Burney Society Biennial, Montreal: The Individual Papers

Elizabeth Linley Sheraton (1754-92) as St Cecilia (1775)) by Thomas Gainsborough

Is it not provoking one can’t marry a man’s fortune, without marrying himself? that one can’t take a fancy to his mansions, his parks, his establishments, — but one must have his odious society into the bargain? (Hilaria, the heroine)

I have been the ruin of you all, — & I feel cursed queer. I’ll go and lie down again (the eldest son, a spendthrift rake responsible for the play’s chief family having to go live in a run-down cottage, from Burney, Love and Fashion)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s now nearly three weeks since I and my daughter, Isobel, attended the Burney Society Biennal, 9-10 October 2014, which this year overlapped with the Jane Austen JASNA, both taking place in or near (the Atwater Club) the same central Sheraton hotel in Montreal. The Burney people packed in as much intellectual, social and entertainment pleasure (not to omit eating and drinking) as the short time between Thursday all day (9 am to 9 pm) and Friday 9-11 am allowed. I’ve divided the report into a first part on the panels on Thursday; and a second part on Juliet McMaster’s separate hour long talk and the play-acting late Thursday, and the trip to McLennan Library and the Burney Center at McGill, and Cathy Parisian’s “Frances Burney in the year 1814” on Friday morning.

After a continental breakfast, and welcome, there were two morning panels (with a break for coffee and talk). The first panel was called “Embodied Performances.” In her “Women of Enchanting Talents: Finding Elizabeth Linley Sheridan in Burney’s Cecilia,” Amy Fugazzi was one of two people to discuss the presence of Elizabeth Linley in Burney’s work. Ms Fugazzi told of Burney’s enthusiasm about Linley when Burney first saw her, Linley’s life (her elopement with Sheridan was partly to escape a coerced marriage with a man she did not care for), including the fallout from a duel Sheridan fought; the connection made between Linley and St Cecilia (though by 1772 she had married Richard Sheridan and and was ordered by him to give up her singing in public for money). Ms Fugazzi discussed parallels in Burney’s Cecilia and Sheraton’s life and character as known to the public and described in the young Burney’s journals.

An engraving after Angelica Kauffman’s Anne Home as the Pensive Muse

In “Performative Sociability: Burney, Edmund Burke,and Anne Hunter”, Natasha Duquette discussed how seeking in companionship solace from the world is a theme in Burney’s novels beginning with Evelina and Mrs Selwyn, how Burney admired Burke until Burke attacked Warren Hastings: Burke provided her with intellectual pleasure, and she was attracted to the poet and musician, Anne Hunter, several of whose poems were set to Haydn’s music. Hunter would have been someone whose social identities changed while she remained involved in music from an angle different from those Burney usually came across. Burney and Hunter had mutual acquaintances: Joanna Baillie another Scots woman poet was Frances Burney’s aunt.

Alice Kerfoot in her “Fading into a State of Decay: the leftovers of Dress in Camilla; or, what can Princess Sophia’s Heliotrope shoes tell us about Camilla’s Lilac Uniform?” talked of how fashion, dress, shoes were seen as identifying someone’s social identity, the more extravagant in whatever was the direction of the day, the more the wearer rose in prestige, admiration — and debt. We see in Burney’s journals a quiveringly intense gratification in the glamor of costume-like outfits. Ms Kerfoot tried to work out which pair or particular kind of shoes a particular person wore. The discussion afterward included the question whether the performing self is a false or real self? The point was made however they might have reveled in performance or costuming themselves, the Linleys (so she brought in Elizabeth Sheridan) and Burneys taught performed music in public because they needed patronage and money. Esther. Burney’s sister, remained a harpsichordist after she married; Elizabeth Linley Sheridan’s problem was that it was not acceptable for a politician to have a performing wife; Sheridan was also possessive over her, and in effect did not want her competition. She died young of consumption.

The second panel, “Burney’s Public Performances.” Cheryl Clark’s “Traveling in Style and Walking the Circuit: Fashioning Femininity in Frances Burney’s Novels,” delighted me by its style, content and delivery: her central argument: how you traveled expressed who you were. First she named and described the various vehicls for travel (above) and how they were seen (a curricle like today’s young man’s sports car). Burney’s novels have over 300 references to carriages, and each of her heroines appears in scenes where they are judged by their mode of travel (including walking); these experiences provided opportunities for circulating, for empowerment and some independence (Elinor Joddrell is however punished for trying for too much freedom). They were opportunities to be seen in elegant company. Characters may be very hurt by how they are treated around carriages so Juliette is denied room because she is of no consequence to anyone. She quoted male characters’ scathing indictment of certain kinds of travel, but suggested Burney’s novels discredit this hostility and celebrate the female traveler. She also talked of the Burneys’ move to St Martin’s Street in London where the Burneys observed and participated in the social life of great artists of the era.

Mary Ann Yates as Lady Townley in Van Brugh’s The Provok’d Husband (engraving after James Roberts)

In her “‘It seemed to me we were acting a play: Performance and representation of women’s identity in Frances Burney’s Early Journals and The Wanderer” Anne-Claire Michoux argued that Burney presented femininity as theatrical. Burney takes parts in real plays in her journals (Lady Townley) but she stages all conversations in which she participates: in life she acts out an inability to act, with an underlying idea that one’s seemingly final or mature self is not fixed. Ms Michoux talked of how letters themselves are forms of theater, of performance. Again Burney shows the female self is not fixed, but permeable Acting allows neurotic behavior as well as social evils become less obvious and/or hard to endure.

Reprinted in Tavistock Classics in the history of psychiatry

The thesis of Sara Tavela’s “‘Dr Lyster gave her much satisfaction:’ The Pressures of Gender Performance, the Problem of Madness, and the Doctor in Burney’s Cecilia,” was that in Cecilia the pressure to perform leads to Cecilia’s madness. Dr Lyster then functions as a conduit who mitigates misogyny and reveals a shift going on in the era to an understanding of people’s behavior as psychosomatic. Though sensibility remained suspect in this era, in 1732 George Cheyne’s The English Malady described how psychological disturbances affect the body. Cecilia discovers that no one will listen to her, but that a mad state enables her to go outside social control (Delville triggered the madness; Monckton is someone people want to give her to); the myth that marriage protects her is exposed. Dr Lyster alone does not pathologize her. Ms Tavela went over each of later heroine’s psychological journeys across their novels (Cecilia, Camilla, Juliette who is not so much deceitful as a nobody no one else bothers to control). This was a suggestively interesting paper about the state of medicine then and now too (where I would say social coercion is again enforced by psychologists).

There was much discussion after each of the panels in which many of the people there participated. Among the ideas thrown our were how Burney sees that female mobility puts women at risk and yet is fascinated and compelled by the liberty gained. Someone pointed out how in her journals a fascinating moment occurs when her husband is wounded and she is seeking him, she loses her way as she has to make a transition from one mode of travel or through one boundary to another place, and how intensely anxious and distressed she becomes. Peopel talked of how her heroines’ agonies include losing a social role or identity and recognition. I saw a great difference in the favorable attitude towards performance in Burney (both novels and letters) and the distrust Austen shows towards performance in her novels (in Austen’s letters she is far more open to performance). Colors were discussed: lilac had had prestige but was regarded as vulgar once shop girls could obtain lilac cloth for their dresses. Acting in this eras was still intensely gestural (pantomimic).

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From a 2013 production of Sheridan’s A School for Scandal

Misty Anderson’s plenary lecture focused on Burney’s 1798 comic play, Love and Fashion, selections from which were performed after dinner in the later evening. Ms Anderson described the how in 1799 Harris was ready to stage Love and Fashion for 400£. That year (among others) had played Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal; before it, Boaden’s Romance of the Forest. Love and Fashion belongd to this type of ultimately benevolent comedy at the same time as it has a ghost meant to mock the gothic. Its characters are inches away from catastrophe; money troubles everywhere, addiction, gambling; the play satirizes toadyism, hypocrisy; it has edgy connotations in its depiction of an apparently benign father, Hilaria a self-punishing daughter, who takes a jewel from a rich suitor to obtain love and some stability; a character kills himself like Harrel in Cecilia. Burney gives us social not political criticism. Ms Anderson saw in some of this a sense of an unsustainable order (there is a reference to the food riots in France), and thinks although it needs some workshopping, the play would have been a huge success. By 1815 18th century comedy was no longer being written.

Among the implications here is that instead of writing about how Burney included allusive material on Elizabeth Sheridan in her novels, she could have been a rival playwright to Sheridan and Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer). Ms Anderson quoted from one of Doody’s analyses of this play as about a woman’s independence, as showing Burney’s “interest in, and resent[ment] of, snobbery and condenscension, and [she] keenly observes what different effects social tyrannies have on different people: “the willingness of some of her family to humble themselves before the glamour of position was always a source of obscure unease” (The Life in the Works, p 292).

The third panel followed, “Textual Performances.” Jocelyn Harris’s “Jane Austen and the Subscription list for Camilla,” brought out and identified the relationships among an intricate network of friends and relatives who knew both Austen and Burney from this list. She seemed to think that Austen canvassed among Austen’s friends on behalf of Burney. Said she, if we have nothing in Austen’s letters about this, we must remember what a tiny remnant of her letters are left to us. Prof Harris also talked of individuals found on the list, e.g., Thomas Jefferson.

Elizabeth with her sister, Mary Linley as girls (by Gainsborough)

Kate Hamilton’s “‘The Voice of Fame'”: Celebrity in Evelina and [Burney’s] Early Years,” found allusions in Evelina to Elizabeth Linley Sheridan as a model of virtuous celebrity; the novel also presents the negative aspects of a commercialized private story. Ms Hamilton saw in Elizabeth Linley Sheridan as well as a singer-actress Versanti (found in Burney’s early journals), an apparent public intimacy which may be seen or used a way of managing one’s career. The woman becomes a commodity and yet protects her reputation by maintaining a distance somehow from events; an analogy occurs in Evelina when the Vicar tells Evelina she must show disdain and grace and keep Willoughby at a distance from her.

A Kliban cat channeling social anxiety as belligerence

Kate Ozment’s “The Violence of Madame Duval: Performance as anxiety in Frances Burney’s Evelina,” was a subtle interesting interpretation of the sources and results of the scenes of explicit violence and terror in this sentimental romance. Evelina’s French grandmother is turned into a grotesque monster, both comic and tragic because sheis unable to manage the social awkwardnesses in life’s more public spectacles; her social anxieties and class consciousness, a gender tension in her lead to failure to adroitly perceive what’s happening around her and act. These social skills were not required of her when she was among lower class people. Violence then permeates the narrative, and she alienates and separates herself from Evelina and the other characters because she is calling attention to her anxiety rather than controlling it. This is the way to fail social life miserably. (She did say of course the primary purpose of the scenes are to prove humor from farce.)

I thought Ms Ozment’s paper broke new ground about what was happening to Madame Duval in these situations, why Burney and her associates refused to have compassion for Madame Duval: Madame Duval was breaking some deep unwritten social psychological-social code set up for self-protection, and if they reassured or helped her that would somehow threaten them by revealing their vulnerabilities too. To my way of thinking this kind of response is a fundamental cruelty at the heart of society which hits at the disabled especially.

A depiction of the Haiti-St Domingo Revolt of 1791

Shelby Johnson’s “Traces of Haiti: Narrating Agonistic Histories in Frances Burney’s Wanderer,” was the last of the individual papers that day. She discussed what she felt were traces in The Wanderer of the multiple narratives of the era by fugitives, migrant people, slave and other revolts, Burney’s time in Paris when Toussaint Louverture was brought there; her own trip across Europe. The novel has a bleakness, a historical subjectivity coming from the era Burney and her readership had just passed through. Ms Johnson went over the phases of Juliette’s taking off and changing her painful disguises and roles, to project a coherent collective experience of displacement and vehement agons. Ms Johnson felt these traces frightened the middle class white readership. (I think of how the full tales were received in the memoirs of women imprisoned so popular in the era; see my Blood Sisters.)

Again after the plenary lecture and these four talks there was a discussion ranging over all the topics, but it had to be cut short to allow for the bringing in of many tables and chairs, and setting up of a buffet for both people from JASNA and the Burney group to become a single audience for Juliet McMaster’s speech billed as an “Afternoon Tea.” It was not the intimate talk that has been envisaged, and Prof McMasters cut some of it because it took so long for people to get their snacks and drinks; luckily I heher speech twice: I caught it again very late Friday morning in the large assembly room at the Sheraton so I can provide a summary of the speech, one of Cathy Parisian’s the last of the conference, and a record of what was played of Love and Fashion in my second blog.

Ellen