科技部補助專題研究計畫成果報告
期末報告
眷戀的語言:女性、情感與小說 1778-1811(第2年)
計 畫 類 別 ： 個別型計畫 計 畫 編 號 ： NSC 103-2410-H-004-006-MY2 執 行 期 間 ： 104年01月01日至104年12月31日 執 行 單 位 ： 國立政治大學英國語文學系 計 畫 主 持 人 ： 吳易道 計畫參與人員： 碩士級-專任助理人員：藍文玲 報 告 附 件 ： 移地研究心得報告 處 理 方 式 ： 1.公開資訊：本計畫涉及專利或其他智慧財產權，2年後可公開查詢 2.「本研究」是否已有嚴重損及公共利益之發現：否 3.「本報告」是否建議提供政府單位施政參考：否中 華 民 國 105 年 03 月 30 日
中 文 摘 要 ： 本研究計畫檢視十八世紀末及十九世紀初兩位英國女性小說家如何 書寫、爭辯與探索情感的多重向度。以十八世紀「情感文化」(the culture of sensibility) 作為論述架構，本研究將著眼於分析伯 妮(Frances Burney)和雷德克里芙 (Ann Radcliffe)如何挪用與回 應傳統感性敘事方法 (sensibility narratives)來發展其獨特的情 感語言 (the language of feeling)。
本計畫預計分兩年完成，內容分為兩大部分。第一部分「【依 芙蓮娜】中 的禮儀與記憶」探討伯妮的第一本暢銷著作究竟是否為 一情感小說(a sentimental novel)，並進一步分析該文本對禮儀 (manners)和記憶(memory)的重視如何影響情感的流露。第二部分「 情感互惠: 雷德克里芙對劉易士(Matthew Lewis)的回應」重新省視 兩位誌異小說家的競爭與對話，我將分析人與人間的距離 (distance)在後者驚世之作【僧人】與在前者小說【義大利人】中 的呈現有何不同，這樣的比較將可進一步回答兩位作家所共同關心 的問題：親密(intimacy)代表一種肢體上的接近還是一種情感上的 交流?綜合而論，本計畫將可對十八世紀情感文化的發展、女性小說 家的藝術成就以及浪漫時期英國小說的研究做出貢獻。 中 文 關 鍵 詞 ： 情感文化、伯妮、雷德克里芙、劉易士、浪漫時期英國小說、眷戀 英 文 摘 要 ： This two-year research project investigates the fraught
relationship between women, feeling and fiction in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. It asks an important question: is there an alternative way of
imagining and articulating affection in this era other than the dominant rhetoric of sensibility? This project
comprises two parts. The first section, “Manners and Memory in Evelina” examines how Frances Burney’s first novel rejects, recycles and rejuvenates the conventional assumptions about feeling codified and popularized by the eighteenth-century sentimental culture. Burney’s emphasis on good manners does not indicate a resolute and thorough break from literary sentimentalism, as many critics would have us believe. I will demonstrate that Evelina is
centrally concerned with how to sustain affection and create lasting connections. It therefore represents a new stage in the history of the sentimental novel. The second part, “Affective Reciprocity: Radcliffe’s Answers to Lewis’s The Monk,” reconsiders the assumed dialogue
between these two famous writers of Gothic romance. I argue that the notion of distance serves very different emotional purposes in Radcliffe’s novel The Italian and Lewis’s The Monk. The latter associates distance with alienation, while the former connects it with longing. These different
representations of distance and feeling, I argue, reflect their contrasting definitions of interpersonal intimacy. Designed to be deeply historical, this study will
understanding Romantic women novelists and in defining “the Romantic novel.”
英 文 關 鍵 詞 ： the culture of sensibility, Burney, Radcliffe, Lewis, the Romantic novel, attachment
1 Final report
The Language of Attachment: Women, Feeling and Fiction 1778-1811 前言
“Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind.” Few heroines have articulated her feeling as passionately and memorably as Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (64).1 The novel was published in 1847, but the story that it recounts is curiously set not in the mid-19th century. The exact historical moment in which the above episode takes place deserves our attention because Brontë is so meticulous in constructing the timeline of her story and because this information can complicate our understanding of this simple sentence. The standard chronology of Wuthering Heights has it that Catherine declared her love for her childhood playmate Heathcliff in early summer, 1780.2 On the face of it, Brontë’s choice is apt. Late 18th-century England witnessed a prevailing culture of sensibility, one that celebrated susceptibility to exquisite feeling and willingness to display emotions. Catherine’s unabashed revelation of her affection would seem appropriate and understandable in such a cultural milieu. Indeed, Catherine’s declaration crystallizes some of the central tenets of the culture of sensibility: mobility, mixture and excess (Nagle 7).3 Calculated to move Nelly, the housekeeper, and generations of future readers, it demonstrates the potential of language to arouse and to communicate strong feeling regardless of the age, class and gender of the audience. The uncanny dissolution of social boundaries and identities embedded in Catherine’s sentence (“I am Heathcliff”) epitomizes the power of sympathetic bond and romantic excess.
Nevertheless, Catherine’s famous line is framed by her controversial conversation with Nelly, a frame that should draw our attention to how unconventional her affective demonstrativeness actually is. Unlike a typical eighteenth-century sentimental heroine like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Clarissa, Catherine’s emotional effusion results not from male sexual aggression. Nor does it cause her to faint or weep. Catherine’s dilemma, either to accept a rich husband or to be loyal to her genuine love, closely resembles that of Julia in Henry Mackenzie’s sentimental novel Julia de Roubigné (1777). But unlike Mackenzie’s heroine, there is no oppressive father to prejudice her. Catherine’s distress is evident, but her virtue is debatable (she chooses to marry Edgar Linton without loving him).4 Catherine’s example suggests an interesting possibility: the expression of emotion often exceeds or disrupts the historical context in which it is supposedly placed.
1
Hereafter the novel is referred to as WH.
2 Examining “more than six hundred temporal allusions in the novel,” A. Stuart Daley offers a detailed
chronology that corrects the 1926 version by C. P. Sanger (357-61). Daley’s effort has won wide scholarly approval.
3
Surveying the growing secondary literature on the 18th-century sentimental culture, Nagle further explains that these three terms mean, respectively, the circulation or oscillation of feeling, the disappearance of generic, formal or phenomenological differences and overwhelming affect (6).
4 Janet Todd summarizes the constitutive qualities of an 18th-century woman of feeling in Sensibility: An
Introduction (110-128). After Brissenden’s important study of the novel of sentiment, the title of his book,
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Unlike a typical woman of feeling, Catherine expresses her feeling not in terms of sympathy, benevolence, or submission. How should we describe Catherine’s affection for Heathcliff then? To answer this question we need to examine the formal characteristics of her famous sentence and the plot that generates it in the first place. The first half of the sentence (“I am Heathcliff”) merges two otherwise distinct identities and insists on absolute sameness. In the second half, however, this insistence slackens. By a subtle choice of words (“he” and “my mind”), Catherine concedes that she and Heathcliff are two different individuals. Her wishful admission that Heathcliff is always in her mind betrays a painful awareness that he is in fact physically out of her sight. Indeed, Catherine declares her passion for Heathcliff under the impression that he is far away from the room where Nelly converses with her.
Metaphorical distance also plays an important role here. Catherine recognizes that Heathcliff is her social inferior, his education, wealth and manners far below the glamorous realm to which her marriage with Linton will raise her. Her refusal to be separated from him—“don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable’” (WH 68)— only accentuates the fact that they are already separated socially. Catherine’s famous declaration embodies a unique form of feeling, one that accommodates a yearning for intimacy and an awareness of inevitable distance. I shall call it “attachment.”
研究目的
In this research project, I wish to argue that attachment has a much longer literary history and that it is contested, scrutinized and formulated by two English novels before Emily Brontë’s masterpiece: Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Ann Radcliffe’s The
Italian (1797). To better appreciate the value and function of attachment, I plan to investigate
how these two texts respond to the affective patterns dominating other contemporary novels, why the arbiter of emotion changed by the turn of the nineteenth century and why women novelists are particularly interested in revolutionizing the language of feeling.
文獻探討
“The language of feeling” is primarily an eighteenth-century literary and cultural production. In the past two decades, literary historians have identified four of its most crucial constituents: sympathy, sensibility, sentimentality and sociability. They have relied heavily on these four words or their derivatives to illustrate and elucidate how the history of the English novel and the history of emotion cross-fertilized and interpenetrated each other in the eighteenth century.5 To some extent, our understanding of emotion in this era is
circumscribed by these four concepts, which, though useful, are not capacious enough to accommodate the variety and complexity of human feeling. Sympathy and sociability, for example, focus on the power of feeling to bridge the distance of gender, class, race and nationality. But is it not possible that some feelings owe their existence and continuation to distance, literal or metaphorical, rather than to its elimination? Sensibility prioritizes immediate and spontaneous response, while sentimental ideology cultivates irrational love
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that turns a blind eye to social injustice.6 If we pay exclusive attention to the former, we may lose sight of some forms of affection that require time to develop. If we only concentrate on the latter, we risk ignoring the potential of love to assimilate reason and the compatibility of heads and hearts. Indeed, to gain a well-rounded picture of emotion in this era beyond the cognates of sensibility and to discover alternative ways of expressing feeling, we need a new approach, a new set of vocabulary. This is where “the language of attachment” can be useful.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the verb “to attach” generally as “to connect or join functionally.” When it is used to indicate a particular kind of emotion, it means “to join in sympathy or affection to a person, place, etc.”7 Attachment easily invokes an impression of two objects being joined together physically or figuratively. It is an
emotional register that is associated with the notion of distance in general, of closeness in particular. I believe this association has immense potential to expand our perception of feeling in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
There are two reasons why most literary historians have generally turned a blind eye to a new narrative of feeling in this period. Both are concerned with the fortune of literary sentimentalism at that time. For those scholars advocating the longevity of sensibility, this cultural phenomenon continued well into the nineteenth century, informing a variety of Romantic and Victorian poetry and prose.8 The lasting triumph and dominance of the sentimental culture makes it unnecessary, even futile, to think of different modes of
emotional manifestation. Recycling the old vocabulary of feeling is enough. As Ann Rowland writes: “‘Sentimental’ belongs to a group of words—including sentiment, sense, sensibility, sensitivity and sympathy—which together form a crucial lexicon of […] Romantic literary culture ” (192).
But this narrative of sweeping continuity belies the possibility of remarkable difference. Literary sentimentalism suffered severe criticism and disgrace after the French Revolution. According to the OED, the meaning of “sentimental” changed from “exhibiting refined and elevated feelings” in the 1740s to “addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion” by the 1790s.9 This conspicuous suspicion and degradation of sentimentalism has encouraged many critics to associate private feeling with dangerous desire, administering a fatal blow to the reputation of eighteenth-century novels of sensibility. A familiar account among literary critics is that impulsive sensibility is universally criticized in this age and the unbridled (wo)men of feeling are brought to learn self-discipline, usually after public humiliation. Social consensus triumphs over individual emotions (Lynch 460). Apart from cautionary messages, it seems that little could be extracted from the wreck of a once-glorious sentimental edifice. But I will argue that there existed an alternative way of interpreting feeling in this era other than the triumph or downfall of sensibility. How to negotiate this
6 Summarizing Henry Mackenzie’s quintessential novel of sensibility, The Man of Feeling (1771), G. A. Starr
observes: “[w]hat matters is [. . .] the goodness not of our heads but of our hearts. The focus within the novel is not on actions, which involve choice and responsibility, but on reactions—particularly reactions so abrupt as to preclude deliberation. The very idea of pausing to weigh motives and circumstances is alien to the man of feeling” (188). Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings offers an authoritative account of sentimental ideology in the turbulent 1790s.
7 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/12699?rskey=rSTnkS&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid> 7 October 2013. 8
Arguments along this line can be found in Nagel 16, Carson 1-25, Purton, and Csengei 169-94.
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alternative is a controversial problem that concerned contemporary women novelists. In particular, is feeling an inherent part of human nature or is it an acquired skill? How should feeling be evaluated and sustained? What is the relationship between feeling and fiction? What role does gender play in that relationship? The research project that I propose will answer these questions adequately.
I emphasize one single gender in my research project because, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century women played a central role in reading, writing and debating the value of prose fiction. Together they helped propel issues of women’s education, desires, rights and duties to the foreground of contemporary literary scene and political polemics, of which sentimental novels were an important part. At the heart of many sentimental novels lies an anxiety about female desires. This anxiety manifests itself most obviously in a familiar structural pattern that celebrates yet ultimately disciplines women’s passion. Barbara
Benedict aptly summarizes this pattern: “[w]hile sentimental novels depict their characters’ passionate feelings as their heroic trait, they enclose these portraits within a narrative endorsing restraint, contemplation, and self-control. While they praise individuality or uniqueness, they also attempt to socialize it through a language that evokes common values and general standards” (Benedict 210). On the face of it, the two women writers covered in this project (Burney and Radcliffe) subscribe to this rule. At the end of their works there is always an ideal reconciliation between individual (almost certainly female) desire and social expectations.
But if we pay close attention to various ways by which emotions are conceived, sustained, framed and interpreted in their novels, we may discover a different story. Private passion is not necessarily threatening or anarchic but can be empowering and constructive. Although social demands frequently debar women from many active pursuits, they may motivate women to utilize their limited resources more intelligently and productively, thus blurring the boundary between restraint and liberation. Burney and Radcliffe well understand the rhetoric of feeling codified and popularized by their male predecessors and
contemporaries. But they are determined to explore new forms, possibilities and dimensions of the human psyche. The representation of feeling in their novels, I shall argue, formulate a distinctive language of attachment, one that, more than four decades later, culminates in Catherine Earnshaw’s powerful declaration.
研究方法
My research project comprises two sections. The first, “Manners and Memory in
Evelina,” explores Frances Burney’s engagement with literary sentimentalism. Burney’s first
novel is widely recognized as a quintessential novel of manners whose celebration of polite conversation and enlightened self-discipline contrasts sharply with the tropes of inexpressible emotion and self-indulgence that characterize eighteenth-century sensibility narratives.
Evelina, in other words, is “commonly not regarded as a sentimental novel” (Starr 196). But
if this is the case, how can we explain the emphatic claim of one of the novel’s first reviewers that it “would have disgraced neither the head nor the heart of Richardson,” who is arguably
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the father of sentimental novels (Rev. of Evelina 202)? I wish to argue that Burney shares her predecessor’s interest in exploring feminine interiority. But while Richardson scrutinises the twist and turns of feeling through rakish and even thuggish behaviour, Burney achieves a similar aim via her emphasis on good manners.
In eighteenth-century London and Bath, the two fashionable cities where the story of
Evelina unfolds, good manners stand for a thorough understanding of interpersonal distance:
how intimately a man is allowed to interact with a woman and how far middle-class people should keep away from the noble class. Paradoxically, good manners are capable both of broadening and bridging interpersonal distance. Centring her plot and her style on good manners, Burney draws our attention to how attachment grows and alienation occurs. In so doing, she puts feeling in the context of psychological and social development. Feeling is understood not in terms of impetuous outburst doomed to be fragmentary and transient but of gradual progress full of potentiality.
Burney’s insistence that feeling is a mental process that can be open-ended and drawn-out can be best observed in the drama of memory that underlines Evelina. Literary sentimentalism dictates that refined feelings generally, sympathetic bonds between
individuals in particular, tend to be fragmented and transitory (Spacks 129; Benedict 5). Burney challenges this stereotype not least by demonstrating the central role memory plays in lasting connections between her characters. Forgetfulness, in other words, not only results in comic caricatures, but also reveals emotional shallowness. Through its emphasis on manners and memory, the narrative focus of Evelina shifts from instant emotional gratification to the gradual growth of attachment. This shift is significant because it indicates a fresh way of experiencing and writing emotion, one that grants it a long-neglected longevity.
Gothic romance has long been regarded as the logical consequence or apotheosis of literary sentimentalism (Ahern151-202). A thorough discussion of the evolution of feeling in English fiction therefore cannot bypass this important literary fashion in late eighteenth-century England. The second part of my research project, “Affective Reciprocity: Radcliffe’s Answer to Lewis’s The Monk,’” attempts to analyse why Gothic novelists dramatise the intricacy of human mind differently and how these contrasting mental theatres convey different appreciations of feeling. This section is obviously my response to Syndy Conger’s fine essay “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe’s Answer to Lewis’s The Monk.” I agree with Conger’s argument that Radcliffe’s novel The Italian represents her earnest effort to recuse sentiment from the associations of physicality, sensuality and transgression, a link that Lewis’s scandalous work seems to popularize. But I disagree with her suggestion that both Radcliffe and Lewis are concerned with the same issue, sensibility, and that the former is simply restoring to sensibility its “intellectual and spiritual dimensions” conveniently forgotten by the latter (119). I wish to argue that these two writers in fact are pursuing two different paths, which results in diametrically opposed emotional paradigms. Radcliffe revises Lewis’s plot, lines and characterization not because she wishes to return to an old sentimental tradition but because she desires to create a new ways of formulating feeling. To put it succinctly, Radcliffe rewrites Lewis’s violent infatuation into tender attachment.
I plan first to examine the crisis of reciprocal relationships that underpins many critical episodes in The Monk. The Bleeding Nun’s famous chanting, “Raymond! Raymond! Thou art mine! Raymond! Raymond! I am thine!” (161), sematically registers a wish of
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intimacy and syntactically suggests another wish that this affection is reciprocal. What follows, however, is disgust and repulsion. Frustrated emotional reciprocity in the novel, either because of uncanny mistake or foolish misunderstanding, fosters further attempt to secure intimacy, which in turn leads to more violence and horror calculated to eradicate any possibility of mutual affection. This pattern is important because it speaks volumes about Lewis’s conception of emotional intimacy, one that is predicated exclusively on physical proximity. For him, the exchange of feeling cannot take place when two individuals are separated. Distance nullifies affection because it frustrates its fulfilment.
One unmistakable sign of Radcliffe’s disagreement with Lewis is that she, especially through picturesque prospects and absent lovers, allows distance to play a key role in
arousing and mellowing her character’s emotion. By scrutinising the evolution of Ellena the heroine’s affection for Vivaldi (her admirer), Olivia (her mother) and Schedoni (her uncle), I will demonstrate that for Radcliffe sympathetic bonds can develop without physical closeness. In other words, Radcliffe shows that mutual affection paradoxically thrives on absence and separation. This insight, as I shall argue, is not a utopian ideal, but is a valuable skill necessitated by a tumultuous society in which affective reciprocity, especially between two sexes, was a source of profound anxiety.
In his introductory chapter to Waverley: ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Walter Scott dismisses the conventions of sentimentality. He rejects “[A] Sentimental Tale” as the second title of his work because it instantly invokes a “heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage” (qtd. in Rowland 191). Despite this sniffy description of sentimental heroines, Scott’s debt to the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility is
apparent.10 His hero Edward Waverley, for instance, is a man of feeling whose adventures in exotic lands frequently excite his passion and sympathy. If Scott repudiates formulaic
patterns that reduce feeling to stock figures and stiff props, he nevertheless values the ability to feel intensely.
This point becomes clear in Scott’s famous review of Austen’s novels. In an implicit defence of Marianne’s strong passion in Sense and Sensibility, Scott writes: “[w]ho is it, that in his youth has felt a virtuous attachment, however romantic and however unfortunate, but can trace back to its influence much that his character may possess of what is honourable, dignified and disinterested?” (qtd. in Southam 68). It seems significant that, when alluding to exquisite emotion, Scott refuses to use the familiar vocabulary of feeling like sensibility, sympathy, sensitivity or sentimentalism. Instead, he singles out “attachment” as a healthy alternative, even as an ideal worthy of pursuit. My research project will explain the degree to which Burney and Radcliffe concur with him and elaborate how their novels collectively put forward a hierarchy of emotion, with “virtuous attachment” at the top.
結果與討論
I have produced two journal articles that are direct result of my research in the culture of feeling in the late eighteenth-century. My first article, “‘I Suppose It Is Not Sentimental
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Enough!’: Evelina and the Power of Feeling,” appeared in Tamkang Review in June 2015. In this essay I read Evelina against the backdrop of classic eighteenth-century sentimental novels and the emotional paradigm they help to popularise. If the representation of feeling in the novels of Henry Mackenzie and Lawrence Sterne centres on impulsive reaction and immediate gratification, Burney proposes a developmental interpretation of human affection, one that stresses the ability of feeling to evolve through and last despite time. Burney’s use of the verb “to attach” and its cognates in this novel support my argument that her efforts to revise conventional vocabulary of feeling produce a distinctive “language of attachment,” one that foregrounds the longevity and resilience of affection.
My second article, “The Crisis of Intimacy: Lewis’s Infatuation and Radcliffe’s Attachment,” appeared in NTU Studies in Language and Literature, also in June 2015. It revisits the critical consensus that Radcliffe’s novel The Italian represents her response to Matthew Lewis’s earlier work The Monk (1796) and that the former rejects the predominantly carnal understanding of sensibility in the latter. Sensibility alone, I argue, cannot fully explain the intertextual dialogues between these two Gothic texts, because it frequently reduces this dialogue to a matter of contrast and disapproval. I believe that the differences between infatuation and attachment can best encapsulate Radcliffe’s response to Lewis. Scrutinising how Radcliffe dramatises interpersonal attachment in The Italian and comparing this drama to Lewis’s representation of infatuation in The Monk, I demonstrate that the assumed contrast between them belies an important similarity. Radcliffe in fact shares with Lewis a profound scepticism about the possibility of rewarding intimacy.
I have attached the typescripts of these two articles to the end of this final report.
Bibliography
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1680-1810. New York: AMS Press, 2007.
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Edward Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century
Britain. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Benedict, Barbara M. Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-
1800. New York: AMS Press, 1994.
Brissenden, Robert F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson
to Sade. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 4th edn. New York: Norton, 2003. Carson, James P. Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel. New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Conger, Sydney M. “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe’s Answer to Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic
Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Ed. Kenneth W. Graham. New York: AMS ,,
113-49.
Csengei, Ildiko. Sympathy, Sensibility and The Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Daley, A. Stuart. “A Chronology of Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights. 357-61. Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: The
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Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental
Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Ferris, Ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.
Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—
Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995.
Jones, C. B. Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s. London ; New York : Routledge, 1993.
Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. Ed. Emma McEvoy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Lynch, Deidre. “Transformations of the novel—I.” The Cambridge History of English
Romantic Literature. Ed. James Chandler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 451-72.
Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Nagle, Christopher C. Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Purton, Valerie. Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition : Fielding, Richardson, Sterne,
Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb. New York : Anthem Press, 2012.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Rev. of Evelina, by Frances Burney. Critical Review 46 (1778): 202.
Rowland, Ann W. “Sentimental fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the
Romantic Period. Ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2008. 191-206.
Southam, Brian C. ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage Volume I, 1811-1870. London: Routledge, 1995.
Spacks, Patricia M. Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-century English Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
Starr, G. A. “Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century.” The Columbia History of
the English Novel. Ed. John Bender, Deirdre David, and Michael Seidel. New York:
Columbia UP, 1994. 181-98.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.
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Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Essay 1
“I suppose it is not sentimental enough!”:
Evelina and the Longevity of Feeling
Is Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) an eighteenth-century sentimental novel? In the 1770s, when the adjective “sentimental” still retained its favorable sense of exhibiting refined
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feelings and moral virtue, the answer was an enthusiastic yes.11 One anonymous early reviewer of Evelina positioned it firmly in the tradition of literary sentimentalism and argued that the quality of this work “would have disgraced neither the head nor the heart of
Richardson” (202). Implicit in this comment is the reviewer’s belief that the sentimental narratives of Samuel Richardson serve two purposes, both of which are fulfilled in Evelina. If Richardson consistently invests his works with moral messages that could improve “the head” of his readers, Evelina exudes a similar instructional spirit. With its description of the
vulgarity of impertinent remarks and the attraction of good manners, the novel offers useful advice on how to navigate an increasingly commercial society. If Richardson aims at arousing readers’ tearful sympathy for the misfortune of his heroines, Evelina works on its readers’ heart as well. The same reviewer emphasized how affecting reading Evelina could be: “the father of a family, observing the knowledge of the world and the lessons of experience which it contains, will recommend it to his daughters; they will weep and . . . grow wiser” (202).
Curiously, modern critics of Evelina show little interest in exploring the sentimental qualities of this novel, arguably with good reason. For one thing, Evelina flouts some of the essential formal and thematic features that constitute sentimental fiction.12 At the heart of a sentimental novel usually lies a conflict between a benevolent yet vulnerable hero and a hostile and unfeeling world. The pressure and pain this world inflicts on the hero is often so overwhelming that he has no other alternative but to quit it literally, either by death or self-exile. In sharp contrast, Evelina is about how a young lady gradually negotiates a secure niche in a fashionable society.
Moreover, a sentimental novel is fundamentally an anti-bildungsroman. The men and women of feeling that it portrays either refuse to renounce their child-like innocence and adopt adult sophistication or fail to perceive how social expectations circumscribe female subjectivity. In other words, “instead of a progress toward maturity, [a sentimental novel] deals sympathetically with the character who cannot grow up and find an active place in society” (Starr 181). Evelina once again does not fit this description. Its heroine slowly but surely grows from a timid young girl ignorant of social etiquette to a brave woman able to resist male aggression. As Betty Rizzo explains, “with all the sensibility in the world, Evelina sets out with no experience and little ability to judge.” But as the story unfolds, she acquires both autonomous judgement and “the ability to act on it” (83). 13 Starr’s verdict on Evelina seems final and widely-accepted: “Evelina is commonly regarded not as a sentimental novel but as a kind of bildungsroman enlivened by social comedy” (196).
But if Evelina is purely a “bildungsroman enlivened by social comedy” of manners, how can we explain why the novel features so many scenes of weeping, fainting and nervous disorder, all of which are standard elements in sentimental fiction? How can we explain Burney’s emphasis in the preface that her heroine has “a feeling heart?” (9). Recent critics have taken a closer look at the role of feeling in Evelina, aligning the novel with the culture of sensibility that created such influential novels as Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). Patricia L. Hamilton draws an analogy between politeness in Evelina and sensibility in general and argues that both represent a corrective social force aiming at reforming male manners. Impoliteness
11 This adjective acquired negative connotations conspicuously and was attributed to superficial, disingenuous
sentiments during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. See Barker-Benfield 287-395, Todd 141 and Ellis 190-221.
12 For a summary of the defining characteristics of sentimental fiction in the eighteenth-century, see Starr
181-98.
13
For another two important discussions of Evelina in terms of female development, see Doody 45 and Fraiman 32-58.
10
specifically refers to an unwillingness or inability to show “deference to the feelings of others” (428). Closely analysing the reconciliation between Evelina and her father, Virginia H. Cope demonstrates how the sentimental focus on filial tenderness helps Evelina negotiates the controversial issues of legitimate inheritance (73-78). As compelling as these readings are, they discuss the sentimental aspects of Evelina for the sake of other thematic concerns,
subordinating the importance of feeling to politeness and properties respectively. It is as if the novel is not sentimental enough to justify a sustained analysis of its representation of feeling
per se.
This article argues that feeling in Evelina deserves a more thorough scrutiny precisely because it is not sentimental enough by eighteenth-century standard. By comparing moments of intense emotion in Burney’s novel and those in contemporary sentimental fiction, I would suggest that Burney disapproves of and consistently revises the emotional paradigms
popularized by sentimental novelists. In particular, while Sterne and Mackenzie believe that to feel intensely means to feel spontaneously, privileging impulsive passion that fragments human interactions into moments of transport, Burney maintains that the virtue of feeling lies in its ability to cement interpersonal connections and to last through such desirable ties. This reading will refocus the issue of power in Evelina, but not in terms of gender inequality, as is often the case in existing scholarship. Although I agree with feminist critics’ claim that women in Evelina represent a disempowered group persecuted by wealthy and wolfish men, I will demonstrate how and why feeling in this novel becomes an unexpected and unlikely source of power for both sexes.14 Before presenting my arguments in greater length, I will first address the sentimental moment in eighteenth-century narratives of sensibility, which, I believe, is the target of Burney’s revisionist energy.
The Sentimental Moment and the Construction of Feeling
In the preface to The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Richardson claims that all the following letters are “written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on events undecided” (4, emphasis in original). Richardson is deeply interested in the causes and consequences of an emotional moment, when the distress of his heroine becomes so great that it affects herself, other characters and the reader. The
immediacy and affective intensity of that moment, Richardson insists, can best be registered through letter-writing. Although not every sentimental writer in the eighteenth-century subscribes to the power Richardson attributes to epistolary narratives, most of them share his interests in “the moment” and punctuate their texts with momentary ecstasy, grief, rage, compassion or swoon. As Stephen Ahern has convincingly demonstrated, this fascination with an exquisitely emotional moment infiltrates a variety of novelistic forms that falls under the banner of literary sentimentalism. In early eighteenth-century amatory fiction, this
fascination translates into “a dream of union with the beloved in a moment of erotic bliss.” In mid-century narratives of sensibility, it manifests itself in episodes of compassionate
encounters with suffering friends. In late-century Gothic fiction, it evokes sublime terror that expands the heroine’s mind or violent horror that threatens her existence (38).
Permeating the majority of eighteenth-century novels, these moments of emotional transport conjure up two assumptions about feeling and circumscribe contemporary
perception of its nature and value. First, these sentimental moments are by definition short-lived, drawing readers’ attention to the suddenness of feeling rather than to its continuity. A
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sentimental hero never takes time critically to evaluate his feeling. Scrutinizing the cause of his emotional response and weighing up its consequence would immediately disqualify him for a man of feeling. As Starr aptly puts, the focus of a sentimental novel “is not on actions, which involve choice and responsibility, but on reactions—particularly reactions so abrupt as to preclude deliberation” (188). In other words, sentimental novelists narrow the value of feeling down to transient spontaneity. The gradual evolution of feeling through time and its defiance of the eroding power of time are irrelevant to them.
This emphasis on immediate reaction to external stimuli at the expense of responsible actions problematizes the sentimental moment and reveals another assumption about feeling: that it necessarily invokes powerlessness. This assumption can be observed clearly in the general inefficacy of a sentimental hero’s sympathy for the socially disadvantaged. Although tearful encounters in sentimental novels frequently expose social injustice and resultant unhappiness, they serve not so much to address the origin of that particular misfortune as to provide fleeting aesthetic pleasure for the audience of those unhappy scenes. Thus Sterne’s Yorick and Mackenzie’s Harley may readily sympathize and weep with heartbroken women that they meet, but forget these female victims of a patriarchal society soon afterwards. Satisfying their personal emotional need, their sympathy absolves them of social
responsibility and yield little constructive attempt towards social reform. For them, “the immediate emotional response matters, in terms of the sentimental project, more than any action it might generate” (Spacks 134).
Feeling unleashed by the moment of transport is powerless not only because it fails to achieve any social good but also because it is literally associated with physical vulnerability. This dimension becomes apparent in the sentimental swoon that characterizes most
eighteenth-century women of feeling. In Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760), the heroine faints upon learning Lord Dorchester’s decision to fight a duel for her sake. And in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), Miss Milner “sunk speechless on the floor” when she realized that the life of Dorriforth, whom she secretly loves, would be threatened by a duel with Sir Frederick Lawnly (67). Their fainting represents “a disadvantage for both heroines: it prevents them stopping the life-threatening event and assisting where they would be most needed” (Csengei 140). Their loss of consciousness confirms the association of feeling and weakness, suggesting that physical vulnerability and social powerlessness are two sides of the same coin.
With spontaneous reaction and powerlessness as its two constitutive elements, a typical sentimental moment militates against the formation of a lasting connection between individuals. Because a man of feeling prioritizes immediate emotional pleasure, he is not interested in sustaining a relationship with the subject of his sympathy. When a woman of feeling faints, she literally and effectively disrupts her interaction with other characters. The dramatization of feeling in Evelina is not sentimental enough because it highlights how a lasting emotional bond emerges from an intensely sentimental moment and because, through this plot arrangement, it disputes the conventional association of feeling with instant
gratification and vulnerability.
Lasting connections
Like many other eighteenth-century sentimental heroines, Evelina faints and weeps when her mind is burdened with overwhelming emotion. Unexpectedly discovering her maternal grandmother Madame Duval, she “sunk into Mrs. Mirvan’s arms,” “more dead than alive” (53).Returning to her native Berry Hill after a long stay in London, she “wept over” her guardian Villars’s hands (255). But it is important to notice that the person who arouses her strong feeling is neither a sexual predator nor a mere stranger but a family member. Why
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does Burney choose to make her heroine faint and weep in the presence of someone with whom her fate is intertwined? I would argue that this is because Burney wants to connect long-term relationship with powerful feeling, a connection overlooked by the preoccupation of the sentimental culture with impulsive reaction.
The compatibility between sentimental moments and long-lived affective bonds can be best observed in one particular episode of the novel, in which Evelina, for the first time in her life, disobeys Villars. After her London journey, Evelina returns to Berry Hill with a heavy heart. She has written a letter to Orville to apologize for her cousins’ taking advantage of his carriage. A rude reply, insinuating her intention to carry on secret correspondences with Orville, wounds her pride. Villars attempts to identify the cause of Evelina’s
unhappiness, but Evelina tries to evade his enquiries. Tension between them builds up, culminating in a sentimental climax where Evelina, ashamed of her ungrateful reserve, explodes: “I burst into tears: with difficulty had I so long restrained them . . . ‘Say then,’ cried I, kneeling at his feet, ‘say then that you forgive me! . . . — my father! my protector!— my ever-honoured—ever-loved—my best and only friend!—say you forgive your Evelina, and she will study better to deserve your goodness!”(266). In this emotional declaration Evelina gives Villars three roles: father, protector and friend. The value of each role is predicated on sustained commitment. Indeed they are titles awarded to someone with whom we wish to have or have already had a lasting connection. The order in which these three titles are arranged invites scrutiny. Villars has acted as Evelina’s father and protector for seventeenth years. He cannot arrogate these titles to himself after Sir John Belmont fully acknowledges his paternal obligation and after Evelina marries. But Villars can always be Evelina’s friend despite the change in her circumstances. Evelina’s choice of words, “ever-honoured” and “ever-loved,” also suggests that it is in the capacity of friend that Villars can develop a life-long connection with her. The spontaneous overflow of Evelina’s powerful feeling channels her attention not to temporary aesthetic pleasure but to long-term
relationships. As her feeling intensifies, she hits on the most flexible and capacious forms of interpersonal relations: friendship.
The importance of this sentimental moment lies not so much in Evelina’s tearful excitement as in the affective bond it helps to secure after Evelina dries her tears. In particular, Evelina’s reconciliation with Villars saves and strengthens three of her most cherished relationships. When Evelina chooses to withhold her confidence, Villars feels hurt and laments that “though Evelina is returned,— I have lost my child” (265). Gina Campbell argues that throughout the novel Villars consistently associates “child” with innocence. “I have lost my child” therefore implies that Evelina loses her chastity during her London journey, which is too severe a rebuke for Evelina’s unwillingness to reveal her secrets. “Evelina's shock at the charge suggests how serious it is,” Campbell thus concludes (566). However, Evelina’s immediate response to this charge indicates that the cause of her shock lies elsewhere and that she takes Villars’s “child” literally. “‘No, Sir, no,’ replied I,
inexpressibly shocked, ‘she is more yours than ever! Without you, the world would be a desart [sic] to her, and life a burthen” (265). Rather than defending her innocence, Evelina tries to express her gratitude towards Villars, not least by invoking what could have happened to her had Villars not adopted her after her mother’s death. Evelina is shocked because she believes Villars is accusing her of a breach of filial piety. Villars’s accusation in fact carries a real threat. Evelina is legally not his child and he can choose not to leave his fortune to her. Villars does not hesitate to intimate the consequence of his displeasure: “it pains . . . me you should ever remember that you have not a natural, an hereditary right to every thing within my power” (266). But Evelina’s tears soften Villars’s heart. After their emotional
conversation, Evelina is once again “his sole joy, his only earthly hope, and the child of his bosom” (266).
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This sentimental moment contributes to securing another two long-term relationships. Evelina’s resentment at Orville’s apparent insult nearly extinguishes her affection for him. “I will talk,— write,— think of him no more!” she declares (262). However, her sentimental encounter with Villars obliges her to talk, write and think of Orville once more. In addition, Villars’s astonishment upon hearing her stories and his attempt to excuse Orville alleviate Evelina’s indignation and incline her to believe that Orville is really forgivable. Evelina concludes the account of this sentimental moment by mentioning Orville once again.
Addressing her friend Maria Mirvan, she writes: “I entreat you not to acquaint even your dear mother with this affair; Lord Orville is a favourite with her, and why should I publish that he deserves not that honour” (268). Evelina’s request that Mrs. Mirvan’s good opinion about Orville should remain untarnished not only contradicts her previous decision not to think of him anymore. It also testifies to her continual affection for him.
It is worth noticing that Evelina relates her sentimental experience to her bosom friend Maria. Julia L. Epstein has argued that Evelina “maintains the selective privilege of the creative artist throughout her narrative” (117). She carefully edits her letters to Villars,
describing her adventures from the moral perspective of which Villars would approve. On the contrary, her letters to Maria are “direct, their style colloquial and forthright, their tone unstudied” (118). Intrigued by the contrast between these two distinct groups of letters, Epstein argues: “there is a second novel here, over which Evelina rests like a palimpsest—the novel that Evelina’s letters and conversations with a peer, another young woman, would comprise” (119). If Evelina’s respective relationships with Maria and Villars are capable of producing two different novels, the difference between them nevertheless evaporates in the very letter at the centre of which lies Evelina’s sentimental reconciliation with her guardian. This letter begins by linking her friendship with Maria and her filial sentiment, treating both as a good cause for letter-writing: “my dear Miss Mirvan . . . I have . . . at present, sufficient matter for a letter, in relating a conversation I had yesterday with Mr. Villars” (262). At the end of this letter, we see again that Evelina place her friend and her guardian on an equal footing: “to you, and to Mr. Villars, I vow an unremitting confidence” (268). The sentimental moment bolsters Evelina’s connection with Maria in two ways. On the one hand, it provides Evelina with interesting materials worthy of communicating to her best friend. Her regular correspondence with Maria plays a key role in sustaining their friendship despite their separation. On the other hand, it allows Evelina to compare Maria with Villars and draw a fitting analogy. Both of them, she declares, deserve her “unremitting confidence” and lasting affection. Reflecting on the affecting revelation of her secrets, Evelina writes “dear to my remembrance will ever be that moment” (266). That moment is dear to her because it does not implicate her in egoistic sentimentality but considerably improves her interpersonal relationships.
“Dear to my remembrance will ever be that moment”
Evelina’s association of long-term memory with an emotional occurrence points to another reason why Burney’s novel appears not sentimental enough. Like contemporary sentimental novelists, Burney incorporates momentary transports into her narrative. But these dramatic moments reveal not so much her preoccupation with instant emotional gratification as her interest in what happen when feeling is allowed to span a longer period of time. This experimental spirit infiltrates two of the most emotional episodes in Evelina: Macartney’s adventure in France and Evelina’s reunion with her father.
Brought up in a single-parent family and designed for the church, Macartney is a poor Scottish man with apparently little prospect of prosperity. His visit to France, however, transforms his life. In Paris he falls in love with an English lady, Miss Belmont. Their
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affection is clandestine but honest. Miss Belmont’s father, Sir John Belmont, strongly
opposes their relationship and accuses Macartney of seducing his daughter. Infuriated by this unjust affront, Macartney fights a duel with and severely wounds the father of his beloved. Later Macartney finds that he nearly commits the crime of patricide and incest—his lover turns out to be his half-sister. To allay Sir John Belmont’s fears about his daughter being seduced or abducted, Macartney stays in London and waits for his arrival. There he is insulted by his landlords, the snobbish Branghtons, for his inability to pay his rent. There he experiences the comfort of sympathetic benevolence when Evelina, perceiving pistols in his pocket and fearing an impending suicide, rushes into his room to stop him and offers her purse. Combining frustrated love, passionate encounter, social injustice, financial distress and the balm of sympathy, Macartney’s story suggests Burney’s familiarity with the
paraphernalia of sentimental fiction. But with a conventional sentimental hero Burney in fact attempts to introduce a fresh perspective on feeling.
Macartney’s unhappiness arguably starts with the discovery by Sir John Belmont of his secret liaison with his daughter. According to Macartney himself, “the sudden and unexpected return of her father . . . proved the beginning of the misery which has ever since devoured me . . . he darted into the room with the rage of a madman. Heavens! What a scene followed!—what abusive language did the shame of a clandestine affair . . . induce me to brook” (228). The interruption of a private conversation by an angry father, who,
apprehensive of his daughter’s honor, accuses a young man of villainy and seduction: this plot arrangement bears a striking resemblance to the Emily Atkins episode in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Seduced and abandoned by her lover during her father’s absence, Miss Atkins is forced into prostitution to earn a living. Her pitiable condition attracts Harley’s attention and he visits her for a more detailed story. During their conversation, her father unexpectedly enters the room: “the door burst open, and a man entered in the garb of an officer. When he discovered his daughter and Harley, he started back a few paces; his look assumed a furious wildness! he laid his hand on his sword . . .‘Villain,’ he cried, ‘thou seest a father who had once a daughter’s honour to preserve; blasted as it now is, behold him ready to avenge its loss!”(50). Like Belmont, Mr Atkins resorts to a stream of invective to vent his resentment. And both fathers are ready to revenge themselves on the assumed ravisher. But the similarity between Macartney’s experience and Harley’s adventure stops here.
Significantly, Mr Atkins only “laid his hand on his sword” but did not strike. His daughter intervenes and directs his anger towards herself: “strike here a wretch, whose misery cannot end but with that death she deserves” (50). As a result, Mr Atkins’s anger does not bring about more dramatic action but culminates in sentimental speechlessness. “Her father would have spoken; his lips quivered, his cheek grew pale! . . . he burst into tears” (50). Mr Atkins’s tears, mingled with those of her daughter and Harley, quickly dissolve the tension between these three characters. As the emotional intensity subsides, so does the narrator’s interest in further developing this event. The narrative focus on Harley’s feeling peters out: “we could attempt to describe the joy which Harley felt on this occasion, did it not occur to us, that one half of the world could not understand it though we did; and the other half will, by this time, have understood it without any description at all” (52). As a result, the exquisite sympathy Harley has just felt for Emily Atkins and her father is short-circuited. Its brevity parallels the short-lived connection between Harley and his new friends. After this emotional encounter, Harley leaves them to their own device and their memory recedes in his mind. By choosing to dwell exclusively on the immediate drama that emotion produces, Mackenzie appears uninterested in discussing feeling in developmental terms. Ann Jessie Van Sant has observed that Harley is a “reduced figure.” Comparing Harley with Tobias Smollett’s Matthew Bramble and Sterne’s Yorick, she writes: “the physiological bodies of Matthew Bramble and Yorick determine the range and intensity of their experience. Harley— with
15
virtually no body—has correspondingly little experience” (112). I would argue that Harley appears to be a “reduced figure” not only because he lacks a hypersensitive body, but also because he has a fragmented emotional life characterised by a number of unconnected sentimental moments. Chameleon-like, his feeling never concentrates on one subject for a long period of time. Or rather, his mind fails to retain his feeling.
Burney portrays her man of feeling differently. It is not tears but blood that plays a central role in Macartney’s confrontation with Belmont. He fights a duel with Belmont and seriously wounds him. “At that moment I could almost have destroyed myself!” Macartney declares (228). Significantly, this overwhelming emotional moment does not marks a final climax and then fades away but haunts Macartney’s mind ever since. This retention of feeling not only makes Macartney’s emotional life coherent and unified but also becomes a powerful propeller of plot. Macartney’s mother, for example, would not have divulged his secret parentage but for her genuine concern for his sadness after his return to Scotland. As Macartney informs us, “the miserable situation of my mind was soon discovered by my mother; nor would she rest till I communicated the cause” (229). The significance of this revelation lies in two related respects. First, it confirms Burney’s preference to explore feeling in terms of long-term interpersonal connections. Second, by foregrounding the
consequences and implications of Macartney’s passionate encounter, it expands a sentimental moment to a sentimental process, allowing readers to witness the complication, climax and dénouement of Macartney’s emotional entanglement with Belmont. After Macartney learns his parentage, he embarks on a long journey to find his father and seek paternal recognition. Before he meets his father in person, he suffers impoverishment, insult and bereavement. Indeed we do not know whether his petition would be successful for another 130 pages of the novel. In other words, Burney is not satisfied with describing Macartney’s feeling simply in terms of violent outburst. She associates it with an indefinite development and demonstrates how time mellows and chastises his sensibility. For Burney, the value of feeling can best be appreciated through the drama of gradual evolution rather than sudden explosion.
Burney’s interest in the intersection of feeling with time has another important dimension. She believes that feeling, when lodged in long-term memory, is one valuable part of humanity that can survive the transformative power of time. In this respect Burney
markedly differs from other sentimental novelists, whose obsession with momentary effusion of emotion and whose depiction of forgetful characters imply their unwillingness to put feeling to the test of time. Once again Burney carefully engineers a sentimental moment to suggest her familiarity with and revision of the conventional rhetoric of sensibility. Upon perceiving the possibility that Macartney has committed patricide, Macartney’s mother is so overpowered by horror and grief that she faints. As Macartney recounts:
‘My son,’ cried she, ‘you have then murdered your father!’ and she sunk breathless at my feet. Comments, Madam, upon such a scene as this, would to you be superfluous, and to me agonizing: I cannot, for both our sakes, be too concise. When she recovered, she confessed all the particulars of a tale which she had hoped never to have
revealed. — Alas! The loss she had sustained of my father was not by death!— bound to her by no ties but those of honour, he had voluntarily deserted her!— Her settling in Scotland was not the effect of choice, — she was banished thither by a family but too justly incensed; — pardon, Madam, that I cannot be more explicit! (229)
16
Literary historians of sensibility generally agree that the inexpressibility of emotion plays a central role in sentimental fiction.15 The first three lines of the passage above, in which Macartney refrains from elaborating his feeling at the sight of his unconscious mother, shows Burney recycling the sentimental convention. The second half of the passage, however, tells a very different story. Inexpressibility is replaced by volubility: Macartney’s mother relates “all the particulars” of her affair with Belmont, presumably including the ups and downs of her affection for him. In the seclusion of Scotland and separated from its object, her affection for Belmont have remained dormant for more than twenty years. But through Macartney’s
account, the regret, resentment, disappointment and sorrow that his mother have repressed for the sake of her son’s peace of mind return with a vengeance.
Feeling does not die with time, as Harley’s short-lived and ineffectual sympathy for Emily Atkins would have predisposed the reader to believe. But questions remain: why does feeling last in the first place? And what message can be inferred from its longevity? To answer these questions we need to scrutinize the relationship between Belmont and
Macartney’s mother. We learn very little about the twists and turns of their youthful romance. The only information we have is that their love affair ends because of parental disapproval: “she was banished . . . by a family but too justly incensed.” A comparison with Caroline Evelyn, the mother of Evelina, is revealing here. Belmont acts like a villain in his treatment of Caroline. He voluntarily terminates his relationship with her, by “burn[ing] the certificate of their marriage and den[ying] that they had ever been united” (17). In sharp contrast, the degree to which Belmont willingly leaves Macartney’s mother is problematized by the presence of an angry family. This detail suggests that Belmont may have a stronger affection for Macartney’s mother than for Caroline and that their connection could have lasted but for familial opposition. Moreover, their affection is apparently reciprocal. Macarteny’s mother never ascribes her misery to Belmont’s perfidy. Unlike Villars who never hesitates to
publicize Belmont’s criminal offense, so much so that Belmont fears that Evelina is “bred to curse” him (384), Macartney’s mother tells her son that he loses his father to illness. If Villars emphasizes the abrupt annihilation of Caroline’s marriage, Macartney’s mother stresses her unending attachment to Belmont. She tells Macartney that she begins a continual process of mourning “upon the sudden loss of [his] father” (227). This process can hardly draws to an end partly because Macartney himself represents a constant reminder of her youthful love affair. Through constant mourning and rearing the offspring of the man she loves,
Macartney’s mother self-consciously preserves her bitter-sweet memory of Belmont and mentally re-establishes her relationship with him. A retentive mind allows both feeling and interpersonal connections to last.
Burney’s experiment with sentimental moments can be further explored in the two recognition scenes near the end of the novel. Critics have sought hard to explain why there are two meetings between Evelina and Belmont, when one seems enough. Susan Greenfield argues that, although in the first meeting Belmont is shocked by Evelina’s physical
resemblance to Caroline Evelyn, he does not “offer either woman legal recognition.” It is not until Evelina presents her mother’s letter to Belmont that he fully “acknowledg[es] his legal relationship to both child and wife” (312).Amy Pawl also claims that it takes another interview before Belmont “own[s] her as his legal child” (292). Neither critic dwells on the sentimental aspect of these two occasions, assuming that the issue of ownership outweighs the importance of feeling.
15 Spacks, for instance, has identified inexpressibility as “a formal device of considerable import” in sentimental
novels (133). “A crucial aesthetic of such fiction demands sparseness in the narration of emotion. . . . Both the immediate auditor and the reader must fill in the details” (135).
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But in fact these two scenes demonstrate how carefully Burney works on the
representation of feeling in her novel. Unconvinced of Mrs Selwyn’s assertion that she brings his daughter with her, Belmont is unexpectedly ushered in a room where Evelina stays:
What a moment for your Evelina!—an involuntary scream escaped me, and covering my face with my hands, I sunk on the floor.
He had, however, seen me first; for in a voice scarce articulate he exclaimed, ‘My God! Does Caroline Evelyn still live!’
Mrs. Selwyn said something, but I could not listen to her; and, in a few minutes, he added, ‘Lift up thy head,—if my sight has not blasted thee, — lift up thy head, thou image of my long-lost Caroline!’
Affected beyond measure, I half arose, and embraced his knees, while yet on my own.
‘Yes, yes,’ cried he, looking earnestly in my face, ‘I see, I see thou art her child! She lives—she breathes—she is present to my view!— Oh God, that she indeed live!— Go, child, go,’ added he, wildly starting, and pushing me from him, ‘take her away, Madam, — I can-not bear to look at her!’ And then, breaking hastily from me, he rushed out of the room. (372)
This passage reproduces the conventional sentimental moment in two ways. For one thing, the emotion that emerges from this moment is sudden and abrupt. Upon seeing Evelina, Belmont recognizes her resemblance to his deceased wife. And both Evelina and Belmont are immediately “affected beyond measure.” The quick succession of verbs describing Belmont’s actions reinforces a sense of knee-jerk impulsiveness. For another, the violent feeling it produces is short-lived and contributes little to forging or sustaining a lasting interpersonal connection. Belmont’s rushing out of the room and his declaration that he cannot bear to look at Evelina combine to suggest that the strong feeling the sight of Evelina excites only serve to widen the distance between him and her. It is not until this overwhelming feeling subsides, until Belmont recovers from the shock, that he is ready to confront this puzzling affair again. As Evelina suggests, the moment of transports passes very quickly: “he soon after sent his servant to enquire how I did” (373).
On the face of it, the second meeting of Evelina and Belmont simply re-enacts the sentimental excess and impulse manifest in the first.
The moment I reached the landing-place, the drawing-room door was opened, and my father, with a voice of kindness, called out, ‘My child, is it you?’
‘Yes, Sir,’ cried I, springing forward, and kneeling at his feet, ‘it is your child, if you will own her!’
He knelt by my side, and folding me in his arms, ‘Own thee!’ repeated he, ‘yes, my poor girl, and Heaven knows with what bitter contrition!’ Then, raising both himself and me, he brought me into the drawing-room, shut the door, and took me to the window, where, looking at me with great earnestness, ‘Poor unhappy Caroline!’ cried he, and, to my inexpressible concern, he burst into tears. . . .
I would again have embraced his knees; but, hurrying from me, he flung himself upon a sopha, and leaning his face on his arms, seemed, for some time, absorbed in bitterness of grief. (382-83)
The passage of time is deliberately woven into this scene, which qualifies the emotional abruptness underlying a sentimental moment. Belmont may suddenly “burst into tears,” but Evelina’s pen directs us to see the length, not the spontaneity, of his sorrow: “for some time,
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[he is] absorbed in bitterness of grief.” Moreover, interpersonal connectedness informs this scene. Whereas in their first encounter Belmont literally pushes Evelina away from him, here he “fold[s] [her] in his arms.” In return, Evelina attempts to embrace his knees. If in the previous meeting Belmont stops short of admitting his paternity, here, by pronouncing “my child,” he unreservedly includes Evelina into his family circle. Furthermore, gazing at Evelina reminds Belmont of Caroline. His gaze thus imaginatively enacts a long-awaited family reunion of father, mother and daughter. The poignancy of his memory testifies that Belmont is a man of feeling by Burney’s standard. His guilt and sympathy for Caroline’s suffering last for seventeen years.
The longevity of Belmont’s feeling can be inferred from a sentence that smacks of sentimental excess. After Belmont reads Caroline’s letter, he declares: “how willingly would I take her child to my bosom, — fold her to my heart, — call upon her to mitigate my anguish, and pour the balm of comfort on my wounds” (385). Significantly, this sentence represents not so much what Belmont wishes to do now as what he has long been yearning to do. By this point in the novel, we have already learned that Belmont wrongly acknowledged Polly Green, a nurse’s child, as his own, seventeen years ago and that “he had always observed that his daughter bore no resemblance of either of her parents” (374, emphasis in original). The emphasized “always” suggests that Belmont’s paternal affection for Caroline’s daughter existed long before he meets Evelina. For the past seventeen years he has been trying to treat his natural daughter with tenderness but Polly Green’s lack of resemblance to Caroline has “always” prevented him from fully enjoying a gratifying father-daughter relationship. Reconfiguring emotional excess in a way that accommodates enduring affection, Burney negotiates a middle ground between regurgitating the paraphernalia of sentimental fiction and abandoning them altogether.
Empowering Attachment
Burney does not repudiate sentimental fiction because she shares with the genre’s fascination with the ability to feel intensely and because she wishes to transforms this ability from a liability to an asset. Among all letters in Evelina, Caroline’s is arguably the most powerful one. It is capable of undermining patriarchal authority. After reading the letter, a weakened Belmont cries: “ten thousands daggers could not have wounded me like this letter” (385). Moreover, this letter demonstrates female narrative prowess. With it, the dead mother “writes the final version of the familial script,” not least by dictating what the father should do to obtain her forgiveness (Greenfield 312). At the same time, combining maternal
tenderness and references to an old romantic tie, this letter is also one of the most affectionate. It thus provides a fertile ground for investigating the link between feeling and power.
Caroline’s letter rings with her anxiety about disrupted interpersonal connections. She finds no proper way to address Belmont: “shall I call you by the loved, the respected title of husband?— No, you disclaim it!— the father of my infant?— No, you doom it to infamy!— the lover who rescued me from a forced marriage?—No, you have yourself betrayed me!” (338). Husband, father and lover: the three titles that Caroline invokes are all indicators of an affectionate and enduring relationship. The three emphatic “no,” however, sever the tie between the indicator and its referent as abruptly as Belmont burns his marriage certificate. Lamenting her husband’s cruelty alone boarders on an admission of powerlessness. But showing sentimental weakness is far from what Caroline intends to do with her death-bed letter.
I would argue that Caroline’s letter testifies to the empowering potential of feeling. Caroline’s emotional trauma and postnatal weakness could have deprived her of any strength to write a letter. As she herself admits, “hopeless, and almost desperate, twenty times have I
