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).

I think Sheridan read Cervantes

   Sidney Bidulph has been doing this thing recently (last 50 pages or so) where Mr. OrlandoFaulkland, Sidney's old suitor, pretends to be a knight-errant.  At one point in his letter to Sir George, O.F. writes,

You may soon expect to have the second part of this my delectable history; 'Shewing how Orlando, not being able to prevail, with all his eloquence, on the as fair and beautiful, as fierce and inexorable Princess Gerrardina, to put the finishing hand to his adventures and most wonderful exploits, did, his wrath being moved thereby, like an ungentle knight, bury his sword in her snow-white, but savage and unrelenting breast; whereat, being stung with remorse, he afterwards kills himself.'

   Would not this be a pretty conclusion of my adventures? No, no, Sir George, expect better things from thy friend. I hope my knight-errantry will not end so tragically.

He's pretending to be a knight-errant because he's run after Mrs. Gerrard, and convinced her to leave Mr. Arnold, and he's doing all this for Sidney's benefit.  It's an extended piece of selfless gallantry, which Mr. F seems to find pretty funny because he's used to thinking of himself as a rake—he and Mrs. G's niece Miss B had an illegitimate baby together, after which Mr. F declined to marry Miss B, and as a result, Lady Bidulph declined to let Sidney marry him, for being an immoral, untrustworthy young man.

   But the novel really thinks Mr. F is really this selfless, this impossibly good—because it has named him ORLANDO, as in Orlando Furioso, as in that crazy Renaissance knight who rides around after a woman he's in love with but won't ever have sex with (ever EVER), all while doing extravagant strange benevolent things for her benefit.  When Cervantes wrote about Orlando Furioso in Quixote, he was making fun of him (or making fun of people who model themselves after him)—but Sheridan's novel is taking Furioso and knighthood seriously enough to suggest that it's going to be a matter of tragedy at some point.  (Mr. F thinks his extravagant actions are funny, when he compares himself to a knight-errant—but the novel will think it's really really SAD that he and Sidney will never have a chance to have hot-hot-hot sex all over Continental Europe.)  

   Anyway, all this is interesting because I suspect that Sidney Bidulph (pub. 1761) is interested in making-fun-of-gallantry-but-also-taking-it-seriously because of Smollett's translation ofDon Quixote (pub. 1755) had made Orlando Furioso current and interesting enough that Mr. F's first name works as a subtle bit of foreshadowing about his future (or non-future) with Sidney.  

Illustration for "Orlando Furioso" by Gustave Dore (really?  even though it's signed with a different name???), from Wikimedia Commons.  

Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph: An Eighteenth-Century Page-Turner?

So here's what's fascinating so far about The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph—it's the Clarissa I actually want to read. Sidney's 16, lovely, and the only daughter of a very loving but very rigid mother. She has an older brother, George (26), who's been abroad, where he made friends with a very rich young man, Mr. Faulkland. Mr. Faulkland easily falls in love with Sidney through George's descriptions of her, and a few of her letters to George (shades of Between Men, again), and soon after they finally meet, he proposes marriage. That is, he proposes to Lady Bidulph that he marry Sidney, Lady Bidulph refers him to George's authority, and finally, after the two elder Bidulphs agree, Sidney gets to say, "Well, if my mother and brother have no objections—I mean—I'm not seeing anybody—and you're really pretty—" (Something like that, anyway.)

But then Sidney gets a cold, and hallucinates for a week or so, and when she's finally up and about, a letter has come from Faulkland's dismissed footman that says he's a bad, bad man—and inside that letter is a letter from Faulkland's ex-girlfriend, who writes to tell him she's pregnant. Now the Bidulphs are in an uproar—Lady B is incensed and says she will never let S marry such a dangerous rake; F says there's a more complicated side to the story than what was in the letter, and in fact there are some other letters Lady B refuses to read, "for fear of seeing something indecent"; G says that F is a really good guy, and that if Lady B is looking for a young man for S to satisfy all her (Lady B's) scruples, S will never get married. And Lady B has had a long and scathing conversation with F where she's told him to marry his baby's mama, that he should be ashamed to be courting S, that he's an evil man for having let the babymama's aunt let him have sex with the girl and then leave her. G and B are no longer speaking, either, although the B's all share a house. And this is all before page 40. FORTY. It's amazing.

Not that Clarissa doesn't have stuff that happens—but C spends a lot more time in her letters than S does on pity and guilt and wailing that she doesn't know what she'll do. I don't know that Sidney won't get to some of that—but a much larger portion of Sidney's elaboration on these events bears directly on the plot than Clarissa's does. So much so that I'm starting to think Clarissa doesn't have a plot so much as it has a mood—a sort of feeling of overhanging, sickly, horrible gloom. All the stuff that gets written about in Clarissa—the filial piety, the guilt, the recriminations, the shame, the wishing that her father would forgive her and her brother would stop torturing her and her mother would stand up for her—is important, but important mostly to making the reader feel as hopelessly depressed as Clarissa herself must feel. Whereas Sidney—so far, at least—seems to be fascinated by the soap-operatic drama of the family feud she's missed. She wasn't a part of it while it was going on (she was moaning and sweating and hallucinating on her bed for a week), so she can watch it after it's over. She's going to feel terrible when she gets to the end of this episode, of course—but I have a feeling I'm still going to like her when it's over. For one thing, she has these lovely sentences:

You know my mother is rigid in her notions of virtue; and I was determined to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast, and, with as much composure as I could assume, told her, I thought she acted as became her; and that, with regard to Mr. Faulkland, my opinion of his conduct was such, that I never desired to see him more. This answer, dictated perhaps by female pride (for I will not answer for the feelings of my heart at that instant) was so agreeable to my mother, that she threw her arms about my neck, and kissed me several times; blessing, and calling me by the most endearing names ]at every interval. Her tenderness overcame me; or, to deal with sincerity, I believe I was willing to make it an excuse for weeping. Oh! my dear mother, cry'd I, I have need of your indulgence; but indeed your goodness quite overpowers me.

Sidney does what Clarissa never does: she reflects directly on her own conduct. "I was determined," Sidney writes, "to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast." That swelling passion is where Sidney acknowledges having feelings that she doesn't express, while Clarissa is so well behaved that she has no feelings except the ones the conduct-book expects she should. Clarissa, I think, ends up writing itself into a critique of this kind of behavior (because Clarissa does everything right but dies a horrible martyr's death), but it doesn't start off wanting to be this kind of critique—it wants to be the story of a wonderful girl whose family never appreciated her as they should have. Sidney Bidulph, though, starts off as a story about a girl who was always good but ended up unhappy, as though proving that doing everything right may actually be a bad idea.

Anyway, I'm toying with this idea of Sheridan writing a sort of vehicle for the kind of moral ambiguity that Richardson doesn't want to support. Does an epistolary novel have a viewpoint, though? Sidney Bidulph's been just letters from Sidney, so far (except for the brief introduction from the "Editor," and a briefer one from the grown-up Cecilia), so is the novel's opinion just Sidney's? Or is there a sort of über-narrator hidden inside this? (And the idea of the hidden narrator, of course, is making me think of Austen and the Secret of Style, too—could Sidney be internalizing a narrator like Miller claims Anne Elliot is doing in Persuasion?)