Frances (Burney) d’Arblay: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose … “; Thaddeus & McMaster & Kris

Frances Burney by her cousin, Edward Francesco Burney (c. 1784-85)

Friends and readers,

My subjects: We ought to be calling “Fanny Burney” Frances D’Arblay with Burney in parenthesis because of the long mistakenlly Anglo nomenclature — the choice of “Burney” privileges her English family and Anglo-side; a review of Thaddeus’s Literary Life (good on criticism, but presentist; excellent article by McMaster on Camilla, and Kathryn Kris’s insightful article on Frances as having a disability: the article has needed explanatory power.

It’s time to confide something: it’s not just the reading over the past two weeks that has brought to the surface my conviction that we ought to be calling Fanny Burney Frances d’Arblay; rather seeing that Burneyites are still fighting over this, and coming across different ways of referring to Miss Burney, I decided I might as well stop this discretion which has made me chose the half-way house of Fanny Burney D’Arblay. I agree we can no longer call her Madame d’Arblay, the name she apparently choose for her memoirs as brought out by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. Certainly we’re not going to go around referring to her as “Frances Piochard d’Arblay, otherwise La Comtesse veuve Piochard d’Arblay,” the way she signed herself in her last quarter century of life. But the great happiness of her life began at her marriage, she called herself d’Arblay ever after, she chose Frances for public life. Burney in parenthesis preserves the tradition of her as Burney for scholars. I suggest it was chosen to make her sound English and differentiate her from French women writers and emphasize her family and father. Since then there’s been readers calling themselves Burneyites and using the parenthesis keeps them in the picture (they would not want to be D’Arblayites and it’s too late anyway); it does preserve the link central to her life of her brilliant clan.

You think I’m mad. Have a look at the Burney Centre website at McGill. I am morally persuaded that the Burney team did not go on to do a 6th Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney when Lars Troide retired because they wanted to change her name. They skipped the two years and renamed what was to be the 7th in the set as The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney until 1791, when Joyce Hemlow’s later 12 volume Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney begins. They will then return to the end of the story of George Owen Cambridge’s ambiguous romancing of Frances Burney and the tragic misery of the lead-in to her taking up the position of Keeper of Robes for Charlotte, queen of George III, to be called Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney. In the introduction to my Vol 5 she is no longer called Fanny even if the title of the volume to be uniform is Early Letters and Journals of Fanny Burney. She is Frances (Fanny) Burney.

But it’s hypocritical to leave off the last name she wanted too. I suppose the Madame d’Arblay grates as the Victorian icon, but we can drop the Madame as is nowadays done for 17th through 19th century French gentry women of letters. Fanny Burney d’Arblay is contradictory. I have discovered here and there a simply “Frances d’Arblay” in my reading.

And we might as well admit she loved big hats. When she does not have a big hat on in her portraits, she wears a wig and her hair piled so high, it’s like a crown.

Frances is also drawn by her cousin in a straw bonnet: these from The Duchess (Keira Knightley and Hayley Atwell, Georgiana and Bess Foster)

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From Juniper Hall: the layout of the world that allowed Frances to create a life she liked

The last couple of days I more or less finished Janice Farrar Thaddeus’s Frances Burney: A literary life, read again in chapters and essays and other books, most notably the best essay I’ve read on Burney in a while: Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252. I thought I’d report on these tonight — to help my thinking.

Thaddeus book has value: she does situate Frances Burney in the context of recent literary critical traditions, and for each of her sections she briefly reviews the critical outlook for each novel or phase of d’Arblay’s existence. Since Joyce Hemlow’s restoration of Frances Burney’s life and later papers, the feminist movement has rescued Frances; some of the finest essays and work on her has been by feminists. It begins in the 1970s with Rose Marie Cutting’s “defiant woman” and her revaluation of The Wanderer.

Alongside this is the supposed apolitical criticism. The first stage (Hemlow, Sherburn, Hester Davenport, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Kate Chisholm): This gives us a Fanny who enacts a conduct-book woman. “The fear of doing wrong” is what controls her behavior. In her Imagining a Self, Spacks was able to use a reading of the dynamics of fear in Burney to elevate the value of the novels over the journals and diaries, take The Wanderer seriously: “more clearly [much more] than the letters and diaries, the novels betray her anger at the female condition.” She was unable to “integrate her deep perceptions of the female condition into a believable fiction and instead set up fiction as a debate between defiant insightful women and silent exemplary conduct-book heroines who suffer a helluva lot.

Second stage is a double Burney emphasizing the violence underlying the controlled surface. Now it’s fear responding to outside forces. Repressed desire also creates narratives where the point of view that matters comes out indirectly — in the masculine” Mrs. Selwyn, the outspoken Mrs. Arlbery, and the rebellious Elinor Joddrel. In the novels “volcanic spillage produced when female desire is yoked to the service of female propriety.” Here we have Julia Epstein and Kristina Staub’s books.

Third stage might be called finessing it: the many-sided Burney, “protean, wildness, striking sudden ranges (especially in the fiction), repressed undersides, we get not just “comic individual aberration,” but grotesque and macabre symptoms of society’s own perverseness.” Claudia Johnson, Margaret Anne Doody (the best), Barbara Zonitch; a way of reading the plays (Barbara Darby)

Thaddeus says the task now (hers) is to bring all three Burneys into one: the one fearing to do wrong, the one repressing rage, the one unleasing it. Having now read her book I have to say while she does in each of her chapters try to justify all outlooks, her real thrust is to show us a 20th century strong careerist: her opening story exemplifying d’Arblay through D’Arblay’s winning out over a customs officer and keeping her manuscript through nuanced manipulation and tenacity says it all. Frances as businesswoman recurs repeatedly.

In her urge to make d’Arblay “like us” Thaddeus’s occasionally absurd: she declares how Frances must’ve love her husband’s poem, “Happy Fingers” (published only in the 21st century) about the joys of mutual masturbation (pp 111-12). It was found among papers apart from those Frances controlled. If this poem tells us how the pair managed not to have any more children after the birth of one son (Frances was 42 and could presumably have gotten pregnant a couple more times), it’s egregiously obvious she would have been mortified to see this written down. She might have just pasted it over as in his handwriting; OTOH, she burnt and cut and destroyed papers by her beloved sister, Susan and her father (there though I’m with Doody and see repressed hatred even, a desire to wipe out the small mean mind of the man who had shown an endless willingness to allow her life, writing career, emotional needs to be crushed).

Thaddeus cannot bring all three Frances’s together (she opts for Frances), for she basically skips the journals and letters which she appears not to value. She has a long separate chapter just on the admittedly dreadful as dramas plays — which she says Frances wrote because she knew such writing when successful brought in more money. Did it? The life-writing is important for historians (p. 101). She will admit Frances “theatricalised” her dialogues in her journals (p. 52) but then treat them as literally factual documents. For 23 years after her husband’s death as she rewrote the manuscripts, she was revising facts. I suggest the passionate interjections of this prose (e.g., pp 321-22) are a woman re-living as heroine’s agony and heroism the prosaic realities of her life. Thaddeus “may trust” her as she catches each coach seconds before it leaves because she finds the value of the journals can be only in their historicity and say her behavior examples of courage in the face of hazards unspeakable or daily (p. 223). The truth is she was romancing, creating the elegiac, the satiric, the people all around her adulating her and transparently making up to others (Mrs Delany before the Duchess of Portland).

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Said to be an unknown lady dressed as Evelina by John Hoppner (1758-1810)

I’m giving the jist of Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s novels,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252

McMasters says “To examine Burney ‘s concern with expression, I find, is to arrive at a further feminist reading. For the impediments to expression that she presents with such variety and vividness in her novels are peculiar to women, and a source of agonizing distress to each of her heroines … their fables have dramatized the injustices which by good fortune they survive.”

Burney “won’t make her heroines feminists, or overtly be one herself. Instead she creates heroines who suffer under the social sanctions that maintain women’s subordination, and are conscious of them as disabilities; but like their author they abide by them …”

From the Early Journals and Letters:

O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves! … [my ellipsis] Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility,?breach of manners?love of originality,?and… what not. But, nevertheless… they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honor if that will be of any service to them …

From McMaster:

Her heroines are not authors, but they too are made to feel guilty about self expression. Propriety and their authority figures declare that they must never tell their love, even though their happiness and often that of the men they love depends on their declaration. They abide by the prohibition, but it takes its toll in their emotional stability, and produces severe distress, neurosis and even madness. There are other reasons, too, for their silence. Often they must withhold explanations of their behavior, even when revelation is crucial to them, in order to shield some third party (always a male, and usually a brother); or they dare not speak for fear of provoking male violence (usually a duel). These are the typical ordeals of Burney’s heroines. Their lips must be sealed, and because of the men. One aspect of Burney’s growing sympathy with the silenced woman is her progressive disenchantment with male authority …

The text that most makes McMaster’s case is Camilla:

In Camilla the hero, Edgar Mandlebert, intends to be, like Lord Orville, both lover and moral guide. But the emphasis shifts from his pleasure in promoting Camilla’s right conduct to his desire for her unquestioning obedience for its own sake. By the end of the novel he has more need to reform than she; and he must finally admit that his conduct has been “a fever of the brain, with which reason had no share.”11 The novel presents besides a whole array of defective authority figures of the older generation, including Edgar’ s mentor Dr. Marchmont, a bitter misogynist, the absurd pedant Dr. Orkborne, and one female, the spiteful governess Miss Margland …

Between the writing of Cecilia and Camilla Frances Burney experienced for herself, and in an acute form, a relationship in which expression was painfully inhibited: The young clergyman George Cambridge paid her marked attentions; Frances responded, and everybody expected them to make a match of it. But, for whatever reasons, he failed to exercise his male prerogative of choice. Agonized under the scrutiny of curious onlookers, Frances had to act as though she didn’t care, and treat him with a proud aloofness, as Cecilia treats Delvile. According to her biographer, Joyce Hemlow, the situation was painful on both sides, torture” on hers. A timely explanation on the state of their feelings would no doubt have cleared the air and eased them both. In her next relationship she resolved to be less inhibited by convention and the spectators.15 This change in her position informs Camilla, which is a long and bitter consideration of the burden of silence imposed on the woman. Too long, perhaps. Some modern readers have been apt to agree with Jane Austen in noting a certain laboring to “keep [the lovers] apart for five Volumes.”16 But Burney is giving full treatment to this particular female difficulty.

For the woman in love, according to Camilla’s father, mere silence is not enough. She must guard against any inadvertent revelation, by any sign whatever, for “There are so many ways of communication independent of speech” (p. 360). Such a policy must involve an elaborate cover-up amounting to deceit. Self expression is so far from being approved that Camilla is exhorted to “struggle then against yourself as you would struggle against an enemy” (p. 358).

Agonies of silence and body repression.

McMaster does falter over The Wanderer, for manifestly the woman who argues for liberty, Elinor, is castigated and the silent woman, Juliet, rewarded. She writes:

If the fable of The Wanderer rewards Juliet’s terrific obscurity, the rhetoric allows Elinor the best lines. And in fact the two positions are almost evenly balanced as two ways of looking at the same problem; so much Burney signals by the similarity in their names, Elinor and ‘Ellis’ (as Juliet is called for most of the novel).

She instances Austen’s similar balancing of Elinor and Marianne and says it’s enough to give the position of liberty a “sympathetic hearing.”

Here, having tried to read the book, I’m not convinced: too much weight given to similar sounding names and what Austen did in her book will not prove D’Arblay did it in hers.

I also know that for long stretches Burney’s books after Evelina are flat, have (to quote John Dussinger) “a machine-like smoothness that deflates the emotion it attempts to describe.”

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View of Fauconberg Hill in Cheltenham: Majesties taking an airing; Frances’s room at the top of the building; the stairs at the bottom where she and Stephen Digby would sit talking

There is a solution of sorts. As I say, the value of Thaddeus is how she reviews the criticism repeatedly. At one point she quotes Kathryn Kris who in “A 70 Year Follow-up of a Childhood Disability: The Case of Fanny Burney” (The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, ed. ASolnit, R. Eissler, P.Neubauer, 1938) argues that Frances’s life-long compulsion to write is a product of a temporary childhood disability, a dyslexia until she was 8 where she couldn’t learn to read or to write. Kris sees “a life-long propensity for shame and cognitive disorganization” (p. 17, 229, n36).

Of course Thaddeus rejects this; she’s not have her tenure material have an actual disability — just as the Austen scholars and Janeites are not having their heroine have Aspergers traits. The dislike and shame before a disability suddenly flares before us.

There is much evidence for a cognitive disconnect and disorientation. Having read Hester Davenport’s convincing description of Burney’s behavior at court where a parallel maybe seen between her loss of Stephen Digby and her loss of George Owen Cambridge — and it’s not the easy one they never wanted her because they were such snobs (even Rizzo likes this one). Rather she couldn’t connect to them. She couldn’t see what was in front of her and didn’t know how to respond, to reciprocate. Cambridge later in life grew close to Frances and was an active mentor and patron of her son, providing for him the one decent position he had. Digby asked Miss Gunning to marry him only after Fanny refused to visit his family and many years of courting; after she died, he came back. She then froze him off.

Explain her blindness in front of her father. How her books do not come alive; that the characters are often despite her pellucid analytical efforts two-dimensional exaggerations. I will next week obtain this book from the GMU library.

Cela suffit.

Ellen