Tuesday
I’ve just finished reading Fanny Burney’s Cecilia for the first time and can report that, by the end, I found this 900+ page novel impossible to put down. While I loved teaching Burney’s earlier novel Evelina in my class on “Couples Comedy in the Restoration and 18th Century,” I can report that Cecilia is at another level. It also appealed to me as a Jane Austen fan.
Indeed, it was Austen who alerted me to the excellence of the novel. In Northanger Abbey, when Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe are bonding over their love of Ann Radcliffe novels, Austen finds herself compelled to defend the genre. Many moralists at the time, not to mention various literary characters (including Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice), feared that novels would lead young people astray. Even worse, Austen wrote, were those novelists who created protagonists who themselves denigrate novels:
[I]f a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, [Catherine and Isabelle] were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
Novel reading is attacked despite the joy involved, Austen complains. Even though “our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world,” she writes, “no species of composition has been so much decried.” As a result, young people fear acknowledging their enthusiasm:
[H]ere seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
I can testify that, while Burney is no Austen, she does indeed understand human nature and wittily serves up a variety of comic characters. One fictional technique she uses (and sometimes overuses) is having multiple characters intrude upon Cecilia at important moments. Maddeningly oblivious to her needs, they throw a wrench in her plans. I am reminded of the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera.
Comedy often shares the stage with high melodrama—at one point Cecilia is pushed past her breaking point and goes temporarily mad—and there’s even a duel. (The closest Austen gets to a duel is Colonel Brandon fighting Willoughby for debauching his ward, but if you blink you miss it.) Burney appears to have taken a page from the 17th century French tragedians Corneille and Racine, where the heart’s longings are opposed by the call of duty.
In this instance, the problem is caused by the conditions under which Cecilia is to inherit her uncle’s large fortune when she comes of age: she can only marry someone who agrees to take her family name but falls in love with a man from a family that is inordinately proud of its name, which goes back centuries. Delvile could break with his family and become Mr. Beverley (as opposed to Delvile), but that would alienate both him and Cecilia from his parents.
Of course, there are other complications, including problems with each of the three men who have been appointed Cecilia’s guardians, along with various suitors who want to get their hands on her wealth and a seeming old friend who is determined to ward them off so that he can get her once his elderly wife dies. The comic side characters, meanwhile, include a narrow businessman, a pretentious officer, a loquacious lady, a mischievous lady, and on and on. One sometimes dreams of Cecilia sending these people away, but of course she is too ladylike to do so. In this novel, there is very little privacy and the social whirl never ends.
While the virtuous Cecilia always wants to do the right thing, sometimes her youth, inexperience, and naiveté draw her into compromising situations. As in Austen, rules of etiquette impede communication and lead to misunderstandings.
For the Austen fan, there are special treasures, none bigger than the following passage. In it, a wise doctor provides the following advice to the young couple after Cecilia, through a series of misadventures, finds herself captive in a pawnbroker’s shop:
The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all that I could say to Mr Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty,–and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear,–was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings!
Austen is far more restrained than Burney and more economical with her language. Where Burney uses a broadsword to go after her satiric targets, Austen applies a stiletto. Nevertheless one sees the inspiration for many of Austen’s most memorable creations in Burney’s large cast of characters.
Reading about men and women who take integrity, honor, and truth seriously is refreshing in this age when we are daily inundated with falsehoods and bad faith arguments. Moralists may have fulminated against the novel in the 18th and early 19th century, but Cecilia provides an inspiring exemplar of how one should behave, then and now.
