of manners as Lightfoot points out (122; 124-27). But this paper advances on Lightfoot’s argument by showing that Edgeworth capitalizes on the mixed nature of satire, the comedy of manners, and various other genres, to achieve a sincere exploration into characters’ psychology at the time of grand paradigm shift. Belinda ends with a “natural” “appearance” of happiness under the stage direction of Lady Delacour, whose breast though rehabilitated leaves her authority “undiluted.” Through a paired reading of the two novels, we see how Edgeworth deploys maternal issues to pry open the Enlightenment discourse and inquire into the wish-fulfilling quality of her blueprint for modern Ireland.