4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Good! A Note From a Burney Novice, December 17, 2009
This review is from: Woman as Nobody and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Hardcover)
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 other heroines, Evelina, Camilla, and Cecilia do not say, in the sense of reveal, is not merely a lack of speech; they often appear as silent victims because they are denied the legitimacy of name and the authority to name. Denied legitimate speech, the female heroine must resort to hysteria" (84).
Chapter four discusses Burney's fourth novel, The Wanderer, where Burney entirely refuses to name the female main character, and indeed the female main character refuses to name herself in the story. Her identity is not revealed until late into the novel, and the frictions this namelessness causes are borne out: "Juliet's [the Wanderer's] silence about her history, her family, her upbringing, makes her into a no-thing, inaccessible to a hegemony of name because 'unrepresentable'" (89).
Each of the four chapters that deal with Burney's individual books is thorough, and while sharply and intelligently written, the text is still accessible to the novice reader of theory, or Burney. Any reader coming to Cutting-Gray's text without having read the four novels discussed, though, will certainly be at a bit of a disadvantage when trying to construct the context from which Cutting-Gray writes. I came to Cutting-Gray's book having only read Evelina, and what I found in chapter one, the chapter that dealt with this novel, was that Cutting-Gray's analysis was compelling, sharp, and well-supported. In the following three chapters, which discussed Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer, I found it harder to keep up precisely with the analysis, especially when the allusions to theorists whose works I was largely unfamiliar with came up. For the most part, however, allusions to theorists such as Derrida and Nietzsche are sufficiently contextualized and explained so that the novice reader will still be able to follow along. Sometimes these allusions are explained and discussed less thoroughly, and these points in the text can turn into blind spots for the reader, though not at all to a crippling degree.
Chapters five and six, entitled "'Nobody' Is the Author" and "Woman's Revelation and Women's Revolution" respectively, discuss female agency in the eighteenth century, and include analysis from other contemporary theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. Notes, a bibliography, and an index follow.
Cutting-Gray's well-crafted analysis is not only an informative read, it is also an enjoyable read which would likely appeal to anyone interested in eighteenth-century literature, the female voice in literature, Frances Burney, and/or the meaning or possibilities for agency which exist in the concept of the Other. Unlike many other theoretical works, this text is not dry and difficult. Rather, it is dynamic and accessible. Additionally, though this text was originally published in 1992, its insights are still valuable today. I found it illuminating and interesting-- and this from a Burney novice!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
