Fanny Burney
I have been having a wonderful time teaching Fanny Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, written when she was 26. The novel was an instant success when it first appeared and it still resonates.
This in spite of the fact that it is written in letters and reflects a society far more formal than our own. Yet some things never change.
Take, for instance, Evelina’s first experience with a ball. She doesn’t know the rules and finds herself committing a series of missteps. She feels that everyone is judging her, and some are. She also has to deal with men on the prowl. It could be a high school dance.
Some of my students are in the process of imagining Evelina as a contemporary teen movie, just as Amy Heckerling turned Jane Austen’s Emma into clueless. They are finding more than enough material.
For instance, characters in the book seem to find it easier to open up to each other through letters than when they are actually face-to- face. My students tell me that the same is true for them as they communicate via e-mail and texting. In fact, some prefer to text than to talk on the phone. Occasionally roommates sitting together in the same room will text.
When Evelina receives a highly inappropriate letter from (she thinks) the gentlemanly Lord Orville, my students noted that she has just been “sexted.”
Although Evelina tells everything to her guardian Rev. Villars (including a number of rude male advances), she’s holds back about Orville’s letter when they are together. He sees her upset and is saddened by her sudden reserve.
The scene got my students (all of whom are women) thinking about their relationships with their own fathers. Megan Acquaviva came up with a compelling explanation for her silence. There’s a difference between telling one’s father about unwanted advances from a guy one doesn’t like, she said, and from a guy that one cares about. The latter situation is more nuanced and a mother (which Evelina does not have) can be more useful than a father, who may be more confrontational.
In this episode, however, Villars becomes practically motherly. He first expresses his concern for Evelina and then asks whether he can guess what she doesn’t want to say outright. Eventually she shows him the offending letter.
At this point, he becomes the ideal parental figure. He supports her reaction to the letter, speculates on what it could mean, and tells her how she should have responded. In this very formal age where a woman writing a letter to a man may mean opening up an engagement, Evelina could have returned the letter without comment, thereby signaling her disapproval.
Evelina tells the confidante to whom she is relating all this, “This conversation, though extremely affecting to me at the time it passed, has relieved my mind from much anxiety. Concealment, my dear Maria, is the foe of tranquility.”
My students did find something a little “creepy” in Evelina’s relationship with her guardian, starting with the fact that she begs for forgiveness for her reserve on her knees. Their unease, I think, arises from the way that Evelina is still too much daddy’s little girl. They know that she must find a way to break with Villars if she is to grow up.
In fact, she will start distancing from him in volume III of Evelina. More on this tomorrow.
