Evelina

Butts 1 Jimmy Butts Indelicate Jokes: Burney’s Comic Violence as a Rib to the Gothic The Gothic novels of the 18th century do not seem to lend themselves to comedy. However, while there are early novels that are blatantly comedic—such as Tom Jones— one may find humor in unexpected places, like the Gothic, but a parallel to the comedy that may be found in Gothic novels may also be found elsewhere, namely in the violent humor of Fanny Burney’s Evelina. According to critic, Waldo S. Glock, “All critics acknowledge Evelina, to be highly entertaining, especially as a comic satire on bourgeois vulgarity and conceit” (129). Still, while many scholars like Glock have discussed Burney’s humor as being entertaining and satirical, an understanding of Evelina’s comic significance upon the evolution of the novel as a form have been somewhat limited. Burney’s unexpected, violent kind of humor is not without influence. Burney’s comedy attends to the social circumstances informing many other novels written not long after her first publication, particularly regarding feminine anxieties, and particularly informing what would come to be known as the Gothic genre. The Gothic genre seeks at its heart the concept of the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke in 1757, and according to critic Anne K. Mellor, “This concept of the sublime promoted by eighteenth-century theorists… is distinctly, if unwittingly, gendered. The sublime is associated with an experience of masculine empowerment” (85). Thus, while Gothic writers embraced the violence of the sublime at the end of the century, Burney employs the same “masculine empowerment” in her comedic novel—showing the danger that existed for women towards the end of the 18th century.

Butts 2 Burney writes of a young girl finding romance in the new domestic circles in which she finds herself, yet she also includes violently comic moments upon her female characters—comedy of which the women in the novel seem ignorant. However, the violence of the comedic attacks verge upon misogyny, prior to the attacks on women that would occur in later Gothic works, including Burney’s own works, Cecilia and The Wanderer. One of the most prominent Burney scholars, Margaret Anne Doody, in her seminal biography, alongside other scholars, has begun to call Burney’s later novels— while previously written off—Gothic texts. She calls Cecilia “one of the first novels to introduce Gothic symbolism” (147) and mentions, “Burney had had some tendency toward the ‘Gothic’ in here writings, as can be seen in Cecilia” (182). Additionally, The Wanderer as well as Burney’s later plays are often noted for their Gothic sensibilities. All of this is not to say that misogynistic humor in the Gothic or in Evelina is a new phenomenon found only in the 18th century novel, but that the surprising appearance of it in texts like Burney’s in 1778, or in later Gothic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk published in 1798, are inextricably tied to the gender anxieties that arose alongside the heightened role of women in the household during this period. While Burney was writing after the first true Gothic novel was published in 1764—that is Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, her masculine sense of humor would influence the Gothic writers as that new form rose to its zenith with Lewis’s publication. Hence, this paper will examine the connections in Burney’s violent humor to Lewis’s text, which contains its own violent humor in addition to its true moments of visceral sublimity. Lewis knew of Burney’s work, and Burney even saw one of Lewis’s later Gothic plays, The Castle Spectre in 1798 (Doody 291). These examples, then, reveal the contextual interactions of gender tensions

Butts 3 and Gothic tendencies, which Burney and her contemporaries shared concerning the vulnerability of women at the close of the 18th century. As stated earlier, the Gothic seems to be influenced by this early violent comic play developed by writers like Burney. In this strain of violent, masculine humor, Gothic novels introduce not only grotesque physical attacks upon the women lurking within the novel’s pages, but comedic verbal attacks as well. Hence, the intensely masculine verbal and physical play that exists in these early novels works to manage the new tensions that arose alongside the primacy of domestic life, the new roles of women, and their vulnerable roles as readers, although Burney’s Evelina predates the misogynist violence and humor which arises in the Gothic genre. In The Monk, women are certainly treated violently, but are also the subjects of masculine ridicule and humor, even while female readers comprised the bulk of the audience of these Gothic novels. The Monk contains some horrifyingly disturbing attacks upon women. Ambrosio rapes and kills his sister, Antonia, and Prioress is trampled underfoot by an angry mob because she is accused of poisoning a pregnant nun, even the tale of the Bleeding Nun involves her betrayal and murder by an unrequited lover. The Gothic, with its dark themes and horrifying scenarios, seems an odd place for humor. Yet the Gothic’s tensions and intense moments of shock value almost necessitate certain moments where the tensions are relieved through humor. Because women were the main audience of the Gothic, they became the victims of the plots’ attacks, and the subject of its humor. For instance, in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto published before Evelina, the evil male villain Manfred states midway through the novel, “I am no more to be moved by the whining of priests than by the shrieks of women” (62), a comment that

Butts 4 is both funny and dark, and has its unusual place in the Gothic novel. While Evelina is both reacting to texts like Otranto and speaking to The Monk, the latter seemed to take the same comedic aspects that Burney employed to alleviate some of the sexual tensions that arise naturally out of the Gothic genre. One contemporary critic Susan Fraiman in her essay “Getting Waylaid in Evelina” cleverly underscores the way that the novel Evelina handles gender roles by revealing the brutality of the men and the bondage of the women as presented in Burney’s text. She abhors the scenes of male violence such as Captain Mirvan’s rough play in ambushing Madame Duval’s carriage, calling the text of Evelina, “an ugly, gang-banging kind of male bonding” (464). However, Fraiman’s reading seems to ignore the crucial fact that Burney is writing a comedy—which includes violent humor—as a woman, which undermines the gender roles in far different ways than Fraiman’s reading only begins to uncover. In fact, the tensions between what Burney as the author seems to portray as comical, humorous moments in which the women in her novel wince, move Burney away from being a wholly feminine writer, shading her comedy as intrinsically masculine. Doody argues, “Burney is truly innovative in doing what no English woman novelist before her had done—writing not only a novelistic comedy,” but that “She seizes a ‘masculine’ mode of comedy, largely derived from the public medium of the stage, wraps it up in the ‘feminine’ epistolary mode, and uses the combination for her own purposes” (48). Burney’s masculine comedy lends itself to influence upon the masculine spectacle that would later exist in the Gothic. Both of these stances may be explained by a theory of humor called Superiority Theory.

Butts 5 Superiority Theory postulates that humor works because the audience is allowed to associate with a superior position, with a victim as its target, which works because the viewer is outside the space of vulnerability. Thomas Hobbes theorized on this philosophy of humor in his work, Human Nature, during the century before the novel began to arise as an art form. He concludes, "that the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly," and he discusses the “grimace” of “laughter” in The Leviathan. Hence, the brutal humor of Evelina towards women seems to present an ideology founded upon the basis that women suffer from some infirmity, some inferiority, to be scoffed at. The brutal attacks upon women, and the grimacing faces of men, later in the Gothic would reflect these same assumptions. Essentially, then, Burney is handling an issue that concerns the degraded state of women in society; hence, while she must attack them in her text, she is silently recording the tensions and anxieties which women faced during this time. Burney’s comic novel functions from the stance of superiority theory. If dunking refined women in the mud may be crude, it allows the viewers to gain a stance of superiority, which bleeds into the superiority felt in gender differences. An example of this appears at the beginning of the novel where Evelina is in a position of humorous vulnerability, failing in societal manners. Similarly, Captain Mirvan’s tricks in the novel are funny to the uninjured viewer, unless that viewer becomes sympathetic with the victim, which Burney works hard to prevent. Nonetheless, Susan Fraiman’s female bond with Duval has unabashedly aligned her with the victim, whom Burney endeavors to make obnoxious. Still, Mirvan’s trickery takes up a significant space in the novel—

Butts 6 particularly at the end of volume one with the mock-robbery, which reverberates into volume two with Duval’s reaction, and finally at the close of the third volume to close the book with a comedic end. An appreciation for Evelina’s comedy actually, and necessarily, challenges the reader to accept the violence of the males as humorous. Certainly, Burney’s comic novel still involves the serious aspects of 18th century class and gender codes, but the narrative also treats these codes with gleeful disregard. The vulgarity of the humor seems to spring from a strange infatuation on Burney’s part with introducing crudity into the midst of refined society. Similarly, the Gothic genre would declaim the delicacies and reason of the Restoration age for spectacle and “the sublime,” as first outlined by Edmund Burke. Thus the Gothic at the closure of the century would function as a declamation, or a satire, on the culmination of the refinements of 18th century society. When the Captain does indeed pretend to ambush Madame Duval with Evelina in the coach, merely as a witness, the humor of the novel makes use of this superiority theory of humor from a misogynistic perspective. Surprisingly, Burney’s comedic moment here consists of a woman being bound, gagged, dragged through the mud, and tied to a tree. Hence, its violent relation to Gothic texts needs little more explanation. Yet, the mock-robbery scene mixes humor with this violence. For example, in one moment there are lines such as, “the other mask came up to the chariot-door, and, in a voice almost stifled with laughter, said, ‘I’ve done for her!—the old buck is safe” (121). However, the humor is either somewhat thrown off—or possibly meant to increase—at the fury of Madame Duval, who, somewhat melodramatically by Evelina’s account, “with frightful violence, she actually beat the ground with her hands” (121). Hence, there

Butts 7 exists a juxtaposition of laughter and anger—comedy and terror. Significantly, though, Burney seems to despise Duval’s pride and hotheadedness almost as much as Captain Mirvan does, calling her his Madame French. The description of Duval after she has been drenched or dragged through the mud is equally ridiculous— “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” (122). Here, Duval’s image is reminiscent of a clown, beaten and bedraggled—and Burney slyly —almost as slyly as Captain Mirvan—belittles the woman who places too much stock in her delicate place in society. However, this moment is still meant to be funny, and here is the disconnection from Fraiman’s argument. The trick played by these two men, Captain Mirvan and Sir Clement, is both humorous and darkly disturbing, and it is strange then that Burney includes these disturbing scenes in her comedic narrative. Fraiman, who is as outraged by the masculine teasing as Madame Duval herself, writes of “the runoff of anger produced by this narrative, too great for the comic story to absorb” (470). While Burney’s novel might not have been able to contain the tensions of her gender within the confines of a comedy; the Gothic would indeed respond with outright violence and terror. Women were at this time at the mercy of men—and here Burney presents the woman’s plight in terms of humor, where later women Gothic writers, Anne Radcliffe for one, would portray violence towards women without the trope of humor to alleviate those tensions. Thus, while Fraiman suggests that Burney bears a young, innocent confusion

Butts 8 with her sex, another conclusion may be that Burney is intentionally breaking apart feminine codes by ravaging their delicacy. Essentially, Burney makes a commentary on the role of women in society by writing from a masculine perspective, that is, intentionally an anti-feminine one, and breaks outside of the prescribed roles for herself as a writer. While Mirvan’s laughter in the novel is from his stance of superiority, Evelina’s is certainly a result of anxiety. According to at least one critic, Susan Staves, it seems as though “Evelina’s predominant emotion seems to me to be an acute anxiety which is painful, real, and powerful” (368). Indeed, Evelina’s social anxieties as a woman reflect the anxieties that Burney must have felt as a women penning women—and writing to men. While Evelina’s anxieties lead to social fears, Burney’s seem to lead to social attacks. Staves furthers her point by stating that, “Delicacy is in part like virginity” (373). In Evelina, and in Gothic works, the subversive attacks by men upon women are in part an attack upon their “delicacies”—and the reason that unmarried women in particular are attacked is due to the social tensions that arise when the women are inaccessible to men sexually. Hence, old women, young unmarried women, and servants in particular become the victims of such attacks. Interestingly, there is a similar ravaging of women in The Monk, as our Gothic example for comparison, when Don Raymond captures a servant Dame Cunegonda, ties her and gags her. In addition, Theodore, Don Raymond’s servant, had experienced frustrations with Dame Cunegonda, so the novel reads, “Cunegonda’s captivity entertained him beyond measure. During his abode in the Castle, a continual warfare had been carried on between him and the Duenna; and

Butts 9 now that he found his Enemy so absolutely in his power, He triumphed without mercy. He seemed to think of nothing but how to find out new means of plaguing her: Sometimes He affected to pity her misfortune, then laughed at, abused and mimicked her; He played her a thousand tricks, each more provoking than the other.” (152) The treatment of Cunegonda, an unmarried servant, so closely parallels the treatment that Mirvan bestows upon the unmarried old Madame Duval that it seems evident that violent, but laughable spectacle lies near the themes of these two very different novels. The moments of spectacle within both novels are carefully constructed portrayals of melodrama—these melodramatic moments create sexualized tensions that lend themselves to humor as relief. In The Monk, the novel begins with a humorous depiction of the church and its parishioners. The narrator relates, “The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women” (7). This comic play with gender appears on the first page of the novel, introducing the ridicule of women as objects in the novel. In this line, the men are voyeurs, looking upon the women as objects to either be possessed or attacked for their resistance to possession. Later in the first chapter of The Monk riddled with comic lines, the narrator again is the source of a derogatory rejection of women’s place as having any authority. Leonella, who is Antonia’s nurse in the novel, is old and above marrying age. The two “Gallants,” Don Christoval and Lorenzo, have flirted with Antonia and her nurse at the church service. Lorenzo is intently interested in the young and beautiful Antonia, so Don Christoval pretends to woo the old and unappealing Leonella. Later, Leonella is glorying

Butts 10 in Don Christoval’s having kissed her hand, although the novel notes “that Lorenzo with difficulty repressed his inclination to laugh” (23). Leonella asks of Antonia, “did you observe the air of passion with which He kissed it?” (34). However, Christoval had not kissed her hand out of love as Leonella presumes, and Antonia, by the narrator’s observance, “drew conclusions from it somewhat different from her Aunt’s” and “was wise enough to hold her tongue” (34). The humor of Leonella’s “ugly woman” position continues throughout the novel. Here, again, women are chastised if they are not potential wives or bedfellows. The narrator follows the previous scene with still another derogatory joke on women’s capabilities. He jokingly commemorates the moment, noting that because Antonia was wise enough to hold her tongue, he teases, “As this is the only instance known of a Woman’s ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here” (34). Here, the narrator maligns the delicacy of women through an act of delicacy enacted by Antonia. Even though she remains silent here, the narrator jibes women for their lack of quietude, mingling the masculine desire for innocence and the desire for sexual empowerment over women. Since women were evidently expected to hold their tongues, Burney seems almost impressively bold in a frankness that predates Antonia’s silence. Gina Campbell explores Burney’s tenacity and boldness in the midst of this period of women’s quietude, offering, “Since eighteenth-century notions of modesty required women to be reticent or even silent, for a woman to publish was to define herself as immodest” (433). Doody explores a scene where Mirvan tells Madame Duval, “hark you, Mrs. Frog, you’d best hold your tongue…if you don’t… I shall make no ceremony of tripping you out of the window”

Butts 11 (43). Doody comments, “Mirvan regards physical assault on a woman under the guise of jest as a sublime source of social pleasure. He wants to add injury to insult—literal injury” (52). The connection, then, seems apparent to the silenced Antonia of Lewis’s Gothic, and the physical attacks of Evelina—both done out of comedy, but influenced by the ideology of the sublime. Interestingly, while the humor of the novel in its violence is intensely masculine, the moment that Evelina laughs in public, she is also made the victim in the verbal play during a conversation between Lord Orville and Mr. Lovel. The text reads, “no sooner did Lovel begin his complaint, than she was seized with a fit of laughing, first affronting the poor beau, and then enjoying his mortification” (29). To which Lovel responds gaily, “Ha! ha! ha! why there’s some genius in that, my Lord, though perhaps rather—rustick” (29). Here at the one moment when a women is allowed to laugh at a man, she is derided for it, and jokingly called a rustic. In yet another similar moment of fun had at the expense of Leonella in The Monk, a gypsy tells her fortune and chides her character, much in the same way that the men of Evelina chide Madame Duval’s character. The gypsy says of Leonella, “You are now so old,/ Good Dame, that 'tis already told:/ Yet for your money, in a trice/ I will repay you in advice./ Astonished at your childish vanity,/ Your Friends all tax you with insanity,/ And grieve to see you use your art/ To catch some youthful Lover's heart.” (37). She continues by undermining her age, beauty, and lack of morality. After the gypsy’s humorous warning for Leonella, “The audience rang with laughter during the Gypsy's address; and--'fifty one,'--'squinting eyes,' 'red hair,' --'paint and patches,' &c. were bandied from mouth to mouth.” (37) Indeed, the old Leonella, unwed and lascivious becomes the dupe of many of the novel’s attacks. Certainly the earlier, but more subtle

Butts 12 attacks on women in Burney’s novel set the precedent for these later attacks in Gothic texts. Later in the novel, when Ambrosio is attempting to gain access to Antonia’s cell to rape her, he is forced to listen to a ridiculous story presented by Jacintha, Antonia’s waiting maid. Jacintha melodramatically claims that Antonia’s mother Elvira as a ghost says things such as, “Oh! That Chicken’s wing! My poor soul suffers for it!” (324). Here Jacintha is not violently made to be the object of humor, though she is meant to be seen in a derogatory light, since she is made to be seen as ignorant and ridiculous. She too is somewhat unmarriable and, again, it is because of this fact that she becomes the object of humor in yet another novel that deals with the tensions in the domestic realm. Jacintha was to have wed a young man named Melchior Basco, but now she says, “I am a lone woman, and meet with nothing but crosses and misfortunes!” (326). Evidently, for these 18th century novelists, unmarried women face trials, which from the stance of superiority theory, can become comedic to the audience, even if the audience is an unmarried woman. Yet another comedic attack occurs upon unmarriable women in Evelina in the scene where Mr. Coverly and Lord Merton settle a gambling dispute “by a race between two old women” (243). The race is certainly a pitiable spectacle and brings in physical violence and humor to a culmination. Evelina relates the spectacle, writing, “the scene was truly ridiculous; the agitation of the parties concerned, and the bets that were laid upon the old women were absurd beyond measure” (257). The duplicity of the two gambling men, Coverly and Merton, does indeed lead to physical harm for the old women for their own entertainment, invoking that sublimity of terror and male

Butts 13 empowerment that runs throughout these texts rife with gender tensions. The ridiculous scene is comical, but satirical as well, for the women are injured. The text plainly describes the vulnerability of the women: “the poor creatures, feeble and frightened, ran against each other, and neither of them able to support the shock, they both fell on the ground” (257). The humor, then, in Evelina points to the visceral quality of women at the power of brutal men, and one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to turn away in disgust at the grotesqueness of the scenes. The same is true of the attacks in Gothic scenes where spectacle overwhelms the audience with a feeling of the sublime, which is that masculine empowerment. Male violence in Burney’s comedy is not, however, limited to women alone. At the end of volume three, the treatment of the fop, Mr. Lovel, mirrors Captain Mirvan’s treatment of Madame Duval. Interestingly, the foppishness of Mr. Lovel makes him a male victim, yet also essentially effeminate. Of note is that Burney’s father, Dr. Burney, expressed distaste for this particular scene. He wrote in reaction to his daughter’s new novel, “I have been excessively pleased with it; there are, perhaps, a few things that might have been otherwise,--Mirvan’s trick upon Lovel is, I think, carried too far, there is something even disgusting in it” (353). Although, Burney’s father seems to have no scruples about Mirvan’s other comedic attacks. Thus, even the trifles of the novel relate to larger social issues, which would later sprawl into the Gothic genre and can be made sources of great humor and great spectacle. Contrary to Burney’s taste in humor, the exquisitely feminine Evelina is largely silent regarding the humorous aspects of the novel, though she becomes the source of some laughter in her early misunderstandings of the rules governing social manners, or

Butts 14 when she is picked up by a pair of prostitutes. Similarly, Lord Orville, heroic and humane, is the quieting source of gravity in the novel. He quiets the room in their democratic moment of trying to find a means for Lord Merton and Mr. Coverly to settle their quarrel, and quietly suggests that Captain Mirvan remove his monkey at the end of the novel. Mirvan uniquely then becomes a tool for Burney to introduce coarse, masculine joking in the novel, in spite of his lack of appeal. Evelina says of him at her first introduction, “Captain Mirvan is arrived. I have not spirits to give an account of his introduction, for he has really shocked me. I do not like him. He seems to be surly, vulgar, and disagreeable” (31). Mirvan’s vulgarity aligns him with the villainous men of the Gothic, though he is more lighthearted during a time when the terror of the sublime had yet to overwhelm the subject of the novel’s form. Yet Mirvan does not take all of the credit for the humor of this novel. Yet another character who adds to the novel’s wit is Mrs. Selwyn, whose quick repartee with the men certainly presents a stronger feminist stance than usually seem to appear in the 18th century. Indeed, Mrs. Selwyn’s quips offer further lightness and comedy to the text with great one-liners like, “don’t be angry with the gentleman for thinking, whatever be the cause, for I assure you he makes no common practice of offending in that way” (326). Here the woman finally gets her jab in at the men, allowing Selwyn to hold a unique role in these complicated social tensions. Nevertheless, Mrs. Selwyn’s character is not wholly feminine, for according to Evelina’s description of her, “She is extremely clever; her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine; but unfortunately her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying to acquire the knowledge of the other sex, she has lost all the softness of her own” (224). Hence, we see the same indelicacy here portrayed in

Butts 15 a female character, allowing Burney to further push against the expectations of the 18th century’s socialized gender roles. Even the one woman who responds to the men’s comedic attacks becomes a part of the search for male power in the novel. Selwyn is single and vulnerable to attack, yet uses male tactics—wit and ridicule—instead of female modesties to respond to male attacks. Ridicule, indeed, seems an appropriate medium for 18th century comedy, a time when all social attention was paid to proper manners in each situation. The very acceptance of the masculine violence of the 18th century by this novel upturns the genteel reader’s expectations and shows how dangerous Burney was in her understanding of her times. If indeed the text is following the pattern of the Comedy of Manners, then her subversion of 18th century characters in their socially assigned roles certainly follows the tradition of “inappropriate” humor. Indeed, the tensions of this violent comedy work well for the 18th century novel with all of its socialized informing because the 18th century individual was so concerned with appropriateness, or manners—male and female alike. For a novel bearing such serious issues as Evelina’s birth and fate, it certainly paints a blithe portrait of 18th century customs and social interactions. The novel ends with an impressively sustained repartee among most of the cast as a lighthearted dénouement. Evidently then, Burney seems to have, what Doody, and probably Fraiman, would at least call a masculine sense of humor, but let us think of it as a revolutionary feminine one. Like Mirvan, Burney’s humor carries its own duplicitous purpose. Burney is not attacking women—she is attacking the delicacies that have been imposed upon them by 18th century mores. Meanwhile, Lewis presents women as objects of attack, particularly when they are unavailable for marriage. His commentary on the rise of

Butts 16 domestic situations seem to reinforce the anxieties that Burney is presenting, although Lewis makes no excuses for using women violently and mockingly to show his point. As to where these connections take these texts, and took Burney herself, more work needs to be done. Burney’s works have only begun to be uncovered once again by scholars such as Doody, Campbell, and Staves. Still, she certainly was influenced by and influenced the Gothic—even if she did not influence Monk Lewis himself, she certainly allowed her early Gothic interests to shade her later works, and spoke at an early stage to a form that would arise after the publication of her first successful work.

Butts 17 Works Cited Burney, Frances. Evelina. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1998. Campbell, Gina. “How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney’s Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina.” Evelina. Ed. Stewart J. Cooke. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1998. 431-453. Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1988. Fraiman, Susan. “Getting Waylaid in Evelina.” Evelina. Ed. Stewart J. Cooke. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1998. 454-471. Glock, Waldo S. “Evelina: The Paradox of the “Open Path.’” The South Central Bulletin 39.4 (Winter 1979): 129-134. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mellor, Anne K. “Domesticating the Sublime.” Romanticism and Gender. London: Routledge, 1993. 85-106. Staves, Susan. “Evelina: or, Female Difficulties.” Modern Philology 73.1 (May 1976): 368-381. Walpole, Henry. The Castle of Otranto. London: Grey Walls Press Limited, 1950.