In recounting her story, Lady Delacour develops a proper perspective onto key events of her life. After having “outsourced” her domestic duties, she feels an “aching void” in her heart which makes her take a “prodigious fancy” to Mrs. Harriet Freke as a “bosom friend” (B 43).12 The exaggerated adjective, “prodigious,” connecting Mrs. Freke with the campaign of maternal
12 For full implications of the relationship between Lady Delacour and Mrs. Freke which at some points amounts to homoerotic attachment, please see Ty 157-73.
suckling previously referred to as “prodigious rout,” reveals that flouting and complying with the discourse of femininity are two sides of the same coin.
The blatantly unconventional Mrs. Freke cajoles her to participate in a duel with Mrs. Luttridge, Lady Delacour’s arch-nemesis. In the duel, both disguise as gentlemen. The duel itself ends in a truce, as both parties agree to fire in the air. However, Lady Delacour hurts her breast by the recoil of her over-charged pistol. This incident, described by Lady Delacour as a “tragic-com-edy,” develops into a “grotesque mixture” (B 57). After the duel, both ladies are surrounded by peasants who attempt to duck in water these female duel-ists “in men’s clothes.” Lady Delacour’s complaint that these blockheads would not have been so scandalized “if they had boxed in petticoats”
highlights the subversion and usurpation delivered by the spectacle of female duel in men’s attire. In other words, it’s their cross-dressing, not their dueling, that inflames these peasants who threaten to punish them like witches. But her sense of relief after being rescued from the pending disaster, in which “a peeress, after being ducked, could never have held her head above water again with any grace” (B 58), demonstrates her witticism in crisis but also indicates her conventional notions of feminine beauty. In fact, she harbors no ultra-feminist notion as what her playful action would suggest. It defuses the potential disruption caused by her challenge to orthodox conception of gender, and thus renders the duel a “tragic-comedy” in the eye of patriarchy.
However, this duel and the subsequent riot are resolved by an even more bizarre masquerade. This “English mob” is eventually diverted by Cla-rence Hervey, a professed admirer of Lady Delacour, who disguises as a herder of pigs in a contest against a French herder of turkeys. He directs the crowd to move along the troupe of pigs to show the love for their country.
This highly allegorical parade of pigs travestizes the famous reference to the Parisian mob as “swinish multitude” in Edmund Burke’s Reflection of the Revolution in France (1791) (173). As Andrew McCann analyses, Burke’s analogy vividly condemns the French Revolution as an atavistic regression (187). Intriguingly, Burke’s epithet is twice inverted here: first it is used to refer to the English crowd; second it refers to the bigots rather than the revo-lutionaries. Hervey’s piggish parade draws the curtain on the masked duel, evading lynch by another masquerade flashed with jingoism. This incident dramatizes Edgeworth’s investigation into Burke’s refusal to acknowledge the paradigm shift as he laments over “the age of chivalry.” Two of her central male characters seem to enact Burke’s attitude: Hervey who chivalrously
rescues the two ladies with his piggish parade and Percival who prefers “de-cent drapery of life” to Mrs. Freke’s revolutionary stance: “whatever is, is wrong” (B 229-30). Edgeworth puts them three under severe test. In this way, Edgeworth shows her reservation about these contrary attitudes, by having Hervey undergo education regarding true love vs. old chivalrous honor, by showing Percival’s advice to Belinda concerning her choice of husband to be ill-founded, and by exposing Freke’s brand of feminism as nothing but patched quotations.
The “grotesque mixture” of duel and parade, like the Gothic exposure and sentimental confession mentioned earlier, demonstrates the dynamism of quick succession of events with contradictory implications that governs the novel as a whole. This episode is the only one in the novel that evokes the political revolution which is at once dismissed as a court masque followed by its antimasque. The imagery of the pig that characterizes this parade and El-linor’s farmhouse in Ennui connects the two novels in a profound way. Both the mob and the Irish wet nurse stem from the grass roots and both contain aggression to dismantle and to devour. Edgeworth plays with Burke’s con-demnation of the philistine and destructive mob and allows its contradictory implications to implode. In Belinda, the piggish parade is a chauvinist crowd easily fooled by jingoist exhortation. Hervey’s herder disguise, though in-tended to rescue the ladies in distress in a chivalrous fashion, works seam-lessly with the peasants’ self-esteem to save the country by their own power.
In other words, Hervey’s chivalrous act defuses the manifest violence of the bigoted mob, which is incensed by the “revolutionary” potential of the cross-dressed duel. In the end, both paradigms, chivalry and republic, are shown to be equally frivolous.
The episode of duel and parade also reveals Lady Delacour’s irresolu-tion at the juncture of paradigm shift, which is a mixture of guilt over failed motherhood and regret over her militant “feminism.” Her irresolution, as it were, also affects critics for her injured breast remains a site of contention.
Beth Kowaleski-Wallace interprets it as “the locus of her guilt and anxiety,”
for Lady Delacour “channels those feelings introduced by her earlier failures as a wife and mother into an hysterical symptom” at the same time she is rendered dependent on her domineering maid and a quack doctor who “pre-scribes” nothing but laudanum (250). Kowaleski-Wallace sees her as a pas-sive victim, or to be more precise, a coerced collaborator in the “new-style patriarchy” that ceases to emphasize “paternal prerogative and hierarchy” but that works according to “more psychologically compelling themes of guilt
and obligation” (242-43). Conversely, Ruth Perry sees a more asserted Lady Delacour by reading the injury as “festering resentment” at the colonization of her body: for her body is never her own; her desires pervert its natural functions, and its health is beyond her capacity to understand or maintain (204). This paper tries to negotiate between these two strategies. The duel with the parade aptly dramatizes that Lady Delacour’s flaunted independence results not so much from her resentment at the “colonization” of her body but from an accidental backlash that drives her to act out, or role play, those hys-teric symptoms. The “grotesque mixture” of this event seriously qualifies the performance of domestic bliss in the denouement.