Female difficulties: Austen's Fanny and Burney's Juliet.

McMaster, Juliet

TWO NOVELS BY WOMAN NOVELISTS, BOTH PUBLISHED IN 1814, both with woman protagonists, both in their ways "novels of distress." The voice of one novelist, the junior of the two, had been first heard in public a mere three years previously; the voice of the other, the senior and more famous, had been stilled, at least in fiction, for many years.

We don't know whether Frances Burney, now sixty-two, with three major novels under her belt published over three decades, had read Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, but we do know that Jane Austen read and greatly admired Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), and that Burney was a heroine and a role model for her as a female novelist: one who wrote "works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed ... in the best chosen language" (NA 38). The circumstances of composition and publication of The Wanderer and Mansfield Park preclude direct "influence" from one to the other. (1) Where they deal with similar subject matter--as in the episode of the amateur theatricals, for instance--the authors arrived at it independently. I'll be exploring affinities, not influence.

The heroines are similar in many ways. Both delight in history and art; both are romantic in revering nature as a moral force. For Burney's Juliet rhetoric and philosophy provide no lesson "like the simple view of beautiful nature, ... so divine in its harmony" (676). '"Here's harmony!"' exclaims Austen's Fanny, gazing on the stars. And she reflects that there would be less wickedness and sorrow in the world '"if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to'" (113).

These two novels are the darkest of their authors' works. Each heroine is put through a series of trials--call them "difficulties"--that demand all their fortitude. We first hear the Wanderer calling out of the darkness in "a voice of keen distress" (l l); our first glimpse of Fanny presents "a little visitor ... as unhappy as possible" (13). Each hero, while being staunchly and expressly moral, wins the love of the heroine without our being sure he fully deserves it; each "happy" ending is muted, and according to some not happy at all.

Reading Burney's novels--at least those that follow Evelina--calls for fortitude in the reader too. Her heroines are indeed plagued with "difficulties." But The Wanderer, particularly, can be as harrowing as a late Hardy novel. Trained by Hardy, I can read a quite neutral statement from the narrator--such as "He opened a drawer, took out his best dark suit..." (Hardy 116)--and find myself shouting "Don't do it!" because I know something quite awful, and completely out of proportion to the trivial action, is going to result. The Wanderer trains one in a similar manner. Coincidence is rife, and it's nearly always of the unfortunate kind. Juliet's world seems populated solely by those who know something to her discredit; and they're sure to show up at times when they can do most damage. Indeed Hardy surely must have read and internalized The Wanderer. In 'less of the D'Urbervilles, as in The Wanderer, the heroine finds herself unexpectedly in Stonehenge; and the ancient monument connects both heroines with the primitive roots of human experience (Doody, Life 363-65).

An extra discomfort for the reader, as for the characters, is the prolonged anonymity of the heroine. Escaping from a forced marriage and the threat of the guillotine on one she loves, Juliet is forced into secrecy. She is "the Incognita," to us as well as to the characters, and the fact that we don't know her name, or her reason for concealing it, leaves us with a lingering sense of uneasiness. We too are long left groping in the dark.

Mansfield Park too has its problems, and we're all familiar with the debate on Fanny's character and Edmund's, spearheaded by Kingsley Amiss "What Became of Jane Austen?" in which he denounces Edmund and Fanny as "both morally detestable" (142).

Mansfield Park and The Wanderer are of course different in many ways, but especially in the scale of the action. Jane Austen largely observes her own rule, limiting herself to those three or four families in a country village--except in the Portsmouth chapters, and those too are limited, almost claustrophobic. Burney's sweep of society and geography is much wider. Her novel begins on the shores of France. We follow the Incognita to the south of England, to Lewes, to Brighton, to London; and then Juliet's increasingly desperate wanderings take her around the south of England, to Salisbury, Stonehenge, the New Forest, and Teignmouth on the coast. The French Revolution is the backdrop; the Reign of Terror forms the initial context and the reason for the wanderer's anonymity. Socially, as geographically, Burney provides a cross-section, as Juliet subsumes her aristocratic birthright in the various roles of actress, musician, seamstress, mantua-maker, haberdasher, "humble lady companion, and rural laborer. Because of her lack of identity--or her plethora of identities--the wanderer is Everywoman, as Margaret Anne Doody has defined her (Introduction xv).

Despite the contrasts, however, in borrowing Burney's subtitle for The Wanderer, "Female Difficulties," as my own title, I mean to dwell on what the two novels share rather than on their differences.

To start, then, with the most obvious shared element, the episode of the amateur theatricals: Tom Bertram's production of Lovers' Vows at Mansfield Park and Elinor Joddrell's of The Provok'd Husband at her aunt's house in Lewes. In both, the heroine is put under severe pressure to take a role; in both, the companies, though firmly amateur, flirt with the idea of going public, at least to a limited extent; in both, the actors tend to get carried away by their roles, or exploit them for erotic satisfaction.

What's wrong with amateur theatricals, we modern readers ask ourselves?--knowing that Austen and Burney both enjoyed putting on plays themselves. Is Maria's situation really so delicate as to make acting improper? Does Sir Thomas's absence really require the young people to refrain from this kind of entertainment? Quite aside from those objections, however, what we find in the play sequence of Mansfield Park is a progress of improper behavior and deteriorating human relations, as Henry Crawford makes mischief between the sisters, both Crawfords find opportunity for clandestine sexual satisfaction, and Fanny is bullied to the point of tears. Producing a play doesn't cause immoral action; but it provides ample opportunity for it. It seems that for some, playing a role suspends responsibility.

The production of The Provok'd Husband at Mrs. Maple's house is also up against serious obstacles. To begin with, Mrs. Maple refuses to let it happen at all. But Elinor, like Tom Bertram, knows how to override objections. She simply "threaten [s] to carry [the scheme] into execution in Farmer Gooch's barn, and to invite all the county" (69); sure enough, Mrs. Maple comes round. Tom Bertram stoops to the same kind of blackmail: if Edmund won't play Anhalt, he says, "'We have but to speak the word; ... I could name at this moment at

least six young men ... who are wild to be admitted into our company'" (148). Edmund, too, comes round. Both episodes highlight the crucial opposition of public and private. For the company, the issue is largely a class one: ladies and gentlemen should not be exposed to the gaze of the common herd. For the individual, especially the woman, it is tied up with "delicacy," a fraught issue in both novels, but especially in The Wanderer.

Fanny and Juliet are both unwilling to join in the productions, probably for much the same reason: the reluctance of a modest young woman to put herself forward, to go on display. In Fanny's case there is also real timidity (Doody, Introduction xxii). "'No, indeed, I cannot act,"' she pleads, when pressured to play Cottager's Wife (145). She finally capitulates and takes the part, but she is saved by the bell--Sir Thomas's return. Juliet is subjected to even sterner pressure: she must take the leading role of Lady Townly or be thrown out onto the street. Those who disapprove of her taking such a role "know not," she cries, "how little my choice has been consulted" (94). In her case, however, she finds her acting voice, and her performance is a triumph.

The temptations and dangers of role-playing are to the fore, in both productions. Henry Crawford and Maria in their roles of Frederick and Agatha become "'indefatigable rehearsers,"' so that in their roles they can enjoy physical contact denied to them in their own identities (169). Mary Crawford, somewhat more scrupulous than her brother, nevertheless seduces Edmund into playing opposite to her Amelia as Anhalt, so that they can enact courtship and love-making in their roles without actually committing themselves in reality. Afterwards she gloats over her triumph in luring him to act against his principles: "'His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression'" (358).

Burney's characters too get carried away by their roles. After Miss Arbe lets the company down, Elinor, the outspoken feminist, decides to take the lead role of Lady Townly herself, but then finds she can't manage it and has to settle for her original role as Lady Wronghead. (So much for feminism, perhaps?) She should have persevered, however, for Harleigh, the hero and the man she loves, plays Lord Townly over against Juliet's Lady Townly, and promptly falls in love with her on stage. Identifying with the distress of the repentant Lady Townly, Juliet gives a splendid performance; and Harleigh, "affected and enchanted, ... took her hand with so much eagerness, and pressed it to his lips with so much pleasure, that the rouge, put on for the occasion, was paler than the blushes which burnt through it on her cheeks" (96). But Harleigh, unlike Henry Crawford, carries his stage devotion through to real life.

Let me now move to those "Female Difficulties" that are the main subject of my essay. What are they, and how do we classify them?

Burney is very explicit about the difficulties her heroine faces. Though born an aristocrat, the circumstances of her forced anonymity leave Juliet with no visible means of support. And we watch her painful efforts to attain that self-dependence which [she] so earnestly covet [s]" (373). As she tries one job after another, [H]ow insufficient, she exclaimed, is a FEMALE to herself! How utterly dependent upon situation--connexions--circumstance! how nameless, how forever fresh-springing are her DIFFICULTIES, when she would owe her existence to her own exertions! Her conduct is criticised, not scrutinized; her character is censured, not examined; her labours are unhonoured, and her qualifications are but lures to ill will! Calumny hovers over her head, and slander follows her footsteps! (275)

And with horrifying specificity Burney does indeed chronicle the poor female's pains in the different employments Juliet undertakes: the casual arrogance with which the upper classes dismiss the talents and the qualifications of the music teacher and performer; the thoughtless disregard by ladies of fashion for the labor and inconveniences they force on the mantua-makers and sisters of the needle"; the slavery thrust upon the lady companion. By earning her own living, however humbly, Juliet promises herself independence. But she discovers "how imaginary is the independence, that hangs for support upon the uncertain fruits of daily exertions! ... [A]h! what is freedom but a name, for those who have not an hour at command from the subjection of fearful penury and distress!" (473-74). It is an eloquent depiction of the plight of the working class, and a plea for social justice. Burney was ahead of her time. It was not for another generation that Thomas Hood, in the reform-conscious 1840s, managed to shake middle-class Victorian complacency with his "Song of the Shirt, supposedly in the words of a seamstress: O! Men, with Sisters dear! O! Men! with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you're wearing out, But human creatures' lives! Stitch--stitch--stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

These are not merely routine laments over the plight of the poor. Burney's searing specificity strikes home and is as eloquent as Hood's in evoking lived experience.

Austen's Fanny doesn't have difficulties of this kind, at least in comfortable Mansfield Park, though even there she is a general dogsbody, running errands--forgotten, bullied, and begrudged room on the sofa when she has a headache. When she gets to Portsmouth, she glimpses something of the drab dirt and squalor of an ill-run, lower-middle-class home, with its "tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue" (439)--the sort of gross physical detail that Austen seldom provides. And where Burney puts "FEMALE DIFFICULTIES" in caps, and is deadly serious about them, the term "difficulties" in Mansfield Park appears with a degree of irony. Lady Bertram dozes while Fanny gets through "the few difficulties of her work for her" (126). Mrs. Norris whines, '"I must struggle through my sorrows and difficulties as I can'" (29).

Fanny's principal "difficulty," I suggest, is Mrs. Norris! And I ask myself again--why does Mrs. Norris endlessly and gratuitously begrudge Fanny recognition, importance, even existence?

We know that Miss Ward--we never learn her first name2--was the oldest of the three sisters; that Miss Maria, probably being the more beautiful, had "the good luck" to snare a baronet, although she was considered "at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim" to such a match. So Miss Ward, despite being the oldest, was "obliged to be attached" to a mere "Rev. Mr. Norris" (3)--whom we learn she never loved and can do perfectly well without (23). There is some reason for all this detail about the Ward sisters and their marital chances. Miss Ward, we are to understand, arrived at the marriage stakes one baronet short, as it were, and can never quite catch up. Lady Bertram, indolent and assured of Sir Thomas's loyalty, is quite content to let her elder sister take over the management role at Mansfield Park, and she becomes in a sense a "cipher"' in her own home (162). Mrs. Norris can therefore move in and, in some respects, take over Mansfield Park and Sir Thomas too. She calls him "'my dear Sir Thomas'"; she saves money for him (saving the husband's money is her ideal of being a good wife); she constantly flatters him, so that his judgment is "disarmed by her flattery" (190). I suggest that the project of importing an impoverished little Price niece, about which she is so eager in the novel's first chapter, is her way of having a child with Sir Thomas, of becoming "Lady Bertram" herself. And "Nanny" (perhaps her maid, or the Bertrams' old nurse) is to act as a kind of midwife in the delivery of this new child (8).

So what goes wrong?

Partly it's that Sir Thomas takes things over, instead of going along with her plan of saving him money by Nanny's mediation; partly she simply wakes up to reality; and partly, I believe, things go wrong from the outset: "I told her how much might depend on her acquitting herself well at first," she says. But for all her lecturing to that effect, "the whole way from Northampton," little Fanny is exhausted, and the more cast down from "the idea of its being a wicked thing for her not to be happy." Sabotaged early in her new life, all she can do is cry. And Aunt Norris seems to give up on her from that moment: '"This is not a very promising beginning,"' she says. '"I wish there may not be a little sulkiness of temper--her poor mother had a good deal'" (13). Thereafter Fanny can do no right in her aunt's eyes. She takes to Lady Bertram; but she starts every time she hears Mrs. Norris's voice (17). That wasn't meant to happen! Renouncing the role of nurturing mother, Mrs. Norris becomes the wicked stepmother, favoring the Bertram girls and determined to put down Fanny-Cinderella. '"Remember,"' she tells Fanny, "'wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last'" (221). Even when she boasts that the money she manages to save is all for the benefit of her nieces, she pointedly excludes Fanny (30). And by the end, after Maria's elopement with Henry Crawford, she considers Fanny as "the daemon of the piece" (448).

Sir Thomas himself, in the long run, realizes he has in some sense succumbed to becoming Mrs. Norris's husband: "she seemed a part of himself, that must be borne for ever." His release from her, a sort of divorce like Rushworth's, "was the great supplementary comfort of Sir Thomas's life" (465-66). The removal of the wicked stepmother allows Fanny to be restored to the love of the father, as in a fairy tale.

Fanny's other major difficulty is her secret love for Edmund, to which she can give no utterance: this is a "female difficulty" indeed. Custom and the conduct books forbid the woman's initiative in courtship and decree that only the man may declare his love or propose marriage. Until he takes the initiative, she must "never [tell] her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud, / Feed on her damask cheek"--et cetera (Twelfth Night 2.4.109-11). Austen tacitly accepts this rule, though she often dramatizes the pain of enforced passivity in her heroines, especially in Fanny and Anne Elliot.

But Burney's counter-heroine Elinor Joddrell, her mouthpiece for what she has to say of the wrongs of woman, refuses to accept this particular "female difficulty." Irreversibly in love with Albert Harleigh, sbe is bound and determined to tell him so--custom and "green and yellow melancholy" be damned. Though in principle she claims the right of declaration, in practice she finds it agonizing. Even to Juliet she struggles against the embarrassment of admitting her love. She had to break her engagement to Denis Harleigh, she explains, once she has "seen--known--adored--his brother!" (154). She stopt, and the deepest vermillion overspread her face; her effort was made; she had boasted of her new doctrine ...; but the struggle being over, the bravado and exultation subsided; female consciousness and native shame took their place; and abashed, and unable to meet the eyes of Ellis, she ran out of the room. (154)

"[F]emale consciousness and native shame" are indeed among the most agonizing female difficulties dramatized in The Wanderer, and they assert themselves in the teeth of the contrary principle. "Native shame"? Is it native, something every female is born with, natural and instinctive? Ellis/Juliet would say, Yes, this female consciousness--the awareness that it is ineluctably the mans part to take the initiative in love--is hard-wired in a woman's mental structure; Elinor would say, No--"You've got to be taught" such shame, you must be socialized into it. (3) And she fiercely resists such socializing.

When it comes to declaring her love to Harleigh himself, Elinor has more shame still to get the better of, notwithstanding her principles. She is amazed that she should "blush to pronounce the attachment in which I ought to glory" (174). But she boldly proceeds: "Accept, then, the warm homage of a glowing heart, that beats but for you; and that, beating in vain, will beat no more!" (175). And she means it; for, discovering that he loves another, she proceeds to suicide.

Poor Elinor! Harleigh is embarrassed by her love and shocked by her declaration. He prefers Juliet the modest, the "Incognita," who keeps even her name under wraps, and whose delicacy will never allow her to speak openly of her love. Divining this preference, Elinor accuses him of falling in love with mystery, of losing his noble nature "in a blind, infatuated admiration of the marvellous and obscure" (180). She is right, for Juliet's mystery, her scrupulous delicacy, is a major cause of his devotion.

Delicacy, indeed, is a major theme in The Wanderer, and in Mansfield Park too. In Mansfield Park, Elinor's role of the liberated and outspoken rival of the heroine is played by Mary Crawford. From her first appearance, Fanny and Edmund agree that she is too free in her speech, for instance in talking of those '"Rears, and Vices'" among Admirals of her acquaintance. '"It was very wrong--very indecorous,"' Edmund and Fanny agree (60, 63). Mary Crawford has no such grand passion for Edmund as Elinor has for Harleigh. But the issue

of a woman's declaring her love is explored through Mary's role as Amelia in Lovers' Vows to Edmund's Anhalt. "'Miss Crawford must be Amelia,"' declares Tom Bertram. "'She will be an excellent Amelia.'" Julia Bertram calls Amelia an "'odious, little, pert, unnatural, impudent girl'" (136). In the play Amelia almost seduces her clergyman tutor Anhalt: the subject being "Love," she urges him, "'Come, then, teach it me--teach it me as you taught me geography, languages, and other important things'" (MP 506). Fanny, reading the play for the first time, is shocked. For her, the forward language of Amelia is "unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty" (137). Even Mary Crawford herself has qualms about the Amelia role, as she confesses: "'There, look at that speech, and that, and that. How am I ever to look [Edmund] in the face and say such things?'" (168). She is not so bold as Elinor, even in the role she plays. But the role emphasizes again the issue of female forwardness and female delicacy.

The rehearsal scene in the East room, when Mary Crawford and Edmund each seek out Fanny to rehearse their parts, is a tour de force, dramatically and psychologically. Mary Crawford doesn't plan to marry Edmund, but she is attracted to him. Edmund is attracted and thinks he plans to marry Mary (though he can never bring himself to the point of proposing). For each, this rehearsal affords an erotic thrill, and yet they both feel the need for Fanny in their love scene and can't get along without her. All along she has been the catalyst of their semi-courtship, as in the scene of wandering in the wood at Sotherton. Without her they fall apart. But Fanny herself doesn't know this. To become the prompter in their love scene, and, as she thinks, to promote their courtship, is a kind of crucifixion for her. At one point, she is so agonized by Edmund's animated manner that she "had once closed the page and turned away exactly as he needed help" (170). She might have taken comfort from this very circumstance, for it proves he can't complete his courtship without her help.

So much going on, and so little of it can be put explicitly into words! And if Fanny is often forced upon silence, so is Juliet. Locked up in Juliets head are volumes--about who she is, what has happened to her, and why she must stay silent about it. The usual heroine's burden of silence in the courtship situation in her case extends to all the compartments of her life. Because of the embargo on declaration, readers of The Wanderer, and characters too, must take to reading faces, reading complexions. Burney employs a vocabulary of complexion that could fill a dictionary? At a crucial moment of her capture by the Commissary, Juliet won't look at Harleigh, but he nevertheless reads her. On her cheeks, "a pale pink suffusion" takes the place of a "death-like hue, ... which, fading away almost in the same moment, left her again a seeming spectre." Well up in his Rosetta Stone program on body language, Harleigh instantly translates, "She loves me!" (732).

We too have to learn to read Juliet's countenance, despite her best efforts at somatic reticence. When Elinor accuses Harleigh of being in love with Ellis/Juliet, we hear, "Harleigh breathed hard, yet kept his face in an opposite direction.... Ellis commanded her features to remain unmoved; but her complexion was not under the same controul: frequent blushes crossed her cheeks ... evincing all the consciousness that she struggled to suppress" (179-80).

Burney had had her own practice in the control of bodily response. As an observer of the rigid etiquette at Court, she noted that everything there must be borne without a murmur. If a pin is run into your head, she instructs, and the agony is very great, you may, privately, bite the inside of your Cheek ... for a little relief; taking care, meanwhile, to do it so cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly. And, with that precaution, if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure to swallow it ... for, you must not spit. (Additional Journals 1:549) (5)

Austen too deploys declarative body language as part of her palette, and more, I believe, in Mansfield Park than in her other novels because Fanny is so silent a heroine; and she builds it skillfully into her scenes. Here Edmund is passing on his father's compliments on Fanny's improved looks: '"Your complexion is so improved!--and you have gained so much countenance!--and your figure--Nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it--it is but an uncle'" (198). From reporting his father's comments, Edmund has unconsciously moved into his own appreciation of her attractions, and Fanny understands more of the matter than he does, as her turning away signals.

We know that "pictures of perfection" made Jane Austen "sick & wicked" (23 March 1817). Juliet, once she has emerged from her disguise, is a picture of perfection if ever there was one! Perfectly beautiful, perfectly virtuous, brilliantly talented. She plays the harp and piano and sings beautifully; she sews, she draws, she writes; she is a gifted actress who enchants her audience and draws tears from every eye (87). But it is part of Burney's purpose in presenting female difficulties that her heroine should have all these advantages and still, without an acknowledged identity or the "connexions" that depend on it, be unable to earn herself even a modest independence. Her beauty, in fact, is an added difficulty because it makes her a target for cruising males, such as the wicked baronet Sir Lyell Sycamore, Ireton, and her elderly beau, Sir Jasper Herrington.

Even with all these talents, she can't make money? This is where the "female" part of the difficulties comes in. Miss Arbe, who aspires to be her patron and promoter, lays on a singing engagement:

Ellis, amazed, exclaimed, "Can you mean, Madam,--... to propose my performing in public?"

"Precisely that. 'Tis the only way in the world to settle the business, and conquer all parties."

"If so, Madam, they can never be conquered! for never, most certainly never, can I perform in public!" (286-87)

But if she wants to remain an amateur and not get paid, why should she be surprised, we wonder, that she can't make money like a professional? Clearly another of her difficulties is her genteel birth, which precludes

working for money. Miss Arbe continues to urge her, "What a thousand pities, my dear Miss Ellis, to throw away your charming talents, through that terrible diffidence!" (294). And the more sympathetic Mr. Giles persuades her, "Better sing those songs, my dear! ... Then you'll have money for yourself and every body" (304). But when, destitute and in debt, Juliet does agree to perform in a private concert, first Harleigh almost prevents her from getting to the rehearsal, begging her not to deviate "from the long-beaten track of female timidity" (343). Then the rehearsal is a disaster, and the private audience, enthusiastically applauding the bungling lady pupils, has little attention for the gifted teacher: "Ellis was unprotected, unsustained, unknown" (315)--a trio of adjectives that recalls the pathos of the ghost in Hamlet, "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled" (1.5.77). And when it comes to the concert itself, Ellis's performance is sabotaged by Elinor's spectacular act of stabbing herself, in order to die for Harleigh in his presence.

This scene is another emblematic triangle, like Edmund's rehearsal with Mary while Fanny prompts. Harleigh is similarly torn between the woman who will reveal and perform nothing and the woman who will trumpet her views and her love to the world. Elinor, the bold feminist who sounds like Mary Wollstonecraft and has no qualms about dressing as a man, scoffs at Juliet's complaints about female difficulties. "Debility and folly!" she calls them. "Put aside your prejudices, forget that you are a dawdling woman, to remember you are an active human being, and your FEMALE DIFFICULTIES will vanish into the vapour of which they are formed" (397). But then Elinor comes from a privileged background and has a secure income (Doody, Introduction xxx). "If you really are embarrassed [for money], why should you not go upon the stage?" she asks. And she dismisses Juliet's excuse about not being good enough: Pho, pho, you know perfectly well your powers.... [Y]ou only fear to alarm, or offend the men--who would keep us from every office, but making puddings and pies for their own precious palates!-- Oh woman! poor subdued woman! thou art as dependent, mentally, upon the arbitrary customs of men, as man is, corporeally, upon the established laws of his country! (398-99)

Today it is hard not to be on Elinor's side of the argument. But Burney, who invented both Elinor and Juliet, had her own ongoing experience of the pains and pleasures of publicity. In her dedicatory preface to The Wanderer, she reminds her father that she had also dedicated "the first public effort of my pen" to him, as well as this, her latest, nearly five decades later (3). But when she published Evelina in 1778, she hadn't dared to tell him of it before the fact--presumably because she suspected that, like Harleigh, he would urge her to follow "the long-beaten track of female timidity" (W 343). She probably wished she had done the same with her plays, which he refused to allow to be staged (Sabor xvii ff). Burney knew all about this particular female difficulty. And she separates herself out into the two main female characters to argue it out--in this, the latest of her "Divided Fictions" (as Kristina Straub calls her novels in her book on Burney).

If today we agree resoundingly with Elinor on the issue of the woman's right to full expression and public performance, how are we to respond to Juliet's "delicacy," the absolute reluctance about public performance as well as revealing love?

Juliet's preferences are all, it seems, on Harleigh's side of the question. But harsh necessity brings her to some measure of public display, although she never in fact makes a penny by it. Even when she does make a little money by her sewing for customers, she doesn't like it. Her tiny daily stipend from Mrs. Hart, the mantua-maker, brings not pleasure but a qualm: "However respectable reason and justice render pecuniary emolument, where honorably earned, there is something indefinable, which stands between spirit and delicacy, that makes the first reception of money, ... by those not brought up to gain it, embarrassing and painful" (454). It is as though all money earned by a woman were prostitution. The reservation about "those not brought up" to earning money suggests that Juliet's aristocratic class is another of her difficulties, and one that goes with her crippling "delicacy"; but then what female would choose to be born working-class?

In the light of this fraught issue, it is easy to understand Jane Austen's refusal to put her name to her novels, and even her family's reticence about them--as, famously, in not mentioning them on her tombstone. But Austen herself was cheerfully reconciled when her name became known, and decided, "I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it.--I shall try rather to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can of it.--People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them" (25 September 1813). (6)

Juliet remains the champion of delicacy, over against Elinor, the champion of full declaration. But like Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, each gravitates toward the position of the other. Harleigh too, who had begged Juliet not to perform even at a private concert, begs her near the end, "[B]e not the victim to your scruples! ... Your real dangers are past; none now remain but from a fancied ... refinement, unfounded in reason, or in right!" (777). At the denouement, when Juliet is preparing to return to France as a sacrificial lamb to save the Bishop from the guillotine, we have an almost comic crisis of delicacy. Juliet's young half-brother Lord Melbury takes a light tone when he tells her that Harleigh plans to save her life by going to France himself to pay off the vile Commissary and save the Bishop. "He knows all your scruples," he says, "and reveres them,--or rather reveres you, my sweet sister! for your scruples we both think a little chimerical" (852). "Chimerical" scruples! That's the first time we have heard them called so. Juliet is grateful to Harleigh for his generous intention; nevertheless, she cannot allow him to take on what she considers her duties. When he walks quickly toward the vessel, so as to get there first, "her perturbation then was so extreme, that she felt inclined to forfeit, by one dauntless stroke, the delicacy which, as yet, had, through life, been the prominent feature of her character, by darting on, openly to conjure him to return" (854). She wants to sprint after him to prevent his saving her, but that too would be indelicate!

All is well, however, because the Bishop turns out to be on the vessel, safe and well, with no sacrifice called for. The agonizing constraints of silence and delicacy are at last treated lightly, and Juliet can finally relax those high-strung scruples.

Fanny, too, is called on to relax delicacy and finally let Edmund know that she has loved him all along. But she is no Elinor Joddrell: Edmund doesn't achieve this "delightful happiness" until well after his own declaration (MP 471).

We females have our own difficulties today, and Austen and Burney would probably both consider that a little more delicacy would be no bad thing for us. But in their ways they have both helped us--even if only by consciousness-raising--to forsake that "well-trodden path of female timidity.

WORKS CITED

Amis, Kingsley. "What Became of Jane Austen?" 1957. Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1963. 141-44.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1995.

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. London: Oxford UP, 1933-69.

Bander, Elaine. "From Cecilia to Pride and Prejudice: 'What Becomes of the Moral?"' Persuasions On-Line 34.1.

Burney, Frances. Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney. Ed. Stewart Cooke and Peter Sabor. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, forthcoming 2015.

--. The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties. 1814. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor. Oxford: OUP, 1991.

Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988.

--. Introduction. The Wanderer. Oxford: OUP, 1991. vii-xxxvii.

Fergus, Jan. "The Professional Woman Writer." The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. 1-20.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Norman Page. New York: Norton, 1978.

Harris, Jocelyn. "Frances Burney's The Wanderer, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and the Cancelled Chapters." Persuasions 31 (2009): 130-44.

Hood, Thomas. "The Song of the Shirt." Punch, or the London Charivari 5 (1843): 260.

McMaster, Juliet. Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

Sabor, Peter, ed. The Complete Plays of Frances Burney. 2 vols. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1985.

Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985.

NOTES

(1.) However, as Jocelyn Harris has shown, Persuasion, published in 1818, contains clear evidence that Austen had read and absorbed The Wanderer.

(2.) Janine Barchas, at the 2014 JASNA AGM in Montreal, suggested that her name might be "Julia," since it was customary, after the first daughter had been named after the mother, for the second to be named after an aunt. If so, however, the naming hasn't recommended Julia Bertram to Mrs. Norris, for whom Maria remains the "first favourite" (448).

(3.) My reference is to the lyric in the 1950s movie South Pacific. Joe, in love with a Polynesian girl, refuses to believe that race prejudice is "natural" and insists, "You've got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made, / And people whose skin is a different shade; / You've got to be carefully taught." For its time, this statement was a bold blow at racial prejudice.

(4.) I have explored the issues of body language in Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

(5.) I am grateful to Stewart Cooke for supplying me with this reference to his forthcoming edition of Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney.

(6.) See Fergus 11. Similarly, in a comparison of a different pair of novels, Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Burney's Cecilia, Elaine Bander points out that Elizabeth Bennet does not "suffer Cecilia's delicate scruples."

Juliet McMaster of the University of Alberta is a frequent speaker at JASNA AGMs. She is the author of books on Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, Austen, and the eighteenth-century novel, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.