Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney's Mechanics of Coming Out

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney's Mechanics of Coming OutAuthor(s): Julie ParkSource: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Fall, 2006), pp. 23-49Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053490 .

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PAINS AND PLEASURES OF THE AUTOMATON:

FRANCES BURNEY'S MECHANICS OF

COMING OUT

Julie Park

The novels of Frances Burney-Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796) in particular-focus on the period in eighteenth-century women's lives as they move from childhood into adult life and present themselves formally to "the world." While depicting her heroines' experiences in pleasure gardens, masked balls, holiday resorts, and theatres, Burney lays bare the interface between their private sense of self-consciousness in these settings and the uncompromisingly public nature of social life. For Burney's characters and herself as a published writer-coming out, whether in ball rooms, pleasure gardens, or on the printed page-entails a compulsive identification with the automaton, a model of mimesis and regularity that appeared persistently in eighteenth-century conduct literature and social life. As I will discuss in this essay, depicting such processes of mechanical identification paradoxically grants Burney's protagonists affective range, as well as promoting the aesthetic force and technical innovation of her novels.1 When presenting women as automata, Burney does not simply re-iterate or decry a cultural stereotype. Rather, she deploys the novel medium for detailing the possibilities of generating individual affect within the very confines of the mechanized subjectivity that appears to limit the depth of female expression. It is through subscribing to the laws of propriety, yet bringing themselves to the limits at which those laws become impossible to obey, that Burney's heroines paradoxically loosen the regulatory constraints of ideal femininity. The surplus of affect produced by imminent states of abjection, in other words, creates the force by which the protagonists simultaneously obey and resist the conversions into automatized femininity that social life demands.

Julie Park is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She is a co-editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is writing a book on material fictions of the self and the eighteenth-century novel, For the Pleasure of It: Novel Objects and Mimic Subjects in Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming, Stanford Univ. Press).

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (2006) Pp. 23-49.



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 40/ 1

THE MACHINE LIFE OF WOMEN IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND

While consumer society propelled female subjects into a perpetual and non-generative state of wishing for trinkets and apparel-with the fashion doll working as its agent-it also presented an artifactual corollary in the unreflecting yet intriguingly repetitive figure of the automaton. Well before Hoffmann's haunt- ing creation of Olympia in The Sandman (1818), Ned Ward in Adam and Eve Stript of their Furbelows (1714) made a ready equation between the "Machine" and cultural models of femininity when describing the "Devout Lady" who, in her piety, "is so precise in her Deportment, and so mathematically regular in all her Actions, that you would think every Motion in her Limbs, were the Effects of Art, and not of Nature, and that her whole Composition was but a Machine of Clock-work."2 Elsewhere throughout the century, the machine proliferated in conduct literature as a mixed figure for women's consistency and restraint, or her vanity and vacuity.

Working as a moral standard, for example, clockwork imagery fuels Hester Chapone's lecture on procrastination in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: "There is in many people, and particularly in youth, a strange aversion to regularity-a desire to delay what ought to be done immediately, in order to do something else ... It is of more consequence to you than you can conceive ... to acquire habits of constancy and steadiness."3 Viewing the mechanics of conduct more broadly, Abbe D'Ancourt's Lady's Preceptor, or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction Upon Politeness, conceives the whole of life as a machine: "Life is a continual Series of operations, both of Body and Mind, which ought to be regulated and performed with the utmost care."4 For Richard Allestree, in A Lady's Calling, modesty itself, "the Science of decent motion," operates as a canny system for regulating thought and behavior, as it "checks and controles all rude exorbitancies, and is the great civilizer of conversations." Furthermore, it equalizes the internal self to the external self as it "does not only ballast the mind with sober and humble thoughts of ones self, but also steers every part of the outward frame."5

John Essex in The Young Ladies Conduct: or, Rules for Education depicts a less idealized and unified version of female machine life when, in a chapter on "Industry, and the Abhorrence of Idleness," he works to "remind" his "Fair Read- ers" that without "Moral Duties ... they are more than a bare animated Piece of beautiful Clay."6 Conduct literature, in fact, presents the most forceful images of young women as machines when specifically enjoining against such identification. For instance, George Lord Saville, Earl of Halifax, in The Lady's New-year's Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter (1724), describes the woman whose "Looking-Glass in the Morning dictateth to her all the Motions of the Day":

she cometh into a Room as if her Limbs were set on with ill made Screws, which maketh the Company fear the pretty Thing should leave some of its Artificial Person upon the Floor. She doth not like herself as God Almighty made her, but will have some of her own Workmanship.7

Not falling short of oral expression, mechanization affects even the woman's speech: "her Discourse is a senseless Chime of empty Words." Though taken in at first by the piece of work that is his love object, the young man who has fallen in love

24



PARK / Frances Burney's Mechanics of Coming Out

with her soon comes to his senses and sees instead of the "Goddess" he worshiped, "only an Artificial Shrine moved by Wheels and Springs."8

Of interest in the eighteenth-century catalogue of entries on the relationship between automatism and female conduct is the manner in which the machine works as the standard against which female character is not only compared and measured, but self-created. Unlike the consuming woman's relationship with the fashion doll and, by extension, the experience of novel reading, identifying with the automaton derives from and creates a thwarted, rather than expanded image of self. These moments of moral identification, unlike consumption's gentle rever- ies, worked in close tension with social circumstances and standards. In Halifax's depiction, the woman afflicted by vanity and affectation only becomes a machine through the force of her own vices. So intent is she on becoming the idealized vision of her self, she forsakes her natural, "God-given" features for artificial ones. In short, she becomes her own walking and talking doll. In contrast with Hoffman's 1818 female automaton, Halifax's 1688 version is created not by men of science-Spalanzzani and Coppelia-but by the woman's own hands. This aspect of the eighteenth-century relationship between women and automata-one in which women initiate the effort to create their identities in the image of machines-gave new meaning to standard definitions of the automaton as "a machine or engine which has the principle of motion in itself."9

More remarkable in Halifax's example is that such efforts at self-manufac- turing derive from the woman's feelings of self-dislike-"She doth not like herself as God Almighty made her." Moreover, just as soon as her dislike of her natural self leads her to re-create herself in the image of a machine, it also threatens to undo her own workmanship, which the companion image of the woman as a disarticulated, incoherent, and broken toy seems to want to suggest. Halifax's punishing vision of the woman as a machine whose over-reaching vanity leaves pieces of her shat- tered on the floor stages the relationship between women and machines produced throughout Burney's novels. Within her narratives of women who strive and fail to meet compulsory standards of social and moral conduct, mechanical models of selfhood turn into the very image of abjection that Halifax imagines, thus creating an unlikely but classical conjunction between the mechanical and the organic.10

Such metaphors for women as machines arose alongside a more gender neutral if not less complex discourse of mechanics that emerged in diverse areas, from Hobbes's foundational image of the commonwealth as an "Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall," debates between philosophes and materialists on determinism versus free will, La Mettrie's radical identification between the human and the machine in L'Homme Machine and Kant's use of the automaton to debate the viability of free will in deterministic thought, to Adam Smith's notion of self-regulation in economic liberalism.11 In these ways "a rich motif of Enlightenment philosophy and its legacies," as Simon Schaffer puts its, the automaton also pervaded in literature about and for members of society who have yet to become civil subjects, the apex of Enlightened subjectivity. In addition to the roles that Schaffer mentions-commodities for popular culture, tools for "the management of industry and the workforce" for Vaucanson and Lavoisier, and "apt emblems of subjection and government" for Kant and Bentham-automata also appeared as points of reference for narratives of human growth and

25




development.12 This is to say that while the automaton signified the advancement of society by supplying proof of human ingenuity, it also worked to model subjects who "innately" lack the signs of advancement, but can be taught to acquire them through mechanical acts of repetition and imitation, such as children, women, and animals.13

THE MECHANICS OF COMING OUT: A THEORY OF ABJECTION

By consistently narrating the moment of coming out in young women's lives, and following closely their experiences in spaces that were in fact designed to make their identities visible to a wider, marriage-minded public, Burney's novels give the lie to still prevalent assumptions that eighteenth-century female life was relegated to "private" settings. The Georgian social ritual of coming out serves as prime evidence for arguments seeking to revise the "separate spheres" model for understanding the history of gender in eighteenth-century England.14 In order to fuel the gentry's new social machine, the marriage market, young women were in fact obligated to appear in its "stalls," the "assemblies, plays and pleasure gardens of Georgian England."" For the young girls in Camilla, the passage of coming out is cast early on as morally and socially crucial-the governess Miss Margland insists tirelessly on "the necessity of bringing the young ladies out, and the duty of thinking of their establishment"-and thus launches the ensuing narrative (Camilla, 54). Following Burney, and coterminous with her, conduct book authors and other commentators on female customs deployed "coming out" and its attendant motions of travel, exposure, and display as figures for a reviled worldliness that women, upon leaving childhood, were all too capable of occupying.16

Accordingly, Thomas Gisborne, in his popular An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), describes the young girl's "introduction into the world" as a dramatic departure from the sober education at home or school (which he instructively calls a "public seminary") that previously structured her life. "Eman- cipated from the shackles of instructions," she is "brought forward to act her part on the public stage of life." In such passages, conduct book moralizing cuts two ways. On one hand Gisborne treats the young woman's act of coming out as a social obligation. On the other, the choice of theatrical metaphor signals Gisborne's contempt towards the woman's vanity and self-absorption, which grow with each worldly entrance she makes. The more she occupies the surfaces of life, the more surfaces-the beloved image of herself above all-fill and comprise her internal thoughts, thus re-constituting thought itself as a series of material objects and the self-flattery they produce. Having "burn[ed]" with "impatience for the hour of displaying her perfection," and becoming "intoxicated beforehand with anticipated flatteries," she "is launched, in the pride of ornament," and, like Pope's Belinda, "from that day forward thinks by day and dreams by night of amusements, and of dress, and of compliments, and of admirers."17

Wollstonecraft, more concise, but just as metaphorically pungent, queries, "Besides, what can be more indelicate than a girl's coming out in the fashionable world? Which, in other words, is to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one public place to another, richly caparisoned."'18 Displeased, too, by how "the love of pleasure and the love of sway" corrupt-or, displace-the

26




intellect, Wollstonecraft warns that the girl who devotes herself to preparing for her social debut and neglects her education will come to possess a mind as artificial as her face. In doing so, she creates the startling image of the fashionable lady not so much as a doll, but as an android: "The consequence is obvious; in gay scenes of dissipation we meet the artificial mind and face."

In the above passages the young woman coming out is, in addition to an automaton, an actress on stage, a burning object, an intoxicated slave, a "dazzled stranger," an empty vessel, a gaudily dressed horse, and a piece of moveable goods. It is through indulging in elaborate metaphors to decry the very conditions of excess and artifice in female public life that Gisborne, Wollstonecraft, and countless conduct book writers reveal the constitution of emergent womanhood in eighteenth-century social life as ineluctably metaphorical. These metaphors, in describing women through the properties of different entities and objects, accomplish linguistically what coming out does socially, for "when we use one word for another," writes Christopher Tilley, "we move an entity from one place to another."19 In representing the genteel girl's turn to womanhood through its very procedure of "moving" her from one place in society to another, coming out literally enacts many meanings attributed to metaphor in eighteenth-century language. These include its classical etymology-derived from "metapherein," to carry across in Greek-as well as its contemporary definitions of transferring a word "from its First and Proper Signifi- cation, to express some other Thing in a more remote and Secondary Meaning. "20

Not only did eighteenth-century definitions consistently assign literal movement to figurative language-"A TROPE is defined to be an elegant turning of a word from its natural and proper, to a relative signification"-they also perceived metaphor as providing tactile ornament to language, thus embodying the very quality that perturbed contemporary moralizers about femininity. One rhetorician compares metaphors "to the Clothes and Perukes which were first contriv'd to defend from the Cold, but since we use them as an Ornament and a Grace" and furthermore, refers to them as "ingenious Images, that represent the Things with more pleasure and more handsomely than the bare Objects can."21

By contrast, Mary Crawford, in Mansfield Park (1814), communicates plainly and indeed, with charm, that coming out entails not so much the transformation of femininity into a metaphor, but rather, a thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the self. Having asked Edmund Bertram about Fanny Price, "'Pray, is she out, or is she not?-I am puzzled.-She dined at the parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is,"' she determines,

Till now, I could not have supposed it possible to be mistaken as to a girl's being out or not. A girl not out, has always the same sort of dress; a close bonnet for instance, looks very demure, and never says a word.... The most objectionable part is, that the alteration of manners on being introduced into company is frequently too sudden. They sometimes pass in such very little time from reserve to quite the opposite-to confidence! That is the faulty part of the present system. One does not like to see a girl of eighteen or nineteen so immediately up to everything-and perhaps when one has seen her hardly able to speak the year before.22

27




Here, Mary Crawford distinguishes the girl who has come out by creating a metonym rather than a metaphor for what she is not-"a close bonnet for instance." Furthermore, she indicates one of the concerns about eighteenth-century public life that-more than any other literary genre-only the medium of the novel can negotiate and elaborate. If the eternally close-bonneted Fanny Price gives Mary Crawford pause for the first time in knowing whether a woman is out, it is because Fanny's own subjectivity, like all of Burney's heroines, remains at odds with the ontological transformations of femininity that societal standards tend to regard as complete, transparent, and unequivocal. Mary Crawford's question about Fanny Price-"is she out, or is she not"-prompts us to reconsider that understanding "the Introduction" of "a well-educated, but inexperienced young woman into public company, and a round of the most fashionable Spring Diversions of Lon- don"-as Burney herself described Evelina to her prospective publisher-demands

a subtler hermeneutics that simultaneously perceives its object's ability to withhold information, thus turning the allegedly public or transparent subject into a private one.23 Indeed, such an approach is necessary for understanding the internal spaces that Burney's novels create within the avowedly public reaches of their heroines' narrative trajectories on the marriage market, and of their own destinations as published commodities on a book market.

As any transitional state would, coming out promises a metamorphosis that encompasses both social and psychological levels of experience. Though for most observers the change takes place decisively and abruptly, in Burney's hands, it finds an elastic medium for expression in the emergent genre of the novel, which allows the passage to span several volumes that expand in size and scope with each new publication, and each new heroine. This is to say that the novel medium, in its ability to represent temporal experience on its longitude axis, accommodates not only the perils of the process, but also, its daily repetitiveness. As the seemingly endless outings in each novel attest, no single appearance at a given ball, resort town, opera house, or pump-room can complete the act of coming out, save the closure of the narratives that bear the names of the heroines and are then contained as book objects for further consumption. Arguably, the marriages that end Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla can only provide weak and ambiguous closure, as each of them demands subservience or self-sacrifice from the heroine, or both.

In this way, Marina Warner's etymological review of "pupa" draws out the paradoxes in Burney's narrative ambivalences. In Greek, the word for "pupa" is "nekydallos," or "little corpse"; in Latin, the word "pupa" itself means "doll."24 Making their "first appearance in public," and purportedly changing from depen- dent children to autonomous adults, Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla experience their transitions as a risk-ridden yet repeatedly "mortifying" state of encasement within and against unchanging codes of conduct. These frequent moments of "mortification"-ranging from social embarrassment to extreme shock and grief and, in Camilla, actively wishing to be a corpse, or in Cecilia, begging not to be buried alive-render them as much little corpses as little dolls shaped both by propriety and fashion.25 In Cecilia, the heroine's secret marriage with a man named "Mortimer" renders her nominally mortified. The name ("dead water" in French) also signifies his function in the plots as the suitor whose family pride forbids him to forsake his noble name, thus forcing Cecilia to forfeit her uncle's inheritance, whose one condi-

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tion is to require her husband to take her name. For all the heroines, complete and triumphant metamorphosis is questionable as their marriages either leave them, in circular fashion, with husbands who resume the roles of paternal mentor figures, as with Evelina and Camilla, or with a husband who demands financial loss and psychic unease as with Cecilia.

What Burney offers still to debates on women's "place" in eighteenth- century England is not so much a definitive understanding of how the conceptual categories of "public" and "private" were or were not gendered, as many critics have investigated already. Rather, her fiction makes room for displaying psychic life within spaces deemed "public"-including the public spaces of the pages in a novel-by showing how the incorporation of women in public life remains inex- tricable from a powerful yet awkward category of emotion, abjection. The project of illustrating this emotion as one that rises out of the individual failure to embody mechanical standards of consistency and "regular" behavior-and in Burney's own case, authorial productivity-demanded recourse to free indirect discourse. Such a technology of writing not only allowed Burney to be one of the first to combine the psychologically driven technique of Richardson with the physically contingent and socially descriptive one of Fielding, but also, to hold in perpetual suspension the feminized roles of being subject and object at once, the very condition of both the abject and the automaton. It is through this newly invented novel technique, with its ability to represent both external and internal qualities of experience, that Burney most convincingly conveys the notion that the social ritual of coming out invariably entails the psychological ordeal of a casting out.

In its foundations as a word derived from the Latin verb for "throwing down," "throwing away," or "casting off" and "casting out" (abicio), abjection shares the spatial orientation and quality of mobility that distinguish the process of "coming out," as well as metaphor. Not least, mobility distinguishes the material object/subject most remarkable for its ability to move "on its own," the automaton. Towards the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, abjection carried a moral charge in religious texts and novels as an adjective to describe slaves and cowards, parasites and debtors, or one's origins of birth. Although the word itself does not figure conspicuously in Burney's novels-at least once it appears in Cecilia and in Evelina-the quality of circumstance and feeling does, as any one who has read her increasingly dense body of work about fallen heiresses, rejected daughters, hysterical lovers, and social outcasts can attest.26 While other emotions can be ascribed to what Burney's heroines undergo, such as shame, depression, or guilt, it is abjection that captures the filially and socially contingent, as well as spectacularly corporeal aspects of the women's depleted states.

As excerpts from her diary and letters indicate, Burney is a writer who struggles most conspicuously with such visions of conduct literature's ideal femininity, and its ugly reflections of blemished femininity, which the literature paradoxically determines as femininity itself.27 Though her novels work especially hard to smooth away untoward contortions by sustaining a hyper-expository and objective narrative voice, violent and unseemly images of feminine misconduct pollute the novels' surfaces nevertheless, thus producing not the material excess of ornament, but its corporeal face of abjection. This vision is most salient in her pictures of female characters as bleeding, drooling, and gibbering statues and machines throughout

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 40 / 1

Cecilia and Camilla. Even in the comparatively more "sprightly" Evelina, spectacles of female degradation surface not just in the infamous old lady foot-race, but in the image of the aged coquette Madame Duval tied to a tree, roaring with anger, and sitting in a ditch. Here, the artificial and the organic serve as a permutation of the mechanical and the organic: "She was covered with dirt, weeds, and filth, and her face was really horrible, for the pomatum and powder from her head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which, with her rouge made so frightful a mixture, that she hardly looked human."28 At the end of Cecilia we see its beautiful heiress bankrupt, abandoned by her husband, and raving on the floor of a straw-filled room in a pawn-broker's shop, and elsewhere, her suitor's proud mother tearing away with "her face, hands and neck all covered with blood" from a bursting blood vessel (Cecilia, 899, 680). In Camilla, itself a purported conduct book with a passage that later became anthologized in later editions of Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughter, we see Camilla and her sister Eugenia spy on an exquisitely beautiful woman spinning manically on her lawn and drooling, "rendering utterly disgusting a chin that a statuary might have wished to model" (Camilla, 353-362 and 309).29 Towards the end we see Camilla herself, much like Cecilia, alternately crawling up the stairs, falling prostrate on the floor, with "agonies nearly convulsive" distorting "her features" and writhing "her form" over petty shopping debts she believes have caused her father's impris- onment (Camilla, 824).30

For Julia Kristeva, it is the very crisis of the internal rendering itself external that defines abjection. In a formulation that derives largely from Mary Douglas's delineation of pollution, the impure and the unclean, and their powerful effects on tribal structures, she writes, "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes

abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (Horror, 3). As such, boundary dissolution, the shattering of self-integrity, and the disturbance of such fundamental categories as inside and outside, are implicit in any abject condition: "The body's inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile con- tainer, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one's 'own and clean self' but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents. Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up ... (Horror, 53)." Here, Kristeva underscores the compensatory quality of abjection. Not a gratuitous production of excess, and not the cause of abjection in itself, the gross matter famously signifying Kristeva's abjection works to "reassure" the subject after the loss of its integrity. And to have this integrity means having a clear separation between the internal and external aspects of the self. Once that separation is lost-through rendering a self that is all surface, for instance, or, by contrast, all transparency-the self dis- solves. Abject waste, in its revoltingly concrete embodiment, works to prove that an interior self still remains, or, as Mary Douglas puts it, "affirm[s] the physical fullness of reality."31 As the characters who bear or extrude waste matter-dirt, saliva, and blood-the coquettish grandmother (Evelina), the beautiful idiot girl (Camilla), and the proud and class-obsessed mother-in-law (Cecilia) produce cor- poreally what the heroines undergo when they cross the boundaries of their "own and clean" selves.

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While it works as a powerful figure for the overlapping structures of the body and society, abjection also accounts in grammatical terms for what happens to a psyche striving to become a subject while cultural forces (itself included) insist on its object-hood. In this very struggle, the abject is neither subject nor object. The abject does have in common with the object, however, the status of "being opposed to 'I'" (Horror, 1). In Burney's case, the immanent pain in the third-person narratives following the epistolary Evelina may be traced to this resistance of the "I," even as the narratives struggle to produce it. Cecilia, for instance, continually suppresses self-revelation and reflection for the sake of action and reason. During the tumult of making plans for her clandestine marriage, Cecilia is described as forcing herself to forego introspection for practical action: "Cecilia now had no time for after-thoughts or anxious repentance, since notwithstanding the hurry of her spirits, and the confusion of mind, she had too much real business to yield to pensive indulgence" (Cecilia, 825), and, "It was necessary, however, not to moral- ize, but to act" (Cecilia, 858). When the heroine does give in to responding to her emotions, the narrator herself takes over in assuming the stance of reason by using a hyper-expository and balanced tone, even as she makes clear the heroine's own "wandering of reason":

Grief and horror for what was past, apprehension and suspense for what was to come, so disordered her whole frame, so confused even her intel- lects, that when not all the assistance of fancy could persuade her she still heard the footsteps of Delvile, she went to the chair upon which he had been seated, and taking possession of it, sat with her arms crossed, silent, quiet, and erect, almost vacant of all thought, yet with a secret idea she was doing something right. (Cecilia, 850)

The reader is alerted to just how far Cecilia has gone off the rails when her friend appears in the next paragraph and expresses "surprise and concern at the strangeness of her look and attitude" (Cecilia, 850). Cecilia's own mental reflections on the implications of her secret marriage disclose the extent to which a constant sense of judgment and supervision assails her thoughts:

Disinterested as she was, she considered her situation as peculiarly per- verse, that from the time of her coming to a fortune which most others regarded as enviable, she had been a stranger to peace, a fruitless seeker of happiness, a dupe to the fraudulent, and a prey to the needy! ... These reflections only gave way to others still more disagreeable; she was now a second time engaged in a transaction she could not approve, and suffering the whole, peace of her future life to hang upon an action dark, private, and imprudent: an action by which the liberal kindness of her late husband would be annulled, by which the father of her intended husband would be disobeyed, and which already, in a similar instance, had brought her to affliction and disgrace (Cecilia, 826).

Thus deploying the technique later recognized as free indirect discourse, Burney

creates a view of the character from many perspectives at once-the character as

she experiences herself and others, the character as others experience her (as evinced

through dialogue), and the character as the narrator sees her and sees others experiencing her. Perhaps most remarkable about the technique is the impossibility of distinguishing where one perspective ends and the other begins, as one of many more passages describing Cecilia's senility illustrates:

31




Mean while the frantic Cecilia escaped both pursuit and insult by the ve- locity of her own motion. She called aloud upon Delvile as she flew to the end of the street. No Delvile was there!-she turned the corner; yet saw nothing of him; she still went on, though unknowing whither, the distrac- tion of her mind every instant growing greater, from the inflammation of fatigue, heat, and disappointment. She was spoken to repeatedly, she was even caught once or twice by her riding habit; but she forced herself along by her own vehement rapidity, not hearing what was said nor heed- ing what was thought. Delvile, bleeding by the arm of Belfield, was the image before her eyes, and took such full possession of her senses, that still, as she ran on, she fancied it in view. She scarce touched the ground; she scarce felt her own motion; she seemed as if endued with supernatural speed, gliding from place to place, from street to street; with no consciousness of any plan . .. till quite spent and exhausted, she abruptly ran into a yet open shop, where, breathless and panting, she sunk upon the floor, and, with a look disconsolate and helpless, sat for some time without speaking. (Cecilia, 897)

The length of such passages displays the level of detail and number of perspectives Burney uses to make manifest all at once the character's outward circumstance, actions, encounters, and appearance, as well as her train of thought. Perhaps no other narrative technique can convey so effectively a state of being that quite literally, with the heroine falling to the ground at the end of the passage (and throughout her episode of lunacy), not only dramatizes the abject, but also, the self as a feeling object.32 Dead to the world, spinning around without internal purpose like an automaton, and a compelling spectacle to others, she is nevertheless alive to her internal suffering.

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Though she seems to have found an effective technique-"omniscient" third-person narration-for describing internal conditions from a neutral perspective, Burney is so anxious about meeting readers' expectations that, in a cancelled introduction to Cecilia, she asks for lenience from her critics. In it, she begs to be excused from explaining the motives behind her second novel by stating, "the intricacies of the human Heart are various as innumerable, & its feelings, upon all interesting occasions, are so minute & complex, as to baffle all the power of Language." Nevertheless, in the introductory paragraph to her following novel, Camilla, published fourteen years after Cecilia, she lays claim to attempting to master the very "intricacies of the human heart," thus admitting to her own ambitions as a writer (Cecilia, 945).33 Here, she asserts "the historian of human life finds less of difficulty and of intricacy to develop, in its accidents and adventures, than the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes." For, "the Heart of man . . . lives its own surprise-it ceases to beat-and the void is inscrutable! In one grand and general view, who can display such a portrait?" Answering her own question, she takes it upon herself to "fairly, however faintly, to delineate

some of its features." In a brilliant exposition of this puzzling passage, Julie Choi interprets that Burney is describing her own role as narrator when mentioning "the sole and discriminate province of the pen which would trace nature, yet blot out personality." Pointing out that "the task of novelist is to transcribe that which is

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invisible"-the "inscrutable" void the human heart leaves when "it ceases to beat" certainly bears out the notion-Choi claims that Burney solves the inherent difficulty of depicting "invisible" interiority by invoking an analogy with a "prospect painter observing an epic landscape." In doing so, she is not only subsuming her own identity with the pen's function, but also, making herself absent as "observer" or "'delineator'" from the landscape. By "blotting out personality," the pen makes completely immaterial the narrator's own identity. Indeed, this pen-Burney's pen, or, Burney as pen-eradicates completely "the author/narrator function" to make possible a new authorial position whose primary feature is "transparency," or, the quality of being simultaneously present and absent while describing the interior and exterior qualities of characters, in a tense that describes the present while using the grammatical past.34

In an earlier article, Margaret Doody, much like Choi, locates the foundations of realist third-person narrative voice-with its sophisticated and abundant qualities of simultaneity-in eighteenth-century women's writing. For Doody, too, Burney plays an important role in the development of free indirect discourse, but unlike Choi, she regards her influence as an "individual triumph" attributable singularly to the author of Evelina, and "uniquely related to the 'realist modes.'"35 Underscoring the social obstacles involved for women in writing novels, not least the belief that "a woman is not to be judgmental," Margaret Doody constructs a narrative in which Burney's switch from a first-person epistolary model in Evelina to a third-person narrative voice constitutes a courageous advance in allowing women writers to assume textual authority. For Doody, "Fanny Burney's novels provide a record of the women's struggle toward the creation of a tone which is neither whispering or arch. She is the first woman writer in this period to show with marked success what could be done by creating an authoritative and persua- sive omniscient author."36 In prior novels, Burney and other women writers found "the journal-novel" a "safe feminine form." They "tended to hide themselves modestly behind their characters" for in doing so, "responsibility for judgments ... belongs to the characters, and the novelist can always admit that they might be wrong" (Doody, 260). To appear at all in print entails becoming identified with one's product, Doody points out, but Burney's choice to write Cecilia in the third- person is an act of "daring." So much so that Doody goes as far as to say: "The seven veils are cast off and the author seems to be dancing naked before us. That which dances on the page is not the human being who is born and dies, but the critical distinction is of no practical comfort to the author" (Doody, 284).

To a certain extent, Burney was indeed safe from "exposing" herself in writing Evelina-but not necessarily because the epistolary form in which it was written was more acceptably "feminine." She was safe-as long as her identity was kept secret, which was not for long-because the novel had been published anony- mously. Many readers in fact assumed the novel had been written by a man-Joshua Reynolds said he "would give 50 pounds to know the Author," a "Mr. Taylor" also "declared he will find him out," and Lowndes, the publisher himself guessed the novel had been written by Horace Walpole because he too had "published a Book in this snug manner." Most damning was a Mr. Mordaunt, who refused to "believe Evelina [sic] could be Written by a Young Woman, or, indeed, by any Woman."37

Having come out as the author of Evelina, Burney not only felt the risk of having her identity shaped by her creative products, but also, by books as physical

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objects. This form of identification, in fact, entailed the greater source of exposure for her. When Johnson accused her of not loving to read-for she never carried "a Book in her Hand," he had noticed-she answered by pulling out from under her gloves the book she had in fact been carrying all along, a copy of his Life of Waller. Her explanation reveals the extent to which the mere sight of a book attached to her person could define her, much like Mary Crawford's notion of the girl not yet out as a "close bonnet": "Sir ... I am always afraid of being caught Reading, lest I should pass for being studious, or affected, & therefore, instead of making a Display of Books, I always try to hide them" (EJL III 172, 26 September 1778). Wishing her success on the second edition of Evelina, her mentor Samuel Crisp pursued further the notion of the book as an extension of Burney's person- hood-to the extent that it turns into her child:

I wish you joy of your second delivery ... the Babe was born a fine, fair fat, healthy Child . . & its swaddling Cloaths became it very well; & if you have put a Ribband in its Cap & a fine new Sash, its original Features will still be the Object to attract Notice, & the little particulars of dress hardly observ'd: however in its new Form I am determin'd & impatient to have it; & as I see by Londes' advertisement it is still to be had in Sheets. (EJL III 176, 6 November 1778)

Nearly three years later, when working on Cecilia, Burney continued the joke by writing to inform Crisp of progress on his "favourite Ugly Girl," who was being prepared "to appear, tolerably Cloathed, if not adorned, to the World."38

Whether or not Burney wrote her novels in the first or third person, the authorship of novels was a source of acute vulnerability, and its material products-like so many dolls, pupae and automata-objects of self-fashioning. Instances of the gross conflations of Burney and her book product occurred when Dr. Johnson called her "Evelina" ("Come, -Evelina, -come & sit by me,") and when two girls in a shop stared so intently at her, it was "as if they expected to read in [her] Face all the Characters in [her] Book" (EJL III 93, 23-30 August 1778 and 394,

post 12-25 October 1779). The move into the third person-and thus the fortu- itous development of free indirect discourse-was not so much an act of "daring" to have opinions or judgments, as it was a strategy for both hiding the writing self, and for displaying it. In this way the "writing self," apart from the characters themselves who emerged as "written selves," became the more shielded and less accessible figure of the "narrator," who in turn was able to give such psycho-social conditions as abjection its shocking coherence.

About eight years after the publication of Evelina, it was Queen Char-

lotte who realized that Burney had perfected the role of "omniscient" narrator in daily life, as well as her true calling as a novelist. The Queen, conversing with Mary Delany in January 1786, upon reading in the newspaper that Burney had written a play, exclaimed, "Miss Burney's name is every where but her Character is as delicate as if it were no where;-& I should be sorry to have her write for so public a thing as the Stage." While on one hand, to come out at all as a woman in eighteenth-century England necessitated the curiously covert yet omnipresent form of presentation that became formalized in novelistic prose as free indirect discourse, it was only a grammatical form of objectifying the self that collaborated with other forms. And these forms too were shaped under the pressures of social

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rites and regulations. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the very book that gave "voice" to Burney's will to write, and at the same time brought an end to her "dear, long loved, long cherished snugship," Evelina. While the epistolary novel appears to decry the automaton as an object, it reveals a deep affinity for the automaton as subject, the very form of womanhood that the heroine is shaped to become. If Burney had not yet learned the trick of distancing her own identity from her creations by filtering novelistic subjectivity through a third person-thus turning all subjects into objects-she expresses in Evelina a similar realization through the heroine's lessons from a jeweled and mechanical pineapple.

EVELINA AND COX'S MECHANICAL PINEAPPLE

Evelina, a character presented in the novel's preface as possessing "a vir- tuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart" in her "first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life," and having "ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners, of the world," undergoes her social and moral education at sites of consumption. At Cox's Museum, where she and her company encounter, among other mechanical toys, a pine-apple that suddenly opens to reveal a nest of singing birds and a concluding "concert of mechanical music," Evelina gains an opportunity to display her correct understanding of aesthetic values by dismissing the artificial effects and pleasures that the museum showcases. "This Museum is very astonishing, and very superb; yet, it afforded me but little pleasure, for it is a mere show, though a wonderful one," she writes to her guardian, Mr. Villars. Madame Duval, on the other hand, Evelina's "at once uneducated and unprincipled" grandmother, reacts "in extacies" to the concluding "concert of mechanical music" while Captain Mirvan "flung himself into so many ridiculous distortions by way of mimicking her." The mechanical concert's "effect" merely pleases Evelina, even as she "cannot explain how it was produced.""39 Perhaps the most suggestive detail in Evelina's depiction of her excursion to Cox's Museum is her answer to Sir Willoughby's question of what she thinks of "this brilliant spectacle:" "'It is very fine, and very ingenious ... and yet-I don't know how it is,-but I seem to miss something'" (Evelina, 76).

Evelina's experience of Cox's Museum corresponds with the features of its show catalogued in 1773. Listed as the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Pieces of the museum, situated "Within the Rails at the East-End of the Room," the mechanical pineapple actually served as the ornament for the figure of a "Gardener's boy upon beautiful green enamelled [sic] ground, whereon various fruits, roots, leaves, insects and implements of gardening are placed, differently composed of gold and jewellery [sic]."40 The boy, dressed in a coat "embroidered and ornamented with jewellery," wore a brilliantly jeweled hat from which the pine apple [sic] itself grew, "copied from nature, whose leaves are finely enamelled of a beautiful transparent green." The catalogue continues in its description of the pineapple:

the pine-apple is of silver, richly gilt, that bursts open upon playing of the chimes, and discovers a nest of six birds: in the center of the nest is the mother bird, formed of Jeweller's work, whose plumage is set with stones of various colours, which, during the playing of the music, is, by a curi- ous mechanism, animated like life; feeding her several young ones with pearls, and moving from one to the other, holding each pearl in her bill

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over the bird that is fed, and drawing up another pearl which is also carried to the next bird, and then delivered; and so on successively feeding her young, from one to the other, fluttering her wings at the same time; after which the pineapple closes again of itself.

While Burney's own writing scarcely accommodates the ornateness of the actual pineapple, Cox's catalogue reveals the depth of its ornamental and mechanical intricacy, and of several other mechanical pieces throughout the museum that are equally if not more stunning in their minuteness of detail, lavishness of materials, and ingenuity. Such pieces include the deeply layered arrangements of bejeweled and animated pyramids, elephants, dragons, bulls, dolphins, a spiral worm and "Asiatic beasts" [Figure 1].41 Human figures are mostly "Asiatic," such as the "Automaton in the habit of a Chinese," "two Automaton figures of a man and a woman, in Turkish habits" that appear to be singing while ringing bells with ham- mers in each of their hands.42 In another "piece," an "Eastern Lady" moves "from right to left" in a "rich Pavilion" and holding "a rich Guittar, set with stones of various colours." A "Time-piece" hangs above, ending with a "mechanical moving Star" that seems to grow "when in motion."

Burney's prose style, resolutely indifferent to the visual exoticism and showiness of her characters' settings, allows the moral and instructive essence of her novels and their characters to predominate. And yet when Lillian and Edward Bloom describe her writing as consisting of a "peculiar conflation of a fairy-tale narrative and a quasi-philosophical motif, stage-like dialogue, an alternation between comic scenes and those of moral purpose, realistic if blurred boundaries," they could very well be describing one of the magical yet mechanical narratives of Cox's "pieces."43 Elsewhere, Edward Bloom explains "If we do not really see place, we are always aware of it as a social force. As a novelist Fanny [sic] appreciated setting, but she thought it less important than her shifting clusters of people and their interactions" (Evelina, xxv). Indeed, if Burney slights the visual and mechanical splendor of Cox's ingenious machines, it is to devote her rhetorical energies to perfecting the crafting of her own "little people." These were the characters that populate her novels, and provoked the English Review (January 1783), upon the publication of Cecilia, to praise all its figures for seeming "fairly purchased at the great work-shop of life."44 Their "numerous[ness]" and "excessive opulence" prompted Edmund Burke to write her in a letter: "You have crowded into a few small volumes an incredible variety of characters; most of them well planned, well supported, and well contrasted with each other." Gently, he suggests, "Justly as your characters are drawn, perhaps they are too numerous."45 More teasing in person, Burke had also called out to her at an assembly, "Don't go yet, little character-monger!"46 Similarly, Johnson declared both Richardson and Fielding "would have been really afraid of her." While "there is merit in Evelina which" Richardson "could not have borne," in "all of Harry Fielding's Works," on the other hand, "there is nothing so delicately finished." For these distinctions, Johnson in turn characterized her by shaking his Head" at Burney and exclaiming, "0, you little Character-Monger, you (EJL III 109-110, 23-30 August 1778)!"

Cox's Museum with its automata, producing in Evelina a sense of miss- ing "something," is the very distillation of what the fashionable world fosters, from playhouses and opera houses, Marybone-gardens with its fireworks telling

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Figure 1. James Cox, "Miniature Secretary Incorporating a Clock," ca. 1766-1772. All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, to Ranelagh with its Rotunda and Chinese House, so brilliantly lit as to make evening seem like daylight hours.47 The pleasure venues of eighteenth-century London, in their artificial reconstructions of "other" worlds, operate as showcases for fashionable people who participate in life not as themselves, but, much like dolls and automata, as signs and referents of something else. Indeed, it is Cox's Museum's adherence to the dazzling semblance of life as opposed to its unmediated presence that provokes Evelina's sense of lack in her encounters with its mechanical toys.

Cox's Museum figures again later in the novel in a conversation at the Pan- theon between Mrs. Mirvan, Mr. Lovel, and Lord Orville, Evelina's other mentor figure and later, her husband. Orville, prompted by Mrs. Mirvan to offer his opinion on the establishment answers, "The mechanism . . . is wonderfully ingenious: I

am sorry it is turned to no better account; but its purpose is so frivolous, so very remote from all aim at instruction or utility, that the sight of so fine a shew, only

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leaves a regret on the mind, that so much work, and so much ingenuity, should not be better bestowed" (Evelina, 110). Providing an impression that is as ambivalent as Evelina's own, yet more forcible and analytical in its moralistic tenor, Orville also expresses a familiar Enlightenment attitude; he disapproves of wonder for its own sake-indeed, rejects it-and regrets the automata's "uselessness."

By the time Burney wrote her last novel The Wanderer (1814), she had gained enough experience with the genre to make claims for its value and reveal its relationship to her own self-image. In her introduction to the work, addressing her father, she recalls how at the age of fifteen, she burnt all her secret attempts at fiction writing out of an innate sense of shame. In doing so, Burney strikes upon the "degradation" attached to fiction as "a class of composition" (Wanderer, 7). The character of Evelina, Burney explains in the same introduction, "struggled herself into life" in defiance of "every self-effort" to suppress her urges for creating simulacra of people out of language. More confident of her form in old age, she issues the command: "Divest, for a moment, the title of Novel from its stationary standard for insignificance and say! What is the species of writing that offers fairer opportunities for conveying useful precepts?" (Wanderer, 7) Repeatedly invoking the mechanical imagery of the novel as a "vehicle" or conveyer for abstract thought, she also states indirectly its essentially feminized form by begging the general reader not to dismiss its moral usefulness because it is "enwrap[ped]" in "an exterior the most frivolous," or because it appears "a mere vehicle for frivolous, or seductive amusement" (Wanderer, 9, 7). The prejudices that Burney feels hampering percep- tions of the novel as a valid medium for "illustrations of conduct" and "natural and probable human existence" echo Orville's and Evelina's attitudes towards Cox's automata.

And yet, the pineapple opening to display singing birds, like novels, does offer moral examples, despite its equally gay and fanciful exteriors.48 As Evelina undertakes the challenge of developing her moral sense through participating in worldly adventures, she encounters the need to develop a vocabulary of irony: in all its settings, she discovers, worldliness entails presenting the self to mean something else. The automata that she rejects as wonderful but false are the very models for the worldly self she learns both to assimilate and reject in her education of manners, especially as she begins to recognize the disjunction between the misleadingly transparent form of letters and the inner content of thought and feeling. Repeatedly throughout her letters to Maria Mirvan, she recognizes the inherently "inanimate" and "cold" nature of letters, and pleads, when rebuked for her "silence," "Narrative does not offer, nor does a lively imagination supply the deficiency" (Evelina, 253, 262). No longer the dutiful transcriber of every event to Mr. Villars, she maintains the interest of reserve and omission when writing in her next to last letter, "I say nothing of our conversation, because you may so well suppose both the subjects we chose, and our manner of discussing them" (Evelina, 392).

The mechanical pineapple that opens and "closes again of itself" serves as a model of the ideal femininity-open, yet controlled-that conduct books of the period so rigorously formulated, and that Burney, in her obsession with providing "examples," "models" and "illustrations" of conduct, wants Evelina and her other heroines to embody.49 Later novels, though, with their disturbing sequences of heroines transformed into spectacles of madness, imply that as a model of femininity, the

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toy pineapple in its pleasing charm is perhaps most lacking in its inability to evoke the pain of femininity, despite the secrets suggested by its closures. To be sure, the balance between pleasure and pain is an enduring moral and philosophical ideal for diverse authors of the Enlightenment from Jane Austen, whose smooth narratives stage the harsh unfoldings of the self, to George Campbell, who observes, "a mixture of pain" gives "strength and stability to pleasure."50 The balance is perhaps most of all important for the statue in Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations. The statue-itself an organic fantasy of human automatism-whose coming into life and his own voice derives not only from acquiring sense faculties, but also, the capacity to feel pleasure and pain.1

ARTIFICIAL ILLUMINATION AND THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF ABJECTION: CAMILLA

Burney's later novels, Cecilia and Camilla, upset the ideal balance of Condillac's philosophical model and of Cox's pineapple by emphasizing pain over pleasure as the affective instrument for self-knowledge. Cecilia's and Camilla's intensely conflicted experiences at masquerades and in shops and resort towns, for example, transmute the pleasure endorsed at these sites of social and commercial exchange into inner scenes of torment, mortification, guilt, and shame. This excess of pain that Burney so dutifully draws outward as a pain produced in turn by an uneasy sense of public exposure, supplies the very definition for abjection. In doing so, Burney situates abjection as an affect produced within eighteenth- century frameworks of propriety, and heightened by the specular framework of eighteenth-century social life and its own forms of "enlightenment," from brilliantly-lit pleasure gardens and innovations in street lighting, to the internalized gaze of conduct ideology.

For every beautiful, rich, and accomplished heroine Burney creates, she dutifully thwarts her power by producing her abject other-a perversely degraded woman who has lost her mind, her fortune, and most of all, her specular self- governance. What might these losses and abject spectacles mean, especially when Burney's heroines labor to emulate conduct book femininity? In the end, Camilla's and Cecilia's reversals of fortune, and surrenders to madness serve as extremely apologetic compensation for their mistakes and failures. They express above all their "right to be punished" for not being "good enough." Burney's fiction chill- ingly demonstrates the notion of "good enough" for female subjects is, in the end, impossible to fulfill, and yet the beginning for an obsessively self-admonishing mode of behavior and consciousness. As an automatic response to this implicitly impossible ideal, imagining the abject female is the ultimate duty; doing so regis- ters and compensates for her failure to embody the ideal, yet appears to maintain the necessary distance self-idealization demands. Burney's novels, in consistently developing the relationship between abjection, automatism, and female conduct, represent late eighteenth-century femininity as a condition enmeshed in the compulsory aspects of female dollship, the phantasmatic properties of objectivity, and most of all, the failed vision of Enlightenment standards for individual autonomy and classical images of beauty.

Camilla, for example, juxtaposes interior values of selfhood with exterior ones, as well as the visual impressions of the grotesque and the beautiful by

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presenting three female characters who comprise a spectrum of these qualities. Eugenia, once the most beautiful in her family, made a "wizen little stump" by childhood smallpox and a freak accident at a public fair, compensates for her physical deformity with a gift for scholarship and an amiable spirit. For most of her early life, she is so "protected" by her family members from becoming aware of her ugliness that she never understands the extent of her deformity until she travels outside her home and encounters public jeers and rejection whereupon she painfully discovers she was a "total stranger" to the "sensations" she "excites" in others (Camilla, 301). In direct opposition to Eugenia, Indiana, her "beautiful vacant-looking cousin" and "that most exquisite workmanship of nature" indolently foregoes any spiritual or intellectual work with the tutor she shares with Eugenia and seems "scarce to live but while arraying, or displaying herself" (Camilla, 800, 812). Through her self-absorbed and doll-like qualities Indiana in fact embodies the scourge of conduct books. Camilla, heroine of the novel, does not fall as easily into a "purely" interior or exterior subjectivity as do her sister Eugenia, and cousin Indiana. Endowed with an "elastic" form and mind, an "animated voice" and personality, "engaging manners," and "captivating looks," her consciousness is often in conflict with the moral codes of female conduct to which she devotes herself. Caught between the extremes of duty and pleasure, and an awareness of how she appears to herself and an even stronger awareness of how she appears to others, Camilla's consciousness becomes increasingly tortured by its liminal position and conflicting drives. Burney's use of free indirect discourse, an enterprise first undertaken in Cecilia after the epistolary Evelina heightens the "betwixt and between" sense of Camilla's subjectivity.

Much like Cecilia, Burney's third novel presents liminal identity as a media- tion between private and public areas of self-representation, which in turn denotes the turn from childhood to adulthood. Never fully child or woman, Camilla, like Cecilia, is suspended in the act of becoming. Subtitled "A Picture of Youth," the novel begins in the characters' childhood. Though the majority of the book narrates Camilla's experiences as a seventeen-year old woman attempting to make her way around fashionable society after she leaves her parents' home, the moment of childhood lingers; images of dolls and mechanical toys prevail throughout the novel as a submerged vocabulary for the struggles Camilla endures as she con- fronts tensions between social vulnerability and domestic discipline. By prefacing a young woman's entrance in the marriage market with scenes of her girlhood, Burney's novel suggests the objects of childhood are ever present in the objectives of womanhood.

Furthermore, Camilla's representations of femininity emphasize a struggle between "interior" and "exterior" aspects of being, and also, the endeavor to emulate models of femininity. It does so most effectively in its constant allusions to dolls, statues, and automata: from the toys of the girls' childhood, the references to both Indiana and Camilla as beautiful automata or statues, and even Camilla's "sprightliness" and "elasticity," qualities more suggestive of an ingeniously con- structed plaything than a human woman. Darkening these doll references and images further are Camilla's moments of "mortification" (moments universal to Burney's heroines) that paradoxically, in their over-saturation of pain or even un- expected pleasure, make her more of a statue than a sentient being, thus reversing

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the narrative of Condillac's statue's coming-into-being: "Camilla, overwhelmed with internal shame, yet more powerful than grief itself, stood motionless," and "Camilla, overpowered with the struggles of joy and contrition, sunk nearly lifeless" (Camilla, 761-762 and 882). More explicitly compared to an automaton, Camilla, demoralized at a ball, turns into "a fair lifeless machine" "put in motion" by "the music" (Camilla, 714). Eugenia, at the same event, finds herself "nearly turned ... to marble" when overhearing Melmond, the young scholar she adores, discussing his disdain for her with Indiana (Camilla, 720).

Edgar Mandelbert, as Camilla's own personal monitor, functions to regu- late her social behavior and choices through his judgments: "he was observant of the errors of others, and watched till he nearly eradicated his own" (Camilla, 57). Moreover, he unexpectedly appears whenever Camilla has been coerced or cajoled into an injudicious situation-usually in scenes of shopping or commercial exchange-with inappropriate companions, or appears to have conducted herself not as a woman of virtue (sincere), but as a coquette (unsteady and capricious). Camilla's own self-esteem falls and rises in jagged rhythm with Edgar's sternly disapproving or adoring regard for her, as such chapter titles as "Computations of Self-Love" or "A Self-Dissection" suggest. Reflecting alone after experiencing his severe disapprobation of her flirtation, an ill-conceived "experiment," with the fop Sir Sedley Clarendel, Camilla responds with a view to adjusting her machinery for Edgar:

She had seen Edgar, though he knew her to be protected, follow her to the coach, and she had seen, by the light afforded from the lamps of the carriage, that her safety from the crowd and tumult was not the sole object of his watchfulness, since though that, at the instant she turned round, was obviously secure, his countenance exhibited the strongest marks of disturbance. The secret spring, therefore, she now thought that was to re-unite them, was in her own possession (Camilla, 669).

Indeed, her adjustment, provoked by watching his watching, precisely entails machinating a semblance of "general gaiety" in order to "renew solicitude" on Edgar's "part by a displayed ease of mind on her own" (Camilla, 669).

Thus keeping her heroine's self-construction susceptible to her lover's scopic obsession-he is called "a watcher" by Camilla's friend, Mrs. Arlbery-Burney's novel illustrates the problematics of identity formation in which an animate or inanimate doll is consistently invoked as the epitome of femininity. From this situation, these issues arise: a woman's being is compared against an object, and a woman's being is figured as an object. Thus, her "essential" characteristics are registered strictly in terms of what surface impressions she creates and projects. Edgar's role as Camilla's monitor and watcher is made problematic most of all by the fact that his assessments of "the solidity or lightness of" her "heart" are based on pure speculations of her outward actions (Camilla, 594). And yet Edgar himself serves as a localized and humanly embodied instance of a more general social phenomenon.

In life, caught between their parents' and then their husbands' homes, never completely subject or object, Burney's heroines situate themselves on the threshold of cultural legibility and visibility.52 The stakes in such visual positionings are high

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for young eighteenth-century women coming out to society; through the Enlight- enment's technological advancements in lighting, optical devices and mirrors, "the very ability to look and to be seen in a social setting was markedly improved."s3 If England's participation in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment has been contested, its development of material enlightenment remains unquestionable. As the above examples demonstrate, Burney's heroines tend to degenerate into grotesque spectacles that trangress boundaries of propriety, despite their good intentions. Much like Schelling's definition of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) from which Freud works, "the name for everything that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light," Burney's heroines embody the unwelcome obverse of conduct book precepts by ineluctably losing hold of the prescribed "veil of modesty."54 In doing so, they make themselves abject through naked displays of surplus emotion, and as Camilla demonstrates, through a surplus of fashionable consumption.

THE AUTOMATON'S TEARS: AUTHORSHIP AND ABJECTION

Burney's fascination with mechanical doll-like women can be traced throughout her personal writings in detailed descriptions of women she encounters at social gatherings. In a journal letter of 16 June 1779 to her sister Susanna, she writes about the great beauty Sophia Streatfield who had the peculiar gift of being able to make herself cry when she wanted (EJL 316, post 15-?26 June 1779).ss As much a commentary on social behavior as on Streatfield herself, Burney describes the strange scene in which the sophisticated crowd of Hester Thrale's Streatham Park induce the young woman to cry for them:

Sir Phillip. Well, I have heard so much of these Tears, that I would give the Universe to have a sight of them. Mrs. Thrale. Lord, she shall Cry again if you like it. S.S. [Sophia Streatfield] No, -pray, Mrs. Thrale;- Sir Philip. 0 pray do! -pray let me see a little of it!- Mrs. Thrale. Yes, do cry, a little, Sophy; -in a wheedling Voice) pray do!-Consider, now, you are going to Day, -and it's very hard if you won't cry a little; -indeed, S.S., you ought to cry- Now for the wonder of wonders, -when Mrs. Thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a Nurse soothing a Baby, had run on for some Time, -while all the rest of us, in Laughter, joined in the request, two Crystal Tears came into the soft Eyes of the S.S., -and rolled gently down her Cheeks! -such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed; -she offered not to conceal, or dissipate them, -on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by every body. She looked, indeed, un- commonly handsome, for her pretty Face was not, like Chloe, blubbered, it was smooth and elegant, and neither her Features or complexion were at all ruffled, -nay, indeed, she was smiling all the Time.

In this scene drawn from real life, as incredible and dense with the moral implications

of social life as any in Burney's novels, wonder ensues not only from Streatfield's

ability to issue tears when prompted, thus fabricating affect, but also, from her ability to turn a purportedly raw display of feeling into a pleasing and pretty im-

age. The company breaks through the suspense of Streatfield's so-called "pain" by

erupting "at once" into "loud and rude bursts of laughter" at its end.

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Unlike Streatfield, Burney's heroines indeed "blubber" in their tears, and oppose the smooth and contained qualities of beauty with the excessive and deforming features of the abject and the grotesque. According to Mary Russo, the grotesque body is the antithesis of the beautiful body, and shares important characteristics with the abject and the liminal insofar as it is "the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change" against "the Classical body which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism."56 While psychologically spectacular scenes of Burney's heroines' experiencing extreme emotions represent the grotesque waste of abjection, they represent also mappings of a waste more pervasive in their social milieus, the waste of bourgeois consumption.

Camilla narrates the late eighteenth century's growth as a consumer culture in its Southampton chapters where Camilla shops with Mrs. Mittin and becomes mistaken for either a prostitute or a madwoman.s7 In this world, the male aristocratic drive for acquiring objects as sexual trophies dramatized in Richardson's Clarissa and Pope's Rape of the Lock spreads to a newer and wider order of society as the middle class female partakes of the fantasy of compensating for or adjusting "reality" through acquiring consumer goods. In this way, Camilla represents a turn from sexual fetishism to commodity fetishism in the system of objects developed throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, Camilla also illustrates that the over-consumption of objects, rather than enhancing or augmenting the self, entails its expenditure and depletion, through forcing the self to purge-in the form of guilt, shame, tears, and mortification-what it consumes. In one of many effective instances of free indirect discourse in the novel, we are allowed to hear with Camilla the amount of her brother's debts from her father, and at the same time, experience her private recognition that hers far exceed her brother's. Camilla stands

overwhelmed with shame, yet more powerful than grief itself, stood motionless. These expences appeared but like a second part of her own, with her milliner, her jeweller, and her haberdasher. . . . Surprised by her entire silence, Mr. Tyrold looked up. Her cheeks, rather livid than pale, and the deep dismay of her countenance, extremely affected him. The kindness of his embraces relieved her by melting her into tears . . . Am I punished? Am I punished? She internally exclaimed; but could not bear to meet the eyes of her father . . . (Camilla, 762)

As the tears-coupled with the internally quoted voice of guilt, "Am I punished?"- indicate, the abject's main vehicle of expression, unlike the cultural and materially fabricated vocabulary of fashion, lies in the body. As such it comprises, above all, "something horrible to see" deriving from the body's interior (Horror, 155).

Burney may be identified with her own heroines in her own susceptibility to the pains and psychic disturbances of coming out. Numerous commentators on Burney have read her novels closely alongside her diaries and letters in order to understand the social and biographical circumstances of her art. However, Patricia Meyer Spacks in "Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney" differs from those tactics in that she believes the novels themselves provide rich sources of explication for Burney's psychological experiences. In the following passage Spacks outlines the social and psychological consequences of Burney's fiction writing:

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To be marked, discovered, known as a writer, and, therefore, perhaps not a proper female, perhaps a woman unforgiveably addicted to self-display: this idea focused Fanny Burney's terror of doing wrong. To make oneself known as a writer invites people to look; to offer one's fantasies for the perusal of others invites violation. For a woman to be looked at or talked of means, at best, loss of dignity, at worst, loss of reputation.s8

The socially and psychologically charged process of coming out then takes place in the female writer's very project. To modify Spacks's point, it is not so much the embarrassment of being looked at, but the anxiety of being looked at as a subject of speech that makes Burney's production of fiction so painful. Yet for Burney, the desire to be in command of language competes with the shame of self-presentation, and her "obsessive, almost uncontrollable authorial energy" worked in conflict with the "mousy fearfulness" of her public persona.59 Much was at stake in Burney's introduction to Evelina as she acknowledges in its preface that it is to "the public," a synonym for "novel-readers" to which it is being presented. Here too she lays knowing claim to her psychological composition as an author, describing it as "a very singular mixture of timidity and confidence." She both "trembles" for her novel's success, knowing of their "imperfections," and remains assured "while happily wrapped up in a mantle of impenetrable obscurity." This "public" testimony of her own character is consistent with the events she accounts for in her journal: alongside sobbing scenes of gratitude with her father over his "pre- cious approbation" of Evelina and ecstatic recognitions of herself as a "person of Consequence" are descriptions of suffering insomnia over "the certainty of being known as a scribbler" throughout her early journals and letters.60 Hester Thrale most incisively captured the strangeness of Burney's conflicts when attempting to cure her of "an over-delicacy that may make" Burney unhappy "all her "Life" and asking her, "for why should you write a Book, Print a Book, and have every Body Read and like your Book,-and then sneak in a Corner and disown it!"61

Later in her life, Burney continues to try to sneak into corners: in a diary fragment written during her years working in Queen Charlotte's court as her second Keeper of the Robes, she still endures the rigors of publicity brought on by authorship. In her mid-thirties and well past the age of "coming out," she finds herself assailed by a devout reader of Cecilia who calls out, "I must speak with you! I am bursting, I am crammed, -I am Delviled & Ceciliad, all over, & through & through!"62 Her admirer, literally figuring his obsession with her novel as an act of consumption-incorporating her book, characters, and by extension her as author within his body-compels her to ponder, "I knew, here, 'twas the Book, not the writer, he was thus worshipping." As one-time amanuensis for her father's multi- volume General History of Music, Burney, it may seem understood the distinctions between copying and creating and self and product that her admirer confuses. To her admirer, she is still an amanuensis, inseparable and indistinguishable from the novel she penned-there is no room for difference between the material book that comprises Cecilia and the living author; it is as if she merely transcribed the book as a literal extension of herself.

So acute in its social observations, Burney's writing, according to Margaret Doody, had constantly run the risk of appearing to her contemporaries the product of mere transcription as opposed to conscious reflection and willful ordering:

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Some critics have made her a mere impersonal machine; she has been compared to a camera obscura and a tape recorder. Her novels are not automatic transmissions from eighteenth-century drawing rooms. They are the creative products of an actively intelligent, witty, and passionate human being, drawing on an experience of considerable tension and com- plexity, who thought she had something to say which could only be said imaginatively.63

Doody's adjectives to denote Burney's "human-ness" underscore a general anxiety about identifying humans with machines. Even as they too appear automatic in the regularity of their occurrences, the raw moments of abjection that afflict Cecilia and Camilla-and most powerfully Burney herself in her later witnessing of her own mastectomy-ensure that Burney manages to disrupt the smooth and classical beauty of the machine that appears to constrict female creativity.64 Much like Richardson's own unusually lengthy works, Burney's works suggest the impossibility of novelistic containment, especially via the mimetic technologies of transcription and textual reproductions.

In her preface to Evelina, Burney indicates the tensions between the original and the copy that writing novels mediates:

The heroine of these memoirs, young, artless, and inexperienced, is No faultless Monster, that the World ne'er saw, but the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire. In all the Arts, the value of copies can only be proportioned to the scarceness of originals: among sculptors and painters, a fine statue, or a beautiful picture, of some great master, may deservedly employ the imitative talents of younger and inferior artists, that their appropriation to one spot, may not wholly prevent the more general expansion of their excellence; but, among authors, the reverse is the case, since the noblest productions of literature, are almost equally attainable with the meanest. In books, therefore, imitation cannot be shunned too sedulously; for the very perfection of a model which is frequently seen, serves but more forcibly to mark the inferiority of a copy.

Distinguishing the work of copying in literature as less productive and ideal than the generative work of art, Burney suggests the changes brought out by the technological use of the printing press, a machine that can too easily create copies of superior models, and of which eighteenth-century novels were the offspring. Despite the tellingly confused syntax of this passage, its main point appears to affirm the value of the original by associating it with what springs from "Nature" and appears only infrequently. For Burney, the copy is the "Monster," and the original is the product of a natural birth. Her heroine is coextensive with the book itself-another potential "Monster"-as her description blends into a general assessment of books and literature without any differentiation.

Much like the automaton, the eighteenth-century novel attempts to replicate the dimensions of human being-ness, even as Burney appears to deny the taint of copying in her introduction to Evelina. She wants to see her novel not as a mutant human-an automaton, as her references to copying suggest-but as a legitimate child of nature. Yet, her following novels, becoming more ambitious and attuned to the psychological duress of female socialization, manifest an increasing susceptibility to the contours of monstrosity and, at the same time, the anthropomor-

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phic repetitions of the automaton. The more obediently truthful and ambitiously expansive her novels attempt to be in drawing "characters from nature" and the "manners of the times" (to use Burney's phrasings in Evelina), the more time, space and reiterations they require to accommodate those impressions. More excessive than monumental, and messy rather than sleek, Burney's works resist the smooth and closed containment associated with the Classical body. For Burney there are rarely smooth and beautiful shapes for the public representation-whether through copying or original "birth"-of a subjectivity associated both with the novel and the feminine, there are mainly abject ones.

NOTES

This essay was written with the support of an Ahmanson-Getty fellowship from UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and Clark Library. It has benefited from the patient and insightful readings of Marton Dornbach, who gave me his Budapest apartment to write an earlier draft. Further indebtedness goes to Roy Ritchie especially, who gave me a place to continue the writing and research at the Huntington when the Clark closed, David Clark, who gave me his encouragement and Jonathan Lamb, who prodded the essay to come out.

1. Though Rey Chow refers to the far removed context and medium of early 20th-century cin- ematography and its ability to capture the psychological effects of "mechanically repeated motions" in such films as Charlie Chaplin's Hard Times, the connection she makes between the automata and the spectacle captures the arresting effects of compulsion and perpetual unease at the heart of Burney's narratives about women's experiences of turning into social subjects in mid to late 18th-century British society: "Being 'automatized' means being subjected to social exploitation whose origins are beyond one's individual grasp, but it also means becoming a spectacle whose 'aesthetic' power increases with one's increasing awkwardness and helplessness." From "Postmodern Automatons," Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 106.

2. Ned Ward, Adam and Eve Stript of Their Furbelows (London, 1714), 7.

3. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 2 vols. (London, 1773), 11:67.

4. Abbe D'Ancourt, The Lady's Preceptor, Or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction Upon Politeness, translated by a Gentleman of Cambridge, 6th ed. (Birmingham, 1778), 46.

5. Richard Allestree, The Lady's Calling (London, 1720), 5-6.

6. John Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct: Or, Rules for Education (London, 1722), 47.

7. George Lord Saville, Late Marquis and Earl of Halifax, The Lady's New-year's Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter (London, 1724), 100, 101.

8. Saville, 111:104.

9. Frederick Barlow, The Complete English Dictionary; or, General Repository of the English Language (London, 1772-1773), I, AUX-AWK, definition for "automaton."

10. See Joseph Rykwert, "Organic and Mechanical," Res 22 (Fall 1992): 11-8.

11. See Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1788), 127-8.

12. Simon Schaffer, "Enlightened Automata," in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 128.

13. See Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1996), 13: "Man was trained like an animal ... A mathematician learnt the most difficult proofs and calculations, as a monkey learnt to put on and take off his little hat or to ride his trained dog. ... As we can see, there is nothing simpler than the mechanism of our education!"

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PARK / Frances Burney's Mechanics of Coming Out 47

14. The most vigorous revisionist of the "separate spheres" model in historiographies of gender is Amanda Vickery in "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronol-

ogy of English Women's History," The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383-414 and The Gentleman's Daughter (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). Other examples include Harriet Guest, Small Change (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), Eve Tavor Bannett, Domestic Revolutions (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000) and Lawrence Klein, "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1995): 97-109.

15. Vickery, Gentleman's Daughter, 265.

16. Frances Brooke's The Excursion (1777), published the same year as Evelina, manifests the as- sociation with travel that the practice of "coming out" relays. The trope of carriages and carriage rides runs throughout its own narrative of a young girl making her first "entrance" into society.

17. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1806), 59-60.

18. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988/1975), 170.

19. Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 265.

20. Anonymous, Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human (London, 1733), 3.

21. Peter Browne, Lady's Rhetoric, trans. from French (London, 1707), 89.

22. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London and New York: Penguin, 1996), 42.

23. Burney, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, II 1774-1777, ed. Lars E. Troide, 4 vols. (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press: Kingston, Ont., 1990), 215.

24. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 92-3.

25. Burney, Camilla, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972, 1983), 860, and Cecilia, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 908. Further references are by title and page number in the body of the essay.

26. In Cecilia the heroine says to her future mother-in-law: "Do not talk to me of affection, madam ... whatever you had for me is past,-even your esteem is gone,-you may pity me, indeed, but your pity is mixed with contempt, and I am not so abject as to find comfort from exciting it" 641.

27. See Joyce Hemlow, "Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books," PMLA, 65 (1950): 732-61.

28. Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), 148.

29. Edward and Lillian Bloom inform us that Gregory's text with "Mr. Tyrold's Advice to his Daughter ... from 'Camilla', by Mrs. D'Arblay" was included in 1809-1816 printings.

30. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), 53. Further references are by short title and page number in the body of the essay.

31. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 1966), 121.

32. Kristeva evokes the relationship between cadavers and the abject by pointing out the derivation

of the word "cadaver" from "cadere," which means "to fall": "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver," 3.

33. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody include this draft introduction in their edition.

34. Julie Choi, "Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel," New Literary History 37:4 (1996), 641-62. Choi discusses Burney's introduction to Camilla specifically in



48 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 40 / 1

contrast with William Godwin's postscript of 1832 to Caleb Williams, in which he explains his choice to write the text in the first person. See 650-1.

35. Choi, 655.

36. Doody "George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35:3, Special issue: George Eliot, 1880-1980 (Dec., 1990): 260-91, 284. Further references are by author and page number in the body of the essay.

37. Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney III The Streatham Years Part I 1778- 1779, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke (McGill-Queens Univ. Press: Kingston, Ont., 1994), 78-79, 149, 157, 398, 80, 326. Reynolds's vow is repeated at least 4 times throughout the letters and journals written from 1778-1779. Further references are by EJL III and page number in the body of the essay.

38. Burney, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney IV, The Streatham Years, 1780-1781, ed. Betty Rizzo (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press: Kingston, Ont., 2003), 432-3, 15 August 1781.

39. Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (1728; Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 13, 77. Further references are by title and page number in the body of the essay.

40. Anonymous (James Cox?), A Descriptive Catalogue of the Several Superb and Magnificent Pieces of Mechanism and Jewellery, Exhibited in the Museum, at Spring-Gardens, Charing Cross (London, 1773), 28-9.

41. Further information on James Cox and his thriving export trade with the Chinese market can be found, most recently, in Catherine Pagani, Eastern Magnificence and European Ingenuity (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001). See also Pagani, "The Clocks of James Cox: Chinoiserie and the Clock Trade of China in the Late Eighteenth Century," Apollo 141 (January 1995): 15-22 and Charles M. Aked, "The Emperor's Clock," Clocks 9:4 (1986): 29-34. The Guildhall Library, London has one of three copies of William Meyrick, A Short Account of the Remarkable Clock Made by James Cox, in the Year 1766 by Order of the East India Company for the Emperor of China (1868).

42. Anonymous (James Cox?), 13.

43. Lillian D. and Edward A. Bloom, "Fanny Burney's Novels: The Retreat from Wonder," Novel 12.3 (Spring 1979): 215-36.

44. English Review 1 (January, 1783): 14.

45. The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1778-1840), ed. Charlotte Barrett, with Preface and notes by Austin Dobson, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), 11:93.

46. Burney shares this anecdote in a footnote of her introduction to The Wanderer (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 5. Further references are by title and page number in the body of the essay.

47. See Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens (London: Macmillan, 1896), for a history of Ranelagh: 199-218. Wroth quotes Lydia Melford in Humphry Clinker writing "Ranelagh looks like the enchanted palace of a genio, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate the noonday sun," 203.

48. This reading of the Cox Museum scene in Evelina runs counter to Simon During's, who views it as a more or less transparent vehicle for expressing the characters' moral positions. See Modern Enchantments (Cambridge and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).

49. See Bannet on the mutual focus on exemplarity in novels and conduct books of the second half of the eighteenth century.

50. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776; Rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1963), 131.

51. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (1754;

London: Favril, 1930), 236.

52. Epstein, "Marginality in Frances Burney's Novels," The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth- Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). Here, Epstein makes use




of Victor Turner's anthropological descriptions of liminality to focus on the theme of social "margins." For this essay, I find more useful to underscore the themes of transformation and conversion inherent in such historically mediated structures of liminality as the eighteenth-century custom of coming out.

53. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 88. See John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001).

54. Friedrich Schelling, Philosophy of Mythology quoted in Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God(s) (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994), 228.

55. Burney's first encounter with the S.S.'s ability to cry on demand left her shocked and frightened. Exclaiming "No, I won't look at her," she "ran away, lest she [the S.S.] should think [Burney] laughed at her" EJL 111:254, post 26 February 1779.

56. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 62-3.

57. See James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996) and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997) for readings of Camilla and consumer culture.

58. Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney," in Modern Essays on Eighteenth- Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch, Jr. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 462.

59. Epstein, The Iron Pen, 26.

60. Journals and Letters, ed. Sabor and Troide, Numbers 42 (Journal March 1778) 43 (Journal 23 June 1778) and 47 (Journal Letter to Susanna Burney 30 August 1778) 86, 87 and 100.

61. Journals and Letters, ed. Sabor and Troide, Number 47 (Journal Letter to Susanna Burney, 30 August 1778), 98 and 101.

62. Scrap from Diary, Fragments of Court Journal 1786-1790, Autogr. Eg. 3696, ff. 8-26, in the British Library.

63. Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), 34.

64. See John Wiltshire, "Fanny Burney's Face, Madame D'Arblay's Veil," for an acute analysis of this experience through Burney's journals and letters. In Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. W.F Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993).

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Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney's Mechanics of Coming Out

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