Bringing Belmont to Justice: Burney's Quest for Paternal Recognition in Evelina

Bringing Belmont to Justice: Burney's Quest for Paternal Recognition in EvelinaGina Campbell Early in Evelina, the Reverend Mr Villars explains his insuperable objection to the most direct means for establishing Evelina's legitimacy: The law-suit, therefore, I wholly and absolutely disapprove. Will you, my dear Madam, forgive the freedom of an old man, if I own myself greatly surprised, that you could, even for a moment, listen to a plan so violent, so public, so totally repugnant to all female delicacy? I am satisfied your Ladyship has not weighed this project. ... Never can I consent to have this dear and timid girl brought forward to the notice of the world by such a method; a method, which will subject her to all the impertinence of curiosity, the sneers of conjecture, the stings of ridicule. And for what?—the attainment of wealth, which she does not want, and the gratification of vanity, which she does not feel.—A child to appear against a father!—no, Madam, old and infirm as I am, I would even yet sooner convey her myself to some remote part of the world, though I were sure of dying in the expedition.1 Mr Villars's disapprobation of the lawsuit represents exactly the censure Bumey feared in her quest for legitimation as a writer. Modest women 1 Frances Burney, Evelina: or The History ofa Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 127-28. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 4, July 1991 322 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION did not seek the publicity that writing brings.2 Moreover, since Frances Burney's father, Dr Charles Bumey, was himself a scholar and published writer, to write and to publish would be to rival her father and undermine the familial hierarchy. Too brazen a challenge would have been as much an affront as the proposed lawsuit, and as counter-productive. Like Evelina, Bumey must proceed cautiously and indirectly. Burney's venture is by its nature paradoxical: her wish to be thought virtuously submissive compels her to deny authorship of her first published book in its inscription; however, her need to be recognized as a peer by those literary fathers, including her actual father, who subscribe to Villars's code of feminine propriety simultaneously impels her to challenge them with a competitive project. This essay will address the psychobiographical motives underlying that project as they assert themselves in the reconciliation scene between Sir John Belmont and Evelina. I will argue that Frances Bumey is using the scene to reproach her father indirectly for his infidelity to the memory of her mother, his first wife, and for his failure to recognize her own abilities. In that scene Burney's ambivalence towards the code of feminine propriety expresses itself melodramatically. Modem feminist critics like Judith Lowder Newton and Katharine Rogers deplore its sentimentality.3 But Burney's use of the sentimental is not really abject; die pattern to the outbreak of sentiment and the retreat to impersonal, polite formulations can explain the divergent styles of the novel in terms of Burney's distinct impulses. Sentiment and what most modem readers would consider stylistic excess are consistently associated with the legitimation or family romance plot; we find it in scenes between Evelina and Belmont or Macartney and in Evelina's correspondence with Villars on the subject of her quest for legitimation. The issue of Evelina's legitimacy is an emotional one, of course, but the sentimental in Evelina 2 For recent discussions of the connection, in Bumey's work, between the reticence expected of modest women and inhibitions on writing, see Juliet McMaster's "The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Bumey's Novels," Studies in the Novelli (1989), 235-52, and my "How to Read like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina," ELH 57 (1990), 557-84. Of broader interest are Dale Spender's "Publish—and be damned ... as a woman," Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Woman Writers before Jane Austen (London and New York: Pandora, 1986); Katharine M. Rogers's "Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and...