Woman as Nobody and the Novels of Fanny Burney

by Joanne Cutting-Gray

Book Overview

Cutting-Gray places Burney's eighteenth-century view of Woman alongside those views of such contemporary theorists as Kristeva, Irigaray, and Arendt and discovers that Burney dismantles both the old social order and any new order that dictates resistance to male authority. Neither alternative explains the gaps that occur when Burney's heroines resort to madness, sickness, or fits of hysteria to make themselves heard. "Nobody" shifts the perspective...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081301106X
• ISBN13: 9780813011066
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 169 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Very Good! A Note From a Burney Novice

Joanne Cutting-Gray's book is a close study of the ways in which each of Burney's four major novels grappled with female namelessness and alterity in the patriarchal sphere of the eighteenth century. The introduction gives us our point of departure, discussing Burney's now famous teenage diary entry in which she decides to address her diary to ""Nobody" since "to Nobody can [she] be wholly unreserved"" (Burney qtd. in Cutting-Gray 1). Burney goes on to ask ""Why, permit me to ask, must a female be made Nobody?"" (Burney qtd. in Cutting-Gray 2). It is on this premise, this idea of Woman as Nobody that Cutting-Gray launches the rest of her book. For Cutting-Gray, being Nobody becomes a stance of empowered alterity, since that Other is not so facilely named or pinned down by the patriarchal culture, which insists on being named, and having one's status in society declared. This understanding of Nobody as not so much a stance of conscious resistance to the patriarchal culture as a possibility for another way of being within that system helps to explain, according to Cutting-Gray, why Burney's heroines still have to resort to various sorts of hysteria to make themselves heard. In each of Burney's four novels, the question of female namelessness is examined. Each of the heroines (Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and the Wanderer, a.k.a Juliet) has to deal with complex issues of inheritance, legitimacy, and/or marriage. These issues are problematized by the very fact that these women have no appropriate place in the social structure due to issues of namelessness; but, according to Cutting-Gray, this space of namelessness and complication is also the space in which the heroines have a unique power in that they have not yet been totally constructed by the society: "While those in authority speak for Woman, namelessness lets a woman speak herself" (84). Chapter one deals with Burney's first novel, Evelina, and makes the point that this is Burney's only epistolary novel, and therefore the only novel in which the main character (female) gets to truly speak for herself. Cutting-Gray notes that there seems to be a disconnect between the Evelina who writes and the Evelina who lives: the Evelina who writes seems an acute and intelligent agent, while the Evelina who acts in the world is in many ways inept. Evelina does not fully own her powers of verbal and sexual expression, especially outside the confines of her writing. Chapters two and three deal with Cecilia and Camilla. Each of these chapters discusses the problematics of female namelessness as well, and Cutting-Gray makes the point that neither Cecilia nor Camilla speak for themselves through an epistolary/ first person point of view like Evelina had been able to do. In addition, both Cecilia's and Camilla's displays of emotion are interpreted as madness and hysteria within the patriarchal culture: "under representation [in a masculine system] the female seldom speaks, is often silenced. What Burney's othe