In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

252 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:2 Barbara Zonitch. Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997. 167pp. US$31.50. ISBN 0-87413-618-0. In the introduction to her study, Barbara Zonitch positions her work in the context of feminist criticism which has drawn attention to Frances Burney's concern with violence and power in her constructions of femininity and gender relations, acknowledging in particular her debts to MargaretAnne Doody's Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (1988) and to Julia Epstein's The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics ofWomen 's Writing (1989). While duly noting the achievement of such earlier Burney scholars as Joyce Hemlow, who focused on the proximity of the novels to eighteenth-century modes of female literary socialization, above all conduct-books for marriageable women ofthe upper and the rising middle classes, Doody and Epstein foreground Burney's complex understanding of patriarchal society's manifold crippling of women and the annoyance of this very proper lady at their oppression. Zonitch clearly utilizes their findings, but builds her case on contextualizing "Burney's novels more fully in their historical moment" (p. 14), thereby participating in the turn to history of many literary critics in the 1990s. She presents Burney as a writer acutely aware of living in an age of radical social transformation, fromthe pre-modern status society dominatedby the aristocracy to modern capitalist society characterized by social mobility and class antagonism. Zonitch rightly points out that in Burney's largely urban fictional universe the deferential society—which Austen features in her rural settings— has virtually disappeared. Burney's brashly self-confident urban middle classes challenge the weakening old elite's right to rule, and the power struggles of the proponents of these two social orders are shown "to cause a great deal of" the "violence" in the novels (p. 59). Zonitch's primary concern is to delineate the way in which the writer's social vision and concomitant fear of what might replace the traditional paternalistic protection of women suffuses her intricate portrayal of gender relations, that is, the way in which women's lives are affected as the cold-blooded violence of the dynastically oriented aristocratic patriarchy gradually, under the impact ofmiddleclass attitudes, yields to new forms of "familiar violence." From among the sociocultural components ofthe novels' historical context, she singles out the following, which she regards as interrelated and as most pertinent to Burney's preoccupation with violence: legal changes such as the amendments of inheritance settlements which strengthened the position of younger sons as well as daughters within the primogeniture system; economic changes such as the burgeoning of emulative consumerism and the credit system; and the modified ideology of femininity resulting from the new middle-class emphasis on affective individualism and the empowerment of women as guardians of morality and social harmony in the domestic sphere. By conveying the social transformations ofher historical moment through the medium of the novel of manners, by affiliating manners with "forms of power," Burney is seen to have transformed this genre into an "innovative political discourse of manners [which] participates in the complex reordering of patriarchal domination" and becomes "in many ways a cultural articulation of this new bourgeois patriarchy" (p. 32). REVIEWS 253 Although Zonitch typically phrases such claims for Burney's social progressiveness cautiously and steers clear of the untenably bold feminist position ofEpstein, who views Burney as a "self-conscious social reformer" (The Iron Pen, p. 4), she would clearly like to establish her as a social critic who steadily advanced both in discernment and analytical complexity. To this extent, she succumbs to the temptation , which Martha Brown laments, of reading "the 'apparent' feminism in The Wanderer," stemming from Burney's Wollstonecraftian concern with economic independence for women, "back into the earlier novels" (Fetter'd or Free, p. 38). It is true that after Evelina Burney extensively experiments with replacements for the old-style patriarchal control of women, replacements such as affective fatherhood , middle-class patriarchy, and the community of women, which might entail for them an advance towards self-determination. These replacements are already present in Evelina, however...

pdf

Share