The Matter of the Carriage in Frances Burney's Evelina

In Frances Burney's Evelina; or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), a carriage is the centerpiece of many important episodes, from Evelina's first meeting with her grandmother Madame Duval, to Sir Clement Willoughby's attempts to seduce Evelina, to Captain Mirvan's antagonistic interactions with Madame Duval. As a material object that was central to the lives of eighteenth-century men and women, the carriage served both symbolic and functional needs, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, carriage episodes had become a conventional motif in fiction. Percy Adams explains, "as prose fiction was evolving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public stage-coaches and coach travel in general were evolving with it. The new novel then could hardly have avoided making artistic use of the stage-coach."¹ As I will show, Burney's artistic use of the carriage negotiates the complex and contradictory ways in which gender circumscribed carriage use in everyday life.

Taking a material culture approach, I read the carriages in Evelina through the ways in which actual eighteenth-century carriages were important to the men and women who used or encountered them.² In other words, I examine how the carriage matters in eighteenth-century culture to better understand its significance in Burney's novel. In this approach, I follow Daniel Miller's use of the term "matters" to shift emphasis "to the concerns of those being studied" and to put "the burden of mattering clearly on evidence of concern to those being discussed."³ Miller suggests that the idea of mattering coincides with "a move from a primary emphasis with producing things to a concern with consuming things."⁴ In this sense, the carriage matters because a person's use of it as a multifaceted object—a mode of travel, a symbol of status, a space for conversation, a space of entrapment—shaped perceptions of his or her identity, particularly in regards to rank, reputation, and virtue.⁵

Attending to the pattern of carriage scenes in the novel through a material culture lens joins previous scholarly attention to the novel's gender ideology to current critical interest in form and offers a solution to a problem described by Marcie Frank: "Burney's contemporary readers have often found it difficult to reconcile the prim didacticism of her novels with the relentlessness, even cruelty, of some of their episodes."⁶ Rather than disruptive, incongruent scenes, these cruel episodes actually participate in the "prim didacticism" of the novel by demonstrating the difficult choices that a woman must make in the face of contradictory conduct prescriptions. Kenneth W. Graham understands such impossible decisions as exhibiting the "patterns of obligation and entrapment" in the lives of eighteenth-century women, and he explains that for each positive, desirable condition of a prescribed attribute, women also experience a negative, hindering, or threatening condition in response to that attribute.⁷ Carriage episodes in Burney's novel repeatedly force women into this untenable position. Through her interactions with carriages, Evelina simultaneously learns to enact what is deemed to be the proper feminine behavior and experiences the ways in which that behavior can endanger women. Meanwhile, Madame Duval's assertiveness in her use of carriages results in making her a target for cruel jokes. Thus, focusing on the formal role of the carriage highlights how everyday practices create, maintain, and perpetuate an ideology that values women's silence and complicity in the face of harassment and denigrates women's assertiveness and resistance, attitudes that continue to resonate in contemporary women's everyday experiences.

By the eighteenth century, the closed passenger carriage was a common part of daily life in England, and its significance as both a symbolic object and a functional vehicle had been evolving for over three hundred years. Percy Adams dates the invention of the enclosed coach around 1450 and explains that by 1630 it was "a symbol of wealth and prestige in western Europe."⁸ Over the course of the long eighteenth century, the basic enclosed coach evolved into a variety of types of...