Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self

Here's a quote that seems to me to be entirely RIGHT:

The action of Fanny Burney's vast collections of journals and letters, like that of most women's writing in her century, derives from her attempt to defend—not to discover, define, or assert—the self. Both her choices and her ways of describing them testify to her productive and self-protective solution to unescapable problems of women's existence. That solution provides psychic space for her imaginative life, thus making her literary career possible, and also shapes the operations of her imagination.

(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. 160).

And it works so well for other kinds of fictionalized women's writing in the 18th century: Pamela as an attempt to defend the self; Evelina, certainly. The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph isn't about threat and defense, though, so much as avoidance of potential misfortune, and then the failure of that avoidance and bad things happening. So I'm saying there's a difference between SAVING YOURSELF from something and TRYING TO KEEP SOMETHING BAD FROM HAPPENING to you. I think.

Frances Burney's Evelina

I'm listening to Evelina on Librivox and it's making my really happy. The reader has a weird fake British accent which I don't understand (I don't understand why she's doing it, anyway—when she announces her name and the Librivox stuff at the beginning, she does it in a convincingly American accent), but other than that it's really fun. Evelina is kind of a total bitch—smart, critical, funny—but also scared and shy and making enough mistakes that her judgments don't strike me as bitchy so much as really, really fun. That is, Evelina doesn't know how out of place she is, which means that her criticisms aren't nearly as nasty as they really should register. And Burney's SO GOOD at putting in really appalling characters—Evelina's embarrassing French grandmother Mme Duval, Captain Mervin, Clement Willoughby are all terrible, terrible people who say ridiculous petty shit ALL THE TIME and behave badly and pick fights really appalling fights with each other. And then, the best part, Evelina's describing all this shit in letters to her guardian, who's even more socially clueless than she is (that is, more out of the loop of fashion—he's a much better judge of character than she is, but his letters haven't been in the narrative a while, so I tend to forget it), so it never feels as gossippy and bitchy as it properly is. Good job, Burney. She's created the perfect critical epistolary narrator without making her vulnerable to being called rude or impertinent.

Fielding's Shamela

Problem is, I'm still not sure what I mean about Richardson's people seeming like robots. But I'm glad that in Shamela, she fakes drowning herself in order to cover up the fact that she disappeared for a couple hours to fuck Parson Williams—by giving Shamela a surface story and an inner real story, Fielding makes her seem so REAL to me. (Richardson's Pamela doesn't get to do that—she always means exactly what she says, and she's so so so BORING.)

End of Bidulph

Kind of a let-down, actually—horrible things keep happening, and then finally they stop. Sidney stays alive for a while, I think, I can't remember. (Orlando Faulkland completely loses his mind, which is really very entertaining, and Sidney seems to finally find him an acceptable suitor at that point, because she marries him when he says he'll kill himself if she doesn't. She finally stops agonizing about things, just says she'll do it. (Her BROTHER does agonize, and says it'll look bad if Sidney goes off with Orlando right after the wedding; she should wait a while first.) But then he kills himself anyway because he's discovered that his wife who he thought he'd shot dead with her lover wasn't actually dead, just the lover, and so he was kind of a bigamist. So it was good, all in all, that Sidney HADN'T run off with him, even though it means that Sidney and Faulkland never have sex with each other. Sad face.)

Then I read Kathleen M. Oliver's article in SEL, "Frances Sheridan's Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated Male" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625090 ). Oliver does a nice job examining how Faulkland is feminized in the novel—he's excessive, he falls in love too easily, he stays in love too long, he has a tendency to drink too much and play cards too long and lets himself get manipulated by women like Mrs. Gerrarde, Miss Burchell, and (of course) Sidney and Lady Bidulph. Oliver is responding to critics like Spacks, who have contrasted Faulkland's 'activeness' with Sidney's passivity (Faulkland, after all, gets rid of Mrs. Gerrarde as Mr. Arnold's mistress by kidnapping her and marrying her to his servant in France); Oliver says Faulkland is much more subjugated within structures of feminine power than other people have seemed to find him. Then she does something interesting where she talks about how Faulkland is Continental and Feminized, and Sidney (Sir Philip is her obvious namesake, although Spacks ties her to Lady Mary Wroth, and the Countess of Pembroke, and whatever) is English and Masculine. So HOW is Sidney MASCULINE? This would have been a really interesting way to look at the novel (Sidney not so much the victim but the victimized spokesperson of patriarchy), and I wish Oliver had gone there more. I LIKE novels in which women are men, and men are women (like how Captain Wentworth is a mother figure for Anne Elliot in Persuasion).