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.