Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology by Brian McCrea (review)

“The past,” L. P. Hartley famously writes in The Go-Between (1953), “is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology, Brian McCrea suggests that contemporary critics often fail to recognize that things are “done differently” in the writings of Frances Burney. Specifically, he argues that Burney’s novels, journals, letters, and plays have been misread because they are “particularly resistant to interpretation” (3) grounded in feminism, Marxism, and other forms of modern and postmodern criticism and theory.

McCrea’s study begins with the idea that Burney’s writings are “prior to” various ideologies, but his use of the word “prior,” curiously enough, has little to do with chronology. What McCrea means is that Burney “eludes” commentators armed with ideological assumptions: “To be prior to ideology . . . is not a matter of historical accident—in Burney’s case, of her being born before the word was coined” (x). Instead, he suggests, Burney’s “priorness” is based on the ways in which she “tempts critics to impose their ideologies upon her,” even when those critics “see problems or issues that Burney did not” (3). Feminist scholars, McCrea observes, tend to assume that Burney’s narratives about courtship highlight the male gaze and the commodification of attractive young women, but she resists these interpretations by refusing to describe her heroines’ beauty: “Burney introduces all of her heroines as beautiful but never tells us what they look like. . . . We learn nothing about the hair color of Evelina, Cecilia, and Ellis; their eyes occasionally sparkle brightly but their size and color are not described” (35). (We learn more about the beauty of Indiana Lynmere in Camilla, but only because the narrator describes the appearance of her brother Clermont after mentioning that he “entirely resembled” her.) In addition, Burney’s references to beauty are not gendered in ways that contemporary readers may expect—her novels contain male characters described as “beautiful” and female characters described as “handsome.”

Similarly, McCrea contends that present-day scholars interested in the political implications of Burney’s oeuvre frequently misread her views. Margaret Anne Doody, for instance, has observed that Cecilia (1782) is “one of the first of the Jacobin novels,” but McCrea rejects that label for two reasons. First, Burney repeatedly insisted that her novels did not convey political messages. Second, she was a highly patriotic royalist—her brother Charles once referred to her as “Fanny Bull”—who loathed Jacobins: “As any careful reader of Burney’s Journals and Letters can attest, ‘Jacobin’ probably was the dirtiest word in her vocabulary. When a careless wagon driver in Calais injured [her husband Alexandre d’Arblay], Burney immediately assumed he must be a Jacobin. A list of her intense and pejorative uses of the word would be a long one. How is it that Burney’s novels elicit from her finest critic the political association she most detested?” (5). Elsewhere, McCrea stresses that Burney’s depictions of poverty cannot be explained by modern forms of ideology. She occasionally writes about the poor, but these passages contain no demands for economic justice: “Burney sees the poor but will not pursue causes for their suffering. . . . [She] records details of their dress and behavior, notes their economic (mis)fortunes, and transcribes their dialect. However, Burney offers these accounts without analysis, without ‘class-consciousness’” (6).

Some of McCrea’s assertions are based on meager evidence. Is Burney’s apparent reluctance to describe her beautiful female characters or to “gender” beauty really sufficient to demonstrate that her work is “particularly resistant” to interpretation by feminist critics? I suspect, moreover, that McCrea occasionally makes too much of relatively minor issues. When Doody argued that Cecilia is a “Jacobin” novel, for instance, she seems to have meant that Burney’s narrative, like the fiction of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and other English Jacobin writers of the 1790s, highlights the evils of elitism, sexism, and greed, not that Burney admired Jacobins or endorsed...