deconstructing appearances

Deconstructing AppearancesIn Frances Burney’s Evelina

By Hugo Blumenthal

‘The fundamental signified, the meaning of the being represented, even less the thing itself, will never be given us in person, outside the sign or outside play.’ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

‘[…] I have not pretended to show the world what it actually is, but what it appears to a girl of seventeen […]’, Frances Burney once wrote about her novel Evelina.1 And through the novel, ‘appearances’ certainly play an important role: Evelina’s ‘entrance into the world’ signals, basically, her ‘appearing’ in/to ‘the world’ (of society), and not only is Evelina quite aware of appearances –as she often writes in her letters how things ‘appear’ or ‘seem’ to her–, but she tries hard to guard herself against their powers of deception.2

Curiously enough, although much has been written on Evelina, especially since the publication of two new editions of the novel, very little critical attention –if any– has been given to the topic of appearances.3 This is the case even though in 1979 Waldo S. Glock pointed out the importance and the necessity of investigating the ‘theme’ of appearances in Evelina.4 Certainly, it could be argued that the topic has been touched on –obliquely or implicitly, but almost necessarily– under other headings, as most critics seem necessarily forced to take Evelina for what she appears to be, for what she apparently represents.5 But, compared to other topics, the function of appearances in Evelina still remains far from having been properly discussed.

One of the possible reasons for such critical dismissal is that the issues raised by this

Hugo Blumenthal © 2007

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1 As quoted by Julia Epstein, ‘Evelina’s Deceptions: The Letter and the Spirit’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Fanny Burney’s Evelina, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), pp. 111-129 (p. 128).

2 Through this essay, I maintain what Jacques Derrida called ‘the historical ambiguity of the word appearance’, meaning ‘at once the appearing or apparition of the being-present and the masking of the being-present behind its appearance.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 187-315 (p. 221).

3 Edward A. Bloom’s edition of Burney’s Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press) was originally printed as a World’s Classics in 1982. Margaret Anne Doody’s edition (London: Penguin) was originally published in 1994. According to Joseph Grau, Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1981), before 1981 there were not many significant analyses focused on Evelina.

4 Quoting Eugene White, Glock reminds us that ‘[…] Burney is concerned with the most important theme of literature, that of the contrast between appearance and reality […]’ Waldo S. Glock, ‘“Evelina”: The Paradox of the “Open Path”’, The South Central Bulletin, 39, 4 (1979), 129-134 (p. 130). But, despite providing an insightful and well-developed analysis of Evelina, Glock’s essay seems to have passed unnoticed. None of the major bibliographical essays on Frances Burney and Evelina mentions it. See, for example, Julia Epstein, ‘Burney Criticism: Family Romance, Psychobiography, and Social History’, and Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Beyond Evelina: The Individual Novel and the Community of Literature’, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 3, 4 (1991), 277-282, 359-371.

5 That is, at least within what could be called representational analyses, based on the mimetic, that pretend to take a text as an object (as it appears). Such ‘necessity’ is, however, not completely unavoidable. On anti-representational forms of ‘criticism’, see, for example, Herman Rapaport, ‘Deconstruction’s Other’, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1-24.

highly charged word might not seem relevant anymore, as if mimesis and representation had subsumed the specific problematic of appearances.6 Indeed, in the last thirty years there seem to have been more urgent issues demanding the critics’ attention. If we take into consideration the predominant critical theories surrounding the re-discovery of Frances Burney’s work, it is not surprising that the topic of appearances has not been given much thought, since its implications hardly seem to fit into what these theories generally try to prove. In the case of feminism (of certain feminisms), it is not surprising that the criticism on Evelina has been mainly limited to certain issues concerning women, such as the marginalization of women, guilt and fear regarding female self-expression, the name of the father, the marriage market, etc.7 In that sense, the dismissal of the topic of appearances seems not so much because of its inherent irrelevance, but a limitation imposed by some critical theories.

And since the ‘question of appearances’ still seems today to be eminently philosophical, what critical theory could take on the task?8 The answer, somehow, seems obvious. Although refusing to be taken as a critical theory, only ‘deconstruction’ –as a label for a questioning of what appears to be an immutable given– seems to open the possibility of exploring the question of appearances in Evelina.9 In other words, today, the question(ing) of appearances seems –almost, only– possible through ‘deconstruction’.10


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6 But, still, to my knowledge, questions of mimesis and representation in relation to Evelina have been dealt with only in passing, as they relate to other questions. In terms of philosophy, only empiricism seems to have maintained an interest in the question of appearances. Cf. W. E. Kennick, ‘Appearance and Reality’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 135-138, and Thomas Nickles, ‘Empiricism’, in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. by Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), pp. 664-669. However, some of the theoretical limitations of empiricism regarding mimesis and representation are well known, especially after Auerbach’s Mimesis. See, for example, David Carroll, ‘Mimesis Reconsidered: Literature • History • Ideology’, Diacritics, 5, 2 (1975), 5-12.

7 That is, despite the fact that others, such as Jacques Derrida, have shown that the figure of ‘woman’ also relates to questions of mimesis and interpretation. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles / Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche, trans. by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979). But, certainly, Derrida is not officially recognized as a feminist, even if –to some like me– he certainly was.

8 In what follows, I prefer to speak of a question (or questions) of appearances, to refer to ‘appearances’ as a subject or topic, but also to the posing of a question, the interrogation of appearances, and what appearances put into question. This ‘question of appearances’ relates, obviously, to what Jean-Luc Nancy designates as ‘a question of ‘form’ and ‘fundament’ [forme et fond] –a problem perhaps too easily imagined as ‘solved’ or ‘outdated.’’ (As Nancy’s translator points out, since ‘none of the common English expressions –‘form and matter,’ ‘form and ground,’ ‘form and content’ are perfectly able to render the opposition of forme et fond,’ ‘fundament’ is ‘used to designate the stubborn belief in an underlying element that functions as repository of essential realities, divorced from merely accidental forms.’) Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. by Brian Holmes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 212, 414, n2.

9 Given the particular impossibility of defining ‘deconstruction,’ I have decided to follow Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), and use the word –since it seems we cannot avoid a certain generalization here – only within inverted commas, to signal that somehow we cannot know what ‘it’ is. On the difficulties of defining ‘deconstruction,’ cf. Nicholas Royle, ‘What is Deconstruction?’, in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 1-30, and Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, trans. by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Harvester, 1991), pp. 270-276.

10 For today’s relevance of such questions of appearances and their relationship to ‘deconstruction’, cf. Adieu Derrida, ed. by Costas Douzinas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Without being a pre-defined, unifying topic, questions of appearances ‘appear’ –unexpectedly, recurrently– in many of those lectures, originally held at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2005. To mention some examples: Alain Badiou focuses his homage to Jacques Derrida on the question of ‘existence’ as ‘the appearance of a being in a world’ (p. 37), Jacques Ranciere shows how ‘democracy is approached through the filter of the opposition between appearance and reality’ (p. 94), and Slavoj Zizek remind us that ‘the fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but of appearance’ (p. 118). That such questions are raised by such different intellectual figures (many of which do not even consider themselves ‘deconstructionists’), in a posthumous homage to Jacques Derrida, shows ‘deconstruction’ as a propitious ‘place’ to re-think questions of appearances.

Certainly, however, one could also ask why ‘deconstruction’ has not taken up the task yet, despite all the resistances (or precisely because of them, if they are taken as provocations). After all, can ‘deconstruction’ be resisted? Can a text like Evelina be protected against ‘deconstruction’? I can only say that, even if one could find a certain logic in the range of themes and texts with which ‘deconstructive critics’ have been engaged until now,11 there does not seem to be any cause preventing a deconstruction of the ideology surrounding appearances in Evelina. In fact, given the growing critical interest on Evelina, ‘deconstruction’ seems to be practically waiting to happen, even if –as I will attempt to show– what is deconstructible in Evelina deconstructs itself, has already started deconstructing itself, from the very beginning. But if I like to think of my work here as an attempt at ‘applied deconstruction,’12 it is not so much because I have chosen to stay within certain ‘deconstructive’ limits –paradoxically following a methodology that according to ‘deconstruction’ does not exist–, but because I have tried to be truthful to the spirit –or as Derrida may have preferred, the ghost– of ‘deconstruction’. That involves, among other things, a responsibility of truthfulness towards the names of Jacques Derrida, Frances Burney, and –not less importantly– ‘Evelina’.

In what follows, I will start by exploring Evelina’s two main strategies of dealing with (or protecting herself against) deceptive appearances: first, her assumed innocence; and secondly, her desire for an experience of the world that would allow her to distinguish between deceptive and non -deceptive appearances. I will argue that both strategies, which are commonly regarded as in opposition to each other, are –in fact– complementary, in complicity with a logocentric desire for full presence, for a presence not contaminated by the ambiguity of appearances. And I will show how both strategies to escape appearances are inevitably condemned to a certain failure, as there is no escape from the deceptive possibilities of appearances.

In the second chapter, I will explore Evelina’s physical appearance as a sign, as signs and appearances are considered to conceal or restrict access to what they re-present. I will argue that Evelina’s physiological appearance functions as a signifier, that makes possible Evelina’s eventual recognition as a proper woman. Evelina’s name is considered, also, as a sign or appearance where she comes into social existence. I will argue that Lord Belmont’s name seems to be the only thing that can certify that she is a real lady –not just someone that looks like one. I will contend, however, that her resemblance to her mother, on which her father bases his granting to her of his name, is far from being a conclusive guarantee of truth. In that sense, I will demonstrate how appearances are never conclusive, and are always to be interpreted in a different ways, depending –for example – on the context.

The third chapter will focus on appearances as representatives. I will argue that every appearance could be said to contain an essential difference from what it apparently makes


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11 By ‘deconstructive critics’ I mean all those critics for whom –to paraphrase Judith Butler– it has become practically impossible to write and think without relying on names (that is, thinking with and through them) like those of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Cf, Judith Butler, ‘Jacques Derrida’, London Review of Books, 4th November 2004, p. 32.

12 According to Derrida, in a certain sense there is only ‘applied deconstruction’, ‘deconstruction’ does not exist opposed to its ‘application’, since ‘deconstruction doesn’t consist in a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods’ that could be applied onto something, but –at the same time– ‘the only thing that it can do is apply, to be applied, to something else […]’. ‘As if I were Dead: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Applying: to Derrida, ed. by John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 212-226 (pp. 217-218).

‘appear’. Such a difference resists the complete realisation of the representative enterprise for which appearances are necessarily authorized. Writing will be considered as a form of producing appearances. Letters, novels, even signatures, will be considered as different types of appearances, where not only the writing or signing subject cannot but conceal (or distance) itself as an ‘other’, but also through which a certain re-presentation of that same subject is possible.

CHAPTER 1AN INNOCENT WOMAN’S ENTRANCE INTO THE DECEITFUL WORLD

‘[...] I cannot but lament to find myself in a world so deceitful, where we must suspect what we see, distrust what we hear, and doubt even what we feel!’ writes Evelina.13 Her letter, however, does not provide enough information to determine the scope of meaning intended by the word ‘world.’ Taking into consideration the fact that Evelina seems to allow herself to be carried away by temporary ‘passions,’ and seems very little given to ‘metaphysical’ speculations (her generalisations are usually too bound to ‘the moment’), it is probable that by ‘world’ she intends her immediate surroundings, the society of her time. The desperation underlying her words is still far from being a complete pessimism or nihilism. Though distressed because of the condition of the society she finds herself in, Evelina still seems to believe that somewhere might still exist a world not ‘so deceitful,’ or not deceitful at all, where nobody could be deceived, a world like that of her paradisial life with Rev. Mr. Villars.

In contrast to Evelina’s desolate utterance, Villars’ warning –endorsed as sure knowledge from experience– that ‘this is not an age in which we may trust to appearances’ (p. 309) seems more restricted to the present condition of a ‘here and now’. However, it still raises the question of whether there could be ‘a world’ where people could trust appearances: a time and place where appearances reflect without distortion what supposedly lies behind or under them, where appearances were (or will be) transparent or, even better, nonexistent.

Throughout the novel, Villars and Evelina seem to reinforce the same advice: do not trust appearances.14 The lesson, however, was not new for eighteenth-century readers. It was a commonplace in a long tradition of moral discourses, going back to Plato, and present (though, arguably, not so explicitly) in many previous works of fiction, such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Clarissa, Tom Jones, etc. Therefore, instead of the disclosure or revelation of a ‘new’ truth, the lesson could not have had more than the function of reinforcement. But, could it be possible not to trust appearances, to completely avoid them, keep them at a distance, escape from their influence? Can Evelina and Villars stick to their determination not to trust appearances? Can they be taken as triumphant examples of that resolve?


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13 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. by Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 259. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from this edition. Page numbers will be inserted parenthetically into the text.

14 That is, not just deceptive appearances, since –as we would see– they are practically impossible to differentiate from true ones. Evelina’s desire to avoid appearances is obviously impossible, but not the less is it a desire.

In the preface to the novel, Frances Burney emphasises that Evelina was the ‘offspring of Nature […] in her simplest attire’ (p. 8), and that having been ‘educated in the most secluded retirement,’ Evelina was ignorant of ‘the forms’, and inexperienced in ‘the manners’, of the world (p. 7).15 With those declarations, Burney clearly seems to situate Evelina within what Jacques Derrida has defined as the ‘Age of Rousseau’: the eighteenth-century ideology that considered ‘innocence’ and ‘Nature’ as what is original, transparent, and pure, in clear opposition to what was then considered as ‘experience’, culture, society, what is created by man, what is complex and –to a certain extent– inevitably false.16 Coming from the intimate and protected world of a rural childhood, it is not difficult to understand Evelina’s shock at having to confront the ‘external’ world of society in London, a place –Villars tells her– that is ‘[…] the general harbour of fraud and folly, of duplicity and of impertinence […]’ (p. 116). In this confrontation with a world of deceptive appearances, Evelina then realises that many things she took for granted –such as her identity, virtue, and innocence– have become threatened by a possibility of loss.

It is not surprising, then, that, after rereading ‘Orville’s’ ‘improper’ reply to one of her letters, Evelina declares:

Never, never again will I trust appearances, –never confide in my own weak judgement, –never believe that person to be good, who seems to be amiable! What cruel maxims are we taught by a knowledge of the world! (p. 256)

In a sense, it is quite clear that Evelina would like to avoid the possibility of being deceived again by Orville, who until then appeared to her as ‘a model of perfection’ (p. 256). But, more importantly, this proclamation of intention (‘never again will I…’) also signals a desire for a world where deception would not be possible, where people could have direct access to others people’s feelings, thoughts, intentions, etc., without the mediation of appearances, which can always be deceptive. In other words, when Evelina declares things like ‘I have an aversion the most sincere to all mysteries, all private actions’ (p. 259), what she is doing is expressing a desire for a world where everything would be exposed, in the open.17

But, what if Evelina is not so innocent as she looks, or as we are told she is? According to Julia Epstein, in Evelina’s first letters to Villars, ‘her manipulations in [her apologetic gestures of request for permissions] and in her effort to appear helplessly dependent upon her guardian’s judgement […] are hidden surely just to Villars.’18 We must also remember, Evelina’s first ‘appearance’ in society, at the ball, where she gives the false appearance of


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15 Evelina’s ‘innocence’ is also constantly reinforced through the novel. To Villars, for example, Evelina ‘is quite a little rustic, and knows nothing of the world […]’ (p. 19).

16 Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction to the “Age of Rousseau”’, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 97-100.

17 The desire for transparency seems to have been very popular in the Eighteenth Century, repeatedly manifested as a desire to be able to see (as with a Momus glass) another’s heart. See, for example, Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 59-61.

18 Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), p. 103.

already being engaged for the night, to avoid having to dance with a man she does not like.19 If we keep in mind that, on occasions like these, Evelina uses false appearances to manipulate others and accomplish her desires, her position against deceptive appearances becomes quite problematical, almost paradoxical.

The paradox is even more evident if we consider that Evelina’s principal aim through the novel seems to be to gain experience whilst maintaining innocence.20 After all, for Evelina to learn how to follow the forms and manners of society, she would have to start by imitating the model of the proper lady; and, as Derrida would put the question, ‘with imitation, is it not duplicity that insinuates itself within presence?’21 If innocence is a pure presence,22 and appearances are the ‘outside’ where self-presence loses itself, disperses itself, how could innocence desire its own corruption, the division of its plenitude?

The paradox, however, is only apparent. Experience and innocence are not irreconcilable but complementary, in complicity with a certain ‘phallogocentrism,’ within the current patriarchal system. By sustaining the illusion that the subject would be able to distinguish clearly between appearances, grasping the truthful essences behind appearances, experience, after all, is just another form of a desire for a pure, uncontaminated plenitude of the self-same (which, as innocence, is often related to ‘Nature’).23 In that sense, experience, as well as innocence, stands for a desire for full presence.

The paradox, if there is one, lies, rather, in relation to the question of appearances. They are the ones that disturb those aspirations for full presence. They are the ones that make innocence and experience paradoxical, impossible. It is because of appearances that neither an ‘innocent’ Evelina nor an ‘experienced’ Villars can be God, escape deception. That is, neither can Evelina be purely innocent, self-present to herself, uncorrupted by any outside, nor Villars escape Evelina’s deceptive appearance of innocence. (In fact, not even Orville can escape the ‘corruptible’ influence of appearances.24 Certainly, as a man, he is not forced to act out innocence. And his cultural and aristocratic birthright makes it easier for him not to have recourse to ‘false appearances.’ But, still, by misinterpreting appearances, he not only misjudges Evelina several times, but is also often misjudged, as when –because of ‘his’


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19 But since, not already engaged, the decision not to dance with a man who proposes himself was practically ruled out by social conventions, Evelina’s lies (her false appearances of being engaged) are what actually allows her to maintain an space for herself, to create –according to Irene Tucker– ‘[…] the possibility of an autonomy that otherwise would not exist.’ Irene Tucker, ‘Writing Home: Evelina, the Epistolary Novel, and the Paradox of Property’, English Literary History, 60, 2 (1993), 419-439 (p. 430).

20 That, however, was not a paradox exclusive to Evelina, since in the Eighteenth Century society obliged women to act out innocence. Cf. Epstein, The Iron Pen, p. 112. The question, then, for a woman like Evelina, was how to maintain a distance or to create a gap between a social demand for the appearance of innocence and innocence itself.

21 Of Grammatology, p. 205. It is also important to remember that for Derrida ‘the pleasure [jouissance] of self-presence, pure auto-affection, uncorrupted by any outside, is accorded [only] to God [...]’, as a pure, ideal presence. Of Grammatology, p. 250.

22 As Niall Lucy points out, quoting Derrida, ‘within metaphysics, every origin is thought in terms of ‘presence without difference’ –an ideal moment of pure, unmediated ‘firstness’, as it were.’ Niall Lucy, Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 87.

23 According to Jacques Derrida, ‘experience is always the relationship with a plenitude, whether it be sensory simplicity or the infinity presence of God.’ Of Grammatology, p. 283.

24 For Waldo S. Glock, however, ‘no disparity between act and will, between word and thought, distorts the glowing brilliance of [Orville’s] ever-thoughtful outward presence.’ ‘Orville’s “mask” is a truthful reflection of his mind and character.’ ‘“Evelina”: The Paradox of the “Open Path”’, The South Central Bulletin, 39, 4 (1979), 129-134 (pp. 130, 132). It goes without saying that here we are not interested in determining if Orville’s appearances correspond to his true self, but in the effects of appearances.

improper letter– Evelina thinks that his intentions towards her are not honourable).25

Therefore, Evelina’s ‘innocence’ consists of or depends mainly on a wish –her wish, and the wish of others like Villars– for innocence, the belief in the possibility of a pure innocent self and world, uncontaminated by deceptive appearances. In that sense, even if it could be argued that is mainly Villars, among others, who would like to preserve or maintain the illusion of Evelina’s ‘innocence’, it is no less true that Evelina first –as Joanne Cutting-Gray has pointed out– ‘[...] relinquishes experience for the sake of concealing herself in innocence.’26 Clearly, however, Evelina’s acting out innocence does not make her fit for the world of society, as she soon discovers through many embarrassing experiences.

But what Evelina seems to dread the most is not losing her innocence. She is not as concerned about her ‘virtue’ as are many other heroines of the eighteenth-century novel. What she dreads is the dispersion of her self, losing control over her self-image. Such dispersion is what makes her imagine herself a victim of appearances: ‘[…] how strangely, how cruelly have all appearances turned against me!’ (p. 237), she repeatedly exclaims, as if in an attempt to re-appropriate ‘her own self’ in the role of victim.

However, there does not seem to be much else Evelina can do to stop the undesired effects of appearances, no matter how conscious she is of ‘the strange appearance of [her] conduct’ (p. 341). Within the limits of ‘decorum’ (without openly declaring her desires), and without undermining her own autonomy (by openly justifying each of her actions), there does not seem to be much she can do to avoid her appearances being misinterpreted. But when she thinks she ‘can’, she refuses the role of passive victim –for example, when her cousin uses her name –without even her knowledge– to gain access to Orville (for commercial purposes), from which she fears to have ‘irretrievably’ lost ‘the good opinion of Lord Orville’ (p. 248).27 On that occasion she writes a letter to Orville, to clear her name, her reputation, forgetting for a moment that sending a letter to a man (especially if both are single) is seen as inappropriate (in the impulse of the act, she does not have time to retrieve her letter).

But, if others (such as Orville) sometimes fail to interpret adequately Evelina’s appearances, it could also be argued that Evelina’s failure to ‘disentangle true appearances from false’ is what, most of the time, puts her in a dangerous position.28 In Marybone Gardens, for example, she takes for ladies a couple of prostitutes, ‘deceived’ by their appearances as ladies (cf. p. 233). That is, Evelina fails to identify the prostitutes’ profession, even if most people with a bit of experience would have had not much trouble recognising what the prostitutes really were. After all, though the prostitutes mimic ladies, nonetheless they have to advertise themselves –at the same time– as ‘improper’ ladies –or they would be


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25 It also must be noted that it is because of appearances that Orville get his honesty reinstated, when Evelina sees him again and falls back –despite her previous resolution not to– under the power of the appearance of his full presence: ‘[...] had you, like me, seen his respectful behaviour, you would have been convinced [...]’ (p. 283), she tells Villars. Clearly, Evelina can only have access to an appearance of Orville’s full presence. But his closer ‘presence’, the fact that she can see him, existing in front of her, seems to weight against the false appearances constructed in his absence, through writing, by his supposed letter.

26 Joanne Cutting-Gray, ‘Writing Innocence: Fanny Burney’s Evelina’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 9 (1990), 43-57 (p. 44).

27 Here we must point out that ‘name’ and ‘good opinion’ stand for the form of appearances, Evelina’s concession to the importance of ‘keeping up appearances.’

28 Curiously enough, as Glock points out, Evelina criticises her grandmother for not being able to see through appearances (as in the episode of the assault to her grandmother’s carriage), when it is Evelina herself who ‘[…] often fails to disentangle true appearances from false, and even falls victim to the most obvious abuses of self-deception.’ Glock, p. 131.

out of work. But Evelina’s failure to ‘read’ the conventional meaning of certain appearances leaves her open to become a victim of appearances. Because of the context in which he finds Evelina, Orville is then brought to contemplate the possibility that the prostitutes could be real acquaintances of hers (cf. pp. 234, 240).

The differentiation between truthful and false appearances is, therefore, clearly at the root of the problem. The difficulty comes in the fact that reality is made of ambivalent appearances, some better than others, less deceptive than others. Under such ambivalence, it is not very clear if it is difficult to distinguish between appearances because it is not possible to be sure about the truth of any of them, or if it is difficult to be certain about the truth of a particular appearance because it is difficult to distinguish between them. In other words, is it difficult to distinguish an appearance A from an appearance B because it is difficult to determine the truth of A or B? Or is it because A is indistinguishable from B (where B could be false) that it is difficult to determine the degree of truth of A? Or does it work both ways?

In the case of Sir Clement Willoughby, Evelina says that he is ‘far more dangerous, because more artful,’ because ‘[...] though he seeks occasions to give real offence, [he] contrives to avoid all appearance of intentional evil’ (p. 115). If we put aside for a moment the most blatant paradox of this remark (if Willoughby manages to avoid all appearance of intentional evil, how could she know that he actually seeks to give real offence?), we have an example of the previous paradoxes: is Willoughby not easily distinguishable from somebody else because he manages to avoid all appearance of evil? Or is Evelina not completely sure about his ‘intentional evil’ because he resembles innocence? In logical terms, Evelina could not have been sure about Willoughby, she could not really know but only guess his ‘true’ nature; unless Willoughby has not managed to avoid all appearances of evil as thoroughly as she claims.

Evelina, then, cannot be sure about Willoughby because she cannot distinguish between artful and artlessness ‘appearances’ in him (even if, to a certain degree, all appearances are ‘artful’). Evelina tries to read Willoughby, interpreting the signs she perceives in him, but, unsure about the conclusiveness of their significance, she feels threatened by the possibility of their doubleness, the possibility that those signs could mean something completely different, opposite to what she thought.

The result, therefore, is almost the same: Willoughby is ‘far more dangerous’ because of the difficulty of determining or establishing his real intentions, because of the difficulty in establishing the possibility of his ‘dangerousness.’ After all, the word ‘more’ implies that all the others, like everybody else, are not completely free from the same charge, but that it is a question of degree. It is as if the difficulty inherent to all appearances of resisting a definitive establishment of their truth would leave no other option but a continual necessity for making judgements. ‘Experience’ obviously helps, making the reading of appearances easier; but, as with any act of reading, no interpretation can guarantee an unquestioned relation to the ‘Truth’ of something (supposing there is a unique truth behind appearances). But, for the so-called ‘innocents’, such a never-ending process of judgement could seem excessive, unbearable. Under such circumstances, we could then understand Evelina’s wish for the possibility of not having to decide, of avoiding all interpretation or judgement of appearances, deciding beforehand that all appearances are more likely false than truthful, and withdrawing the possibility of trusting them, in the fear of being deceived.

Therefore, part of Evelina’s ‘innocence’ –if we insist upon the term– is not so much a lack


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of experience at distinguishing between truthful and false appearances (after all, she does recognise Willoughby’s falseness), but rather a certain insecurity, the constant fear of the possibility of being mistaken, and the desire to avoid responsibility for her own (mis)interpretations of appearances –in the same way as she desires to avoid responsibility for other people’s (mis)interpretations of her own appearances.

For a young woman like Evelina, the lesson needs to be learnt more urgently in relation to men, to protect herself against the predatory male sexuality of the Eighteenth Century. But Evelina needs not only to be able to see through deceptive appearances (male and female ones, including her own self-representation of innocence), but to learn to ‘maintain appearances’ herself, to wear the mask of social conventions, avoiding embarrassing misinterpretations. Clearly, as we have seen, she already knows that deceptive appearances are sometimes necessary. What she then still needs to learn is not only how to read and use the right register of necessary appearances (of innocence, for example; otherwise, she will continue to produce ‘uncalculated’ acts of ‘artlessness’ that are –according to Cutting-Grey– ‘[…] unreadable by others without the accompanying signs of reflection in her that would prevent misreading artless for artifice’),29 but that there is no escape from appearances, from the possibility of misinterpreting and being misinterpreted by appearances.

In that sense, then, Evelina could be read as a novel of education, where not only the ‘[…] youthful heroine confronts the problem of acquiring the insight by which the false appearance of virtue is distinguished from its reality […]’ (Glock), and ends up controlling ‘[…] the behaviour of others toward her and [determining] her own social position’ (Epstein), but also –and more importantly – where Evelina learns that she shares responsibility for her interpretation of other’s appearances as much as for other’s misinterpretations of her appearances.30 Only then can Evelina reach certain independence and self-authority. Only then can she be said to properly ‘appear’, to enter into ‘the world.’

CHAPTER 2UNDER THE SIGN OF EVELINA

In the previous chapter we have shown how Evelina’s paradoxical position –in terms of innocence and experience as assumed possibilities of escaping deceptive appearances– belongs to what Jacques Derrida has defined as a logocentric system, to metaphysics. In this chapter, we will consider appearances in relation to the linguistic sign, given that appearances are usually thought to be concealing a truth or essence, in a similar way as signifiers are considered to occult or restrict access to signifieds, meaning, intention, etc.

To explore some of the similarities between appearances and signs, we will consider, first of all, Evelina as a woman, as a representative of a young woman’s life in eighteenth-century England, valued for her innocence, artlessness and virtue, but necessarily devalued as a


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29 Joanne Cutting-Gray, Woman as ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), p. 14.

30 Glock, p. 132; Epstein, The Iron Pen, p. 99.

woman, apparently condemned to be no more than a silent ornament. Secondly, we will consider the question of Evelina’s name, her lack of a father’s name, a lack leaving her not yet authorised to represent her father. And thirdly, we will analyse Evelina’s resemblance to her mother, and her status as representative of her mother to her father, as the carrier of a dead mother’s letter to her father.

Evelina seems to stand, necessarily, almost inevitably, for a real young woman (usually we would just say that she is a young woman), living in a real –though not less spectral– eighteenth-century England. This form of ‘appearance’ –of coming into sight, coming into existence, giving the impression of ‘being’ what she seems– could take place (seems to arrive) in many ways. For example, the reader apparently must have an impression of Evelina as something more than a character in a novel, for if the reader cannot believe in the fiction proposed, if Evelina as a young, real woman seems unreal or false, the novel could become practically unreadable, by sending the reader back to the surface of its writing.31 A second way of ‘thinking’ Evelina, of appropriating her, can be found within the novel, at an intradiegetic level, as most characters cannot but ‘take’ Evelina for a young woman or a young lady, in a similar way as Evelina represents ‘herself’ in her letters.32

There are two types of appearances, bestowed by biological inheritance, that Evelina can hardly avoid in her relationship with others: for all of those who knew Caroline Evelyn, one is Evelina’s physical resemblance to her mother; the other, visible to everyone, is the appearance of Evelina’s female body, that makes her appear as a woman.33 Basically, it is because of these two appearances that Evelina is considered a woman, a representative of women in general, and a lady, an example or instance of a lady, a representative of her particular social class.34

To a certain degree, these appearances are not just practically unavoidable, but apparently unquestionable. But to be (taken for) a woman or a lady goes far beyond the biological and the physiological, to the ideological. To be a ‘woman’ (or to be called one) is to be a sign, to place a subject (or to be placed) under the signifier ‘woman’.35 In other words, ‘woman’ –or


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31 This is, apparently, something not desirable –even if literature seems the only form of writing allowed to display its ‘surface’, in opposition to other types of writing in which that ‘surface’ of writing is supposed to be ‘transparent’ (i.e. philosophy, the sciences, the news). Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, trans. by F. T. C. Moore, New Literary History, 6, 1 (1974), 5-74. Frances Burney certainly was quite in favour of a ‘realistic’ novel, in which its writing as fiction could be not only suspended (as with any fiction that engages the reader) but could seem to disappear, in opposition to ‘[…] Romance, where Fiction is coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where Reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvellous rejects all aid from sober Probability.’ Fanny Burney, ‘Preface’, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. by Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 7-9 (pp. 8-9). Italics are the author’s. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from this edition. Page numbers will be inserted parenthetically into the text.

32 Though here we will concentrate on Evelina as a woman for other characters, she could also be ‘thought’ as a young woman for Frances Burney, for an eighteenth-century reader, for a feminist reader (for whom to be a ‘woman’ carries clear politico-economical connotations), etc.

33 Or so one can infer, since Evelina contains no physical description of the heroine. All the reader is told is that Evelina has ‘too much beauty to escape notice’ (p. 18).

34 ‘Example’ here in the sense of a particular case that reflects upon a generality, though the question of constituting an example for others was certainly fundamental for the eighteenth-century society. One of the social functions of novels like Evelina was to help to disseminate such examples. On this type of didactism, cf. J. Paul Hunter, ‘Didactism: The Contexts of Concern’, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 274-302.

35 ‘From the moment that there is meaning’, writes Jacques Derrida, ‘there are nothing but signs.’ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 50.

what ‘She is a woman’ means– is unthinkable outside text, context, and ideology.36 Therefore, it becomes necessary to interrogate the status of the ‘is’ of ‘She is a woman’. Not because we suspect that Evelina is not a woman or a lady. That would be not only absurd, but would leave the ‘is’ untouched, unquestioned. Rather, it is because that ‘is’ performs an erasure of ‘woman’ as sign, makes of a constructed (and ever-changing) category an obvious, given presence.

In order to interrogate this, and since ‘She is a woman’ implies that there could be a ‘she’ who is not (or not much of) a woman, we could start asking what is the proper context of a woman. Under what circumstances was a woman a ‘proper’ woman, in England, in the Eighteenth Century?37 After all, the biological and physiological appearances do not seem enough to guarantee Evelina status as a woman and a lady once and for all.38 Rather, they seem to install or inaugurate, rather, more like the potentiality of a ‘destiny’: Evelina’s potentiality ‘to be’ a proper woman and a lady –that is, ‘to be’ in the sense of a continuous form of being, that keeps ‘becoming’, or must be ‘maintained’, constantly reaffirmed, like a promise (‘destiny’, after all, also evokes ‘destination’, to be ‘destined’, like a posted letter, to/for someone or something in a future).39

The biological and physiological appearances prove to have, therefore, ideological implications. Through society, it is ideology, after all, that prescribes an entire set of other appearances that Evelina must then ‘incarnate,’ keep delivering, to be properly recognised as a woman and a lady.40

Clearly, Evelina seems to agree with the prescribed appearances or norms –since they seem to guarantee ‘normality,’ how things must be– of what is proper for a woman and a lady: appearances such as, for example, ‘female delicacy’ (p. 127), modesty and gentleness, ‘the


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36 Again, according to Derrida, ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ Of Grammatology, p. 158.37 The general ideological context is well-known, so much has been written about the patriarchal system(s) of the

Eighteenth Century. Our main interest here, however, is Evelina’s appearance as a woman and a lady within this logocentric system; an appearance not more truthful or false than the ones Evelina would like to be able to avoid. For a general account of patriarchy in England, see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). For the question of patriarchy in Evelina, see Gary Gautier, ‘Charity and Chastity’, Landed Patriarchy in Fielding’s Novels: Fictional Landscapes, Fictional Genders (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1998), pp. 61-82, and Brian McCrea, Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998).

38 In the same way as no character could have put into question that Evelina is a woman, the novel never puts into question that Evelina is a lady, except for Evelina’s relatives, who seem determined to take her as one of their own lower class. Willoughby’s strategies of seduction seem to test Evelina, to see whether she is a real lady. But, despite being tested or taken for what she is not, Evelina never seems to compromise her status as a lady. Apparently, it does not matter if the question of her status (as a signature or ‘style’ that appears in everything she does) still needs to be socially ‘countersigned’ by her father, so far as the countersignature remains open as part of her future. But, even when confronted with the news that her father has already acknowledged the real daughter of Caroline Evelyn, Evelina does not lose anything of her status as a lady.

39 That is, on a Derridian sense of promise, where to ‘keep’ a promise means to constantly repeat it, re-affirm it. Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, trans. by Tina Kendall, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 256-309 (pp. 304-305), and Niall Lucy, ‘yes’, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 161-167. What we call ‘potentiality of a destiny,’ which is a type of fate rooted in inheritance, class differences and education, appears not only in Evelina but also in many other eighteenth-century novels, such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

40 In that sense, ideology could be said to work like a postal system: the system through which a letter is posted, the system through which a woman (Evelina) is destined ‘to become.’ We will get back to this towards the end of the next chapter.

peculiar attributes of your sex,’ as Villars tells Evelina (p. 217).41 Not to ‘follow’ the normative appearances would mean ending up as Mrs. Selwyn, of whom Evelina writes that she

[…] is extremely clever; her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine; but, unfortunately, her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying to acquire knowledge of the other sex, she has lost all the softness of her own. (pp. 268-269).42

To be a lady (and a woman) implied, therefore, being able to support and maintain certain appearances. However, to maintain appearances is not only a question of acting them out, but also of performing them within the proper context, maintaining them within their right place. Evelina, for example, wandering through Marybone Gardens, in a context to which she does not belong, does not need to behave less like a lady to be considered a prostitute; just in the same way as a prostitute, put in a different context, could very well (apparently) pass for a lady, as Evelina and Madame Duval could testify after mistaking not a few prostitutes for ladies.43

We must concede, therefore, that under certain circumstances it was possible to mistake a prostitute for a lady, and vice versa. After all, society seems to have obliged prostitutes to appear also as ladies.44 To a certain extent, it could also be argued that, under a common patriarchal system, prostitutes and ladies were not so far apart as it is usually thought; especially if we consider that women were generally conceived as ‘objects’ that can be possessed, as silent or empty signs, pure signifiers or ornaments that could only derive their value and meaning in relation to (the pleasure of) men (father, suitor, husband, etc.).45 Also, it was not a secret that there were ladies who could behave like real prostitutes (without being


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41 Evelina only seems to question stereotypes (as reductions, simplifications, like a caricature), such as ‘little Louisa’s’ extreme delicacy (cf. p. 286). On the absolute requirement of gentleness, Evelina considers it ‘a virtue which […] seems so essential a part of the female character’ (p. 269), Orville also considers gentleness part of ‘a true feminine character.’ (p. 289). Not surprisingly, ‘gentleness’, as of mild temperament or behaviour, kind, tender, shares a similar origin (through the sixteenth-century French word ‘gentil’) with ‘gentility’, as of a noble birth. Cf. ‘gentle’ and ‘gentility’, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 11th ed. For a further analysis of the social demands and the implications of being a woman and a lady in the Eighteenth Century, cf. Mary Poovey, ‘The Proper Lady’, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 3-47.

42 Cf. also Sir Clement’s remarks about Mrs. Selwyn and ‘little Louisa’ (p. 343).43 Cf. Letter XXI, Evelina, pp. 231-238. According to Julia Epstein, ‘[…] Ruth Bernard Yeazell points out that

the Marylebone adventure “emblematically stages the risk that every young lady runs who ventures ‘out’ in public spaces –the risk of being seen to be one who belongs in them, a woman of the town, as the idiom has it, or one who walks the streets.”’ Julia Epstein, ‘Marginality in Frances Burney’s Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 198-211 (p. 202).

44 In a very telling move, prostitutes were required to negate or conceal, on the ‘surface’, the truth of their real condition (that they are prostitutes), forcing them to represent an essentially male fantasy of ‘ladies’ behaving like prostitutes. The problem, however, was much more complex. Here we can only generalise a theory for the type of prostitutes Evelina meets in London. For a detailed description of the different types of prostitution in London at the time, see Fergus Linnane, Madams, Bawds & Brother-Keepers of London (Stroud: Sutton, 2005).

45 On the eighteenth-century wide-spread assumption of the ‘emptiness of female life,’ cf. Kristina Straub, ‘Critical Methods and Historical Contexts’, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), pp. 1-23. On female silence as a patriarchal commodity, cf. Joanne Cutting-Gray, ‘Evelina: Writing Between Experience and Innocence’, Woman as ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 9-31.

one), or that did not behave as a lady was expected to behave (Lady Bellaston, for example, in Tom Jones). But as far as ‘to be a lady’ was kept as ideal, any clear exceptions to the norm could be explained away as ‘not real’ ladies. Imitation, after all, requires that the object to be imitated maintains its appearance.

Clearly, that proves that appearances can be deceptive. We do not pretend to argue the contrary. But our main interest here is the similarity that appearances make possible, here between these two opposite types of being ‘a woman’ (some would say the only possible forms in which a woman could appear), bringing together (a lady could be mistaken for a prostitute, a prostitute could be mistaken for a lady) what ideology opposes and society strives to keep apart (a lady cannot be a prostitute, a prostitute cannot be a lady).46

Under those circumstances, the importance of a father’s recognition (arguably, the main plot of Evelina) becomes clear: Lord Belmont’s name is the only thing that seems to be able to certify that Evelina is a lady and not just someone that looks like one.47 Until that happens, Evelina seems condemned to be –to use Margaret Anne Doody’s words– ‘unfathered and unauthorized’, ‘unplaced in society, unclassified.’48 The ‘family name’ –that is, the (sur)name given by the father, ‘the man’ in the nuclear family– was, after all, the one that –according to Julia Epstein– ‘serves metonymically as a sign for social propriety, for what is proper or belongs to, like property.’49 Therefore, as Amy Pawl points out,

dangerous as names are […] there is a greater danger in not being named –or owned.... Being ‘owned,’ far from turning Evelina into a commodity whose personhood is denied, is actually what allows her to become a persona.50

In the case of Evelina, however, her first name is also diachronically significant. It goes beyond the limited function of the first name as –according to Samuel Choi– ‘a differential signifier to distinguish and individualise persons in a synchronic field.’51 After all, ‘Evelina’ was not a common name, it was not like any other name, but a variant of another father’s


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46 This opposition and ‘bringing together’ of ladies and prostitutes is not an exclusive invention of Evelina. It also occurs in Moll Flanders, with Moll’s destiny arguably drawn from an early deception, Moll as a child mistaking a prostitute for a ‘genteel woman’ and stating that she would like to become one of them when she grows up; ironically, Moll becomes a prostitute who can sometimes pass for a lady, just like the ‘genteel woman’ she wanted to become. In Clarissa, to mention just another example, the heroine is not only taken to live among prostitutes, but it is made to believe that some of them are ladies, Lovelace’s relatives.

47 Clearly, that was not the only issue at stake. According to Brian McCrea, for example, ‘Evelina’s paternity matters because she, once legitimized, can claim the power that demographic crisis conferred upon eighteenth-century women of her lineage; she is the key to the transmission of great estates.’ Brian McCrea, Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), p. 146. However, neither Evelina or Orville seem concerned about Evelina’s inheritance. Although we have to concede that such apparent non-concern –which in part was dictated by ‘good manners’– does not necessarily cancel inheritance as a determining factor in their relationship.

48 Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Evelina; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 35-65 (p. 40).

49 Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), p. 97.

50 Amy Pawl, ‘And What Other Name May I Claim?: Names and Their Owners in Frances Burney’s Evelina’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 3, 4 (1991), 283-299 (p. 286). Here, however, we cannot get into an exhaustive analysis of the question of Evelina’s name and her father’s recognition. For a resume of the debate on that issue, see Virginia H. Cope, ‘Evelina’s Peculiar Circumstances and Tender Relations’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (2003), 59 -78 (p. 73, n32).

51 Samuel Choi, ‘Signing Evelina: Female Self-Inscription in the Discourse of Letters’, Studies in the Novel, 31, 3 (1999), 259-278 (p. 264).

name: her mother’s father’s name, her grandfather’s name, Mr. Evelyn.It is as if, in the absence of Lord Belmont, Caroline Evelyn or Villars felt compelled to

create for the child a visible bond with a father, through the only recourse available to them: that is, within the almost limitless possibilities of the first name.52 After all, they could have given (as a gift) to the child practically any name, so far as it was ‘a woman’s name’ (hence the necessary ‘feminization’ of ‘Evelyn’). Certainly, this ‘naming’ after a grandfather, for example, was not unusual. Traditionally, children were named ‘after’ a dead relative (or a relative closer to his/her death), as a way of honouring his/her ‘memory’; a gesture that includes a desire for the child to become a living-monument of that relative, to live up to his/her name/memory.53 Evelina, then, seems obliged to appear (to exist) under a double patriarchal inscription: under the ‘absence’ of her father’s name (what should have been a presence) and under the presence of the maternal grandfather’s name, the mother’s name (what generally should be relegated to an absence, what in the Eighteenth Century was disregarded as non-significant).

In an analogous way as in the absence of the ‘real’ (socially accepted) bond Caroline or Villars must give the child the appearance of one, Villars later on has to invent a surname for Evelina in order for her to appear into the world.54 After all, Evelina could not have carried her mother’s surname. To do so would have been to expose her as a ‘bastard’ (an unrecognised daughter) or the sister of her mother (which would have implied an incestuous relationship –since the only way she could have had her mother’s surname in the place of her father’s is by being her mother’s sister). And, even if to a certain extent Villars not only dreamed of assuming the place of a father for Evelina but felt obliged to fill in that void, he could not have given her his own surname: that would have been to pretend to replace her father. That is why Villars must create a fictitious name –the appearance of a real one. In addition, by giving her a different surname Villars also intended to hide Evelina, to make it difficult for her grandmother to lay claim to her.55

The problem with ‘Anville’ –Villars’ gift of (the appearance of) a surname to Evelina– is the lack of a real father to stand for it, since nobody seems to know of a Mr. Anville –and even if there could exist a father called Anville, Evelina cannot confirm that is the same one; hence Evelina’s embarrassment when Mrs. Beaumont asks her about which Anvilles –the


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52 In the novel, it is not clear who ‘names’ Evelina, if it is Villars, in the memory of Mr. Evelyn and his daughter, Caroline Evelyn, who dies giving birth, or if it is following Caroline’s desire for her child to be named after her father. In any case, Evelina’s name seems to have been given to create a bond with a father, in absence of her biological father, Belmont.

53 According to Gabriele Vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn, ‘because others usually name us, the act of naming has the potential to implicate infants in relations through which they become inserted into and, ultimately will act upon, a social matrix. Individual lives thus become entangled –through the name– in the life histories of others.’ ‘“Entangled in Histories”: An Introduction to The Anthropology of Names and Naming’, The Anthropology of Names and Naming, ed. by Gabriele Vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1-30 (p. 3).

54 As a child, living almost exclusively with Villars, Evelina certainly does not need a surname, she could be merely ‘Evelina’, but once she grows up and goes ‘into the world,’ she must have a surname in order for others to refer to her (as ‘Miss…’). Not to have a family name was (and still is) practically unthinkable, would have make Evelina non-representable in society. Evelina’s relatives, for example, cannot call her ‘Anville’, since that would have been to recognise her as a stranger. They must resort then to not call her ‘by any other appellation than that of Cousin, or Miss’ (p. 243).

55 If ‘Anville’ is merely an anagram of ‘Evelina’, Evelina’s name could be said to be double inscribed. Margaret Anne Doody, however, exploits other possibilities of ‘Anville’, proposing ‘[…] “Eve in a Veil” –Woman not known, Woman obscured. But her name is also “Elle in Alive” –Woman persisting in living.’ Frances Burney: The Life in the Works, p. 40.

ones in the North or the ones in Lincolnshire– she is related to (pp. 284-285).56 Under a different surname, Evelina then must take the place of (situate herself as) a stranger, appearing as what she is not, or should not have been. Appearing under a false name that barely masks the absence of what must have been the real one (most of her friends know about her unrecognised status), in the absence of a proper, socially recognised name, Evelina then seems to live namelessness. And as Joanne Cutting-Gray has pointed out,

more than a social deficiency, namelessness [‘a form of social silence’] functions symbolically for the patriarchy that constitutes the “named.” As a metonym for woman, it stands in the way of Evelina’s social acceptance and inhibits her ability to designate herself other than within the category of innocence, the character given to her by her culture.57

Evelina then seems obliged to live a divided existence, to exist between two possible identities, as Anville or Belmont, knowing that she is not really an ‘Anville’, that there is not a real Anville to support her social position.58 And, though she never questions her identity as ‘the daughter of her father’, never contemplates the possibility of not being a Belmont, she also knows that ‘Belmont’ still cannot be her social name, that she cannot authorise herself to use it, without her father’s consent.59 That seems to leave Evelina, therefore, as limited to being a mere incarnation of a false Anville, since pretending to legitimise ‘Anville’ is also impossible. Again, it would amount to pretending to be a woman without a father. This is why she does not seem to have any other option but to try to legitimise her true name, her father’s name, by attempting to get recognised by Lord Belmont. Only then can she gain the social value and necessary recognition to become a ‘good match’ in the marriage market.60

In that sense, the name could be said to function as an ‘external’ sign or appearance, where a subject comes into being. It not only constitutes identity by instituting relationships and differences, but also constitutes in its representation the social status and wealth of the subject. Therefore, it is also –or rather– what ‘permits a person’s worth to be representable’, circulated, exchanged, ‘like money.’61 A ‘name’ –what Catherine Parke denominates as the ‘functional counterpart of the third person’– is then no more or less than another ‘appearance in a world of appearances.’62

In the end, just as with the question of the name, it seems almost ironical that Evelina –


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56 For Julia Epstein, Villars then ‘[…] fails to provide [Evelina] with the first gift of an avowed father: legitimacy. […] Evelina’s anagrammatic namelessness denies her even the minimal social respectability […]’ Julia Epstein, ‘Evelina’s Deceptions: The Letter and the Spirit’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Fanny Burney’s Evelina, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), pp. 111-129 (p. 121).

57 Woman as ‘Nobody’, p. 12.58 Evelina to Villars: ‘I cannot to you sign Anville, and what other name may I claim?’ (p. 24) The italics are hers.

Madame Duval ‘[…] had it in her head to make something of me, and that they should soon call me by another name than that of Anville, and yet that she was not going to have the child married, neither.’ (p. 121).

59 For Joanne Cutting-Gray, Evelina ‘needs to have her name legitimated by the community as having truth value because she cannot legitimate it herself.’ Woman as ‘Nobody’, p. 137.

60 Although Evelina’s beauty is recognised as a valuable attribute for winning a husband, it is still not enough. A ‘name’ is required to enhance the value of Evelina’s beauty.

61 Joanne Cutting-Gray points out that ‘social status, beauty, and wealth coined as the name that permits a person’s worth to be representable can be circulated and exchanged like money.’ Woman as ‘Nobody’, p. 133. Italics are mine.

62 Catherine Parke, ‘Vision and Revision: A Model of Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel of Education’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16, 2 (1982-1983), 162-174 (p. 165).

who seems so determined to distrust all appearances– can find a certain amount of autonomy and happiness thanks to her mother’s appearance. Certainly, by then Orville already wants to marry her. But only her father’s recognition can place her at a level similar to Orville’s.63 That is, only her father’s recognition can change Orville’s marriage proposal from being an offer she could hardly refuse to a question of her own free choice. After all, unrecognised as she was, she could hardly have found a better proposal. But with a name and fortune established, Evelina can have a choice, marry any other men that, until then, she could not have dreamed of marrying (including Orville).

Therefore, even if for some critics such as Virginia Cope, […] Evelina earns her inheritance by proving to her father that her heart is “formed for filial tenderness,” proof of which comes, paradoxically, in her unwillingness to demand her legacy […]64

it is Evelina’s resemblance to her mother that seems to make possible the recognition and the inheritance (which could then be made conditional on her behaviour to her father).65 In that sense, Evelina’s resemblance to her mother seems to function as a prerequisite. Considering that Belmont believes Polly Green is his daughter, if Evelina had not resembled so strikingly her mother, it is highly improbable –in terms of verisimilitude– that she could have obtained her father’s recognition. As the word implies, ‘re-cognition’ is only possible in relation to the same, something already ‘known’. Without the certificate of her appearance, the expression of her feelings towards her father would have been useless to Evelina to obtain his recognition.

Evelina is also encouraged to confront her father mainly because of her resemblance to her mother: ‘[…] without any other certificate of your birth, [but] that which you carry in your countenance, as it could not be effected by artifice, so it cannot admit of a doubt’ (p. 337), Lady Howard says to Evelina. It is her mother’s ‘appearance’ in Evelina’s ‘countenance’ that seems to make possible the claim, by giving a certain assurance of the possibility of its success.

Evelina’s resemblance to her mother seems to function, therefore, like one of those ‘transparent’ appearances that she and Villars would like the world to be made of; an appearance that reveals an uncontaminated presence or truth: a mother’s presence in a daughter. It is this ‘transparent’ appearance, with the presence it seems to reveal, that seems to certify Evelina as the daughter of Caroline. In that sense, Evelina’s appearance is made legal, taken for a certificate that cannot be falsified, reproduced or copied; a certificate that only those bearing a direct relationship (being a daughter or a son) with an ‘origin’ (of a father and/or a mother) could have. Or so it is thought. That ‘first’ appearance is made equivalent to an original presence, in opposition to the possibility of being ‘merely’ copied, which would then


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63 In that sense, Evelina is a very conventional novel –close to the prevalent ideology of its time–, where marriage seems only possible within the same social class.

64 Virginia H Cope, ‘Evelina’s Peculiar Circumstances and Tender Relations’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (2003), 59-78 (p. 61).

65 For Joanne Cutting-Gray also ‘[…] what convinces Sir John Belmont that Evelina is his daughter is not Mrs. Selwyn’s argument, not a legal claim, not even an appeal to pathos. It is Evelina’s resemblance to her mother […] her most convincing proof is neither a document nor a form of patriarchal speech that bears the authority of a truth statement. She ‘posts’ a likeness of her mother that lacks any of those patrilineal seals of legitimation.’ ‘Writing Innocence’, p. 55. But, precisely, because it is her father’s recognition that Evelina is aiming for, she cannot be authorised by his discourse. Appearance, resemblance, similarity, in such a case seems to take the place of authorizing ‘proof’.

have the value of a mere (false) appearance; as if against the threat of a copy, the first ‘copy’ could gain the value of an original that must be protected.

This is a mechanism put into place to guarantee the metaphysical order, to guarantee clear differences between what it is and what it is not, between being and non-being. This mechanism not only occults or negates the possibility of forfeiture –as an appearance cannot take the place of what it is supposed to represent, of the presence/truth that uncovers and covers simultaneously– but also guarantees order, keeps things apart, clearly separated, stating the impossibility of their interdependence or mixing.66 Therefore, Evelina’s resemblance to her mother is made to pass, or presented, as in no contradiction with her earlier stated position against appearances. Society, morality, etc., seem to require that there cannot be irony or contradiction involved. But, can we be so sure that some form of deception is not always at work, involved somehow?

Let us assume that Evelina’s resemblance to Caroline Evelyn is only a coincidence, reinforced by the common desire to find a resemblance between parent and child. Also, it must be remembered that Evelina does not know her mother, that she does not even seem to have been able to see a picture (if there is one) of her mother.67 All Evelina knows about she is what others –such as Villars, Lord Belmont, or Mrs. Selwyn– tell her: that her mother used to look just like her, Evelina. Mrs. Selwyn for example, assures Evelina that she has a ‘too strong a resemblance’ to her ‘dear, though unknown mother’ (p. 316). Therefore, Evelina only ‘knows’ her mother through herself, picture her mother’s appearance through her own image (in a mirror, for example). The assurances of others then become for Evelina ‘the certainty I carried in my countenance’ (p. 374). But even if there was not a real ‘connection’ –that is, even if Evelina just happens to look like Caroline, without being her biological daughter–, Evelina’s appearance would still deceive everyone. Everyone would still think Evelina to be the daughter of Caroline and Sir Belmont. Therefore, nothing much seems to change. In that sense, this seems to be more like a contained possibility. What happens is that the logocentric system requires the avoidance of such a possibility in order to reassure itself as the only existing real(ity). After all, in logical terms, any proposition could be taken as the truth only if the possibility of its negation can be avoided, erased, forgotten.

Curiously enough, the effects of our proposed possibility are not far from Belmont’s plans to ‘maintain’ appearances and make everybody happy in the end. According to that ‘solution,’ the world would be told that Miss Belmont is going to get married. By ‘Miss Belmont’ the world would understand, obviously, Polly Green. Technically, it could be argued that it is not a lie, because Evelina is also, in effect, getting married, and the same day. The lie –since there is one– consists, basically, in maintaining a false appearance: Polly as Belmont’s biological daughter. Certainly, in terms of appearances there does not seem to be too much of a difference –or, at least, that is what Lord Belmont seems to hope– if Polly, by marrying Macartney, Belmont’s son, becomes Belmont’s daughter-in-law, passing from being a ‘real’


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66 Here we do not intend to reveal how things really are (to attempt to do so would be to fall into a trap similar to that we criticize) but to question or deconstruct the will or ‘need’ to see them in a certain way (what is called logocentrism) that we have started to suspect as being too simple.

67 But even if she was lucky enough to have a painted portrait of her mother (photography obviously did not exists in the Eighteenth Century), that would not have been too much of a guarantee, as portraits did not so much try to capture with ‘objectivity’ (still a vague concept then) the image or appearance of the person to be represented, but more often were idealized, as the person depicted would like to be remembered, and following conventional artistic parameters. For an example of these difficulties, in relation to portraits in the Eighteenth Century, one could study the case of Frances Burney, of whom we do not have a ‘good’, trustworthy portrait, only quite conventional ones, which were the norm among Evelina’s social class.

daughter to being considered ‘as’ a daughter.68 In an analogous though somewhat inverted way, Macartney will pass from being the non-recognised real son of Lord Belmont to appear as his son-in-law.

The public display of Evelina’s recognition is not ruled out but seems merely postponed to an undefined future –where, again, Lord Belmont seems to desire things will clarify by themselves, or not matter anymore. Evelina seems expected to renounce her right to use her father’s name. However, that is apparently unimportant since she is going to marry, and she would then be covered by her husband’s name, since in social terms her father’s name will hardly matter anymore, since what would matter then is whose wife she is, not whose daughter she is (this explains Belmont’s interest in her wedding taking place as quickly as possible).69 Luckily enough, what seems important to Evelina is the act of recognition itself, not so much its ‘external’ appearance, the public display of it (though it is important to share the recognition with a few people as witness, as well as with Orville, to assure him he is marrying someone from a similar social class).

Keeping all this in mind, could Evelina’s resemblance to her mother have been such an absolute guarantee of truth, that it could not ‘admit of a doubt’? Could that appearance, as ‘it could not be effected by artifice,’ have been enough to prove once and for all Evelina to be the daughter of Caroline Evelyn? Clearly not everybody in the Eighteenth Century could have ‘effected by artifice’ that appearance. For one thing, they obviously did not have the technology necessary to try to modify ‘natural’ –biological, inherited– appearances. However, Evelina’s resemblance to her mother is not a completely unique form, without relation to other forms, but ‘made’ of certain common features: a certain colour and form of the eyes, lips, skin, eyebrows, nose, hair, etc., even if the novel does not provide these specific details of Evelina’s resemblance, but gives it as a monolithic feature. And –as we know– there is not a law (of inheritance, for example) that could once and for all dictate that a specific group of features necessarily has to reproduce itself from mother to daughter. Polly Green –whom Lord Belmont has recognised as Caroline’s daughter– seems to demonstrate that a daughter did not have to resemble her mother in order to be considered legitimate, or that another resembling set of appearances could be found in somebody else.70

Therefore, no appearance can guarantee beforehand its authenticity, its non-deceptiveness. There is always the possibility that things are not what they seem. Not because all appearances are deceptive and false (the possibility then becomes a certitude), but because there are always many factors at work that determine the production and perception of


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68 Belmont then knows she is not his daughter, but would like to consider her as one. However, it is not clear if for the world, Polly would still be considered ‘the real’ daughter. Belmont seems to desire that the transition from ‘the real’ to the ‘as a’ will go unnoticed by society.

69 We must remember that under a strong patriarchal system, respectable women, proper women, were only allowed (that is, considered with approval) to exist as a daughter or a wife of a man, as ‘belonging to’ (or in relation to) men. Cf. Mary Murray, ‘Sisters, daughters and subordinate wives’, The Law of the Father? Patriarchy in the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 90-110. For Murray, however, ‘it is clear that there was a general relationship between the regulation of sexual behaviour and property. But the perception that women were ‘property’ is actually symptomatic of a change in ways of thinking which only came about in the course of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.’ Murray, p. 122. We point out such character of property in a symbolic, not literal, sense.

70 On seeing Evelina, Lord Belmont exclaims: ‘[…] never was likeness more striking! –the eye, –the face, –the form [...] Oh dear resemblance of thy murdered mother!’ (pp. 385-386). However, he has to see the resemblance for himself. Mrs. Selwyn’s assurance of Evelina’s resemblance to Caroline was, apparently, not an unusual claim. Lord Belmont seems to assume that it could have been applied to someone else, not necessarily with the intention of being deceptive. He does not seem to doubt Mrs. Selwyn’s word, only her judgement based on Evelina’s appearance.

appearances; more factors that someone could take into consideration, to overcome the reassuring and comfortable illusions of objectivity, transparency, and sameness. And, contrary to the common idea that first there is being, essence, presence (‘the’ identity of someone called ‘Evelina’, for example), and that only then (in a ‘second’ place) there are exterior appearances, that ‘serve’ –even if, under a closer scrutiny, they mostly seem to fail– to communicate that essence to others, appearances are the condition of the possibility that there could be an identity, some-one called Evelina.

CHAPTER 3EVELINA WRITING EVELINA

In the sense of ‘coming into existence’, it would seem that an appearance does not necessarily have to represent anything. However, in their most common meaning, and according to the metaphysical view, ‘appearances’ are always external expressions of something else; something that –contrary to its appearances– is fully present in itself, does not carry within itself an absence, does not represent anything different from itself. Appearances, therefore, seem inevitably condemned to be judged for their capacity to re-present something else in its absence. Accordingly, then, they become ‘truthful’ or ‘deceptive’ depending on their ‘closeness’ to the ‘original presence’ they supposedly represent.

In the case of appearances as visible exteriorities, for example, one could think that Evelina’s looks do not have to represent anything, that they are just what they are. But, as they are taken for Evelina’s ‘exterior’ form of appearing –an assumption almost impossible to avoid–, they are not just what they are but also what she is. They become the representatives of an ‘interior’ self or subject called Evelina, which is assumed to be more than the sum of her ‘exterior’ appearances. Assumptions about representation, however, hardly stop there. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Evelina –as a whole subject– can hardly escape being taken as a representative of her sexual gender and her social position. Even her father cannot but consider her as a representative of ‘something’ else (of her mother, because of the resemblance between them).

One of the problems is that, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, perfect representation is expected ‘to represent perfectly’, to restore the presence of the ‘thing’ it represents and efface itself as representation.71 Luckily enough, just as an appearance is not (cannot be) the same as what it supposedly reveals or conceals, a representative is not (cannot be) the same thing it is thought to represent.72 In other words, Evelina cannot be her mother. Evelina’s appearances resist the equivalence. It is as if, in every appearance and representative, there is –paradoxically– at least one (essential?) difference with respect to what it makes ‘appear’ or


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71 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 297-298. This ‘desire of making representation disappear’ (Of Grammatology, p. 306) is similar to Evelina’s desire for ‘transparency’, for the effacement (‘disappearance’) of the deceptive possibilities of all appearances.

72 Derrida: ‘[…] the representative is not the represented but only the representer of the represented; it is not the same as itself. As representer, it is not simply the other of the represented.’ Of Grammatology, p. 297.

represent, a difference that seems to resist the very realisation of the representative enterprise. Hence the constitutive suspicion of logocentrism about appearances and representations as containing a certain dispossession, a certain corruption or ‘corruptive principle.’73

This is particularly evident in relation to signed letters, as they seem to demand to be taken as true representatives of its writer. Clearly, all of Evelina’s letters are supposed to re-present her to others, as if they were an extension of her voice; but only her signed letters seem to demand be taken as such. After all, a signature is one of the most proper representatives of the subject. And its purpose is to certify as proper (to ‘authenticate’) something that could appear as a representative.74 It is a way for the subject to say: ‘Here, I, who sign, guarantee that these are my words, as if they were given voice by me, supported by my full presence.’ In that sense, every single signature seems to share a certain common origin (a unique subject behind) that it re-presents (makes present in his/her absence).

But we must not forget that a signature –to sign, ‘to make a sign’– is also, basically, a type of writing, the written appearance of the ‘ideal’ of a signature. Signatures depend on the illusion of the perfect repetition of an ideal form –a ‘style’ that belongs exclusively to the signing subject, that nobody else could re-produce.75 And since there is no signature out of context, since every signature is bound to the context in which it appears, there is not (cannot be) absolute identity between signatures –even under the illusion of a signing subject that remains the same. However, it is the illusion of the possibility of repeating an ideal signature that makes possible –paradoxically enough– the forgery, by overlooking the specific differences between signatures, by assuming a common ‘origin’.76 And if a signature can be falsified, the same applies –by default– to everything that such a signature was supposed to certify as truthful.77

Willoughby’s forfeiting of Orville’s signature, in a letter to Ovelina, is a clear example of the above. By relating an appearance of Orville’s signature (as forfeited by Willoughby) to the ideal form of Orville’s signature, Evelina cannot but believe in the authorized truth of what comes signed by it. Since that seems to be the first time Evelina sees ‘Orville’s’ signature, she can only assume it is the same. However, it is irrelevant how difficult Orville’s signature


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73 As Derrida has pointed out, in passing, ‘[...] evil always has the form of representative alienation, of representation in its dispossessing aspect [...]’ Of Grammatology, p. 296. From the point of view of logocentrism, representatives seem more as an evil that should be avoided as much as possible, since even the most necessary ones contain a certain degradation or loss of an original presence. This ideological condemnation of representation can be seen, for example, in the eighteenth-century generalised distrust towards anything related to the theatre, particularly actresses. See Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992).

74 That is, even if, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out, ‘it is impossible to authenticate a written text,’ since ‘[…] an author can never be there, in person, in order to guarantee the identity of the one who wrote “I,” of the one who expressed himself in the first “person.”’ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. by Christopher Fynsk, trans. by Eduardo Cadava (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 43-138 (p. 136).

75 According to Niall Lucy, ‘by seeking to suppress the work of iterability, every signature tries to pass itself off in terms of a pure originality.’ Niall Lucy, Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 165.

76 In that sense, as Derrida has pointed out, ‘[…] the possibility of the forgery always defines the very structure of the event called signature […]’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Between Brackets I’, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 5-29 (p. 25).

77 However, not every deception can be reduced to an effect of signatures. Other factors are also at play. In the case of a letter, one must consider the entire ‘postal’ system: the messenger, the idea that a posted letter must arrive at its destination, seals and sealing, handwriting, the verisimilitude of what is contained in the text of the letter, etc. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

could have been to copy, since –as we have just argued– every signature structurally contains the possibility of its replication –and, therefore, of its forgery.

In the case of Evelina’s signature, it could be argued that Evelina was authorized to use ‘Anville’ as much as Willoughby was to use Orville’s name. Therefore, her signing ‘Anville’ is not far from being as deceptive an act as Willoughby signing ‘Orville’. On the other hand, unlike Willoughby, sometimes she does not seem to have a choice but to sign with such a name. Evelina’s ‘I cannot sign (to you, Villars) ‘Anville’’ seems to demonstrate that, despite the familiarity with the addressee, she seems to feel it necessary to sign with a full name.78 But, since she does not (cannot) fully identify herself as ‘Anville’, since that is not who she (thinks she) is, it is as if she were signing with somebody else’s signature –even if that somebody else does not exist, or is an-‘other’ that she could have been.

In that sense, the distinction between Evelina’s and Willoughby’s letters –as between rightful and unlawful authorizations, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ representatives – could be said to be a ‘fictive’ distinction. Such a ‘fiction’, however, is quite necessary. In fact, we cannot escape from it. Our very position, throughout this essay, depends on its existence. What we are questioning here is its ‘simplification’: the idea that there is something that can guarantee the recognition of clear distinctions between different types of appearances, as if it were possible to avoid all the ‘false’ ones. After all, between some of the most authorised representatives and deceptive appearances there are more similarities than someone like Evelina would (or could) like to admit.

Therefore, it is not as if Evelina’s signed letters are any worse or better representatives than the ones she leaves unsigned. After all, she does not seem to try to avoid inscribing her-self in everything she writes. She does not seem to sign only what she can corroborate, refusing to sign what she cannot, as if to accord only, then, an appearance of truth, without compromising herself. Rather, her signatures seem to have a function of re-assurance of her self, to herself as well as to others.79 But the assurance is not always possible, or without its difficulties, since Evelina is far from having an already-constituted identity that she would have to protect from the ‘exterior’ contamination of others, from an alterity that threatens her with disappearance. On the contrary, Evelina’s acts of signature seem to be attempts to constitute a more proper ‘image’ of herself, an identity that could be recognised in terms of authority. Until then, as mere ‘Evelina’, she is just a girl, who is not supposed to have a ‘voice’, an authority of her own –to determine her own life.

To a certain extent, however, Evelina fails in her attempts to constitute herself as ‘Anville’. But also, and partly because of that failure, she could be said to succeed, beyond her expectations. Evelina fails –first of all– because she does not obtain more respect from others for signing ‘Anville’. Neither does she become more convinced that she really is ‘Miss Anville’ by signing that name. In fact, ‘Anville’ could not have guaranteed the authority that she required in society. After some necessary attempts, Evelina then seems to prefer not to use ‘Anville’ anymore and pursue instead the authorization of the name that should have been


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78 See also Evelina signing ‘Evelina Anville’ (p. 173) to Miss Mirvain, to whom she calls her ‘other self’, whom she supposedly treats with more ‘familiarity’.

79 According to Samuel Choi, ‘[…] just as Evelina encounters numerous persons who, on one level, attempt to insinuate themselves, their lives, their names, and their bodies into hers (to the effacement of hers), so too does she meet with circumstances that threaten to displace or replace her symbolically. Her signatures serve to mark each of these occasions and to reassert herself at fundamental levels.’ Samuel Choi, ‘Signing Evelina: Female Self-Inscription in the Discourse of Letters’, Studies in the Novel, 31, 3 (1999), 259-278 (p. 262).

hers by right, ‘Belmont’.80 That ‘failure’ only then can become a ‘success’.But the problem of Evelina’s identity is not restricted to the fact that it appears divided, in

suspense, between at least two names. Her identity is also problematic in its representation. Writing, for example, is far from being the perfect representative that she could have wished. Writing, after all, seems to require Evelina’s effacement, an identification of herself in/through ‘her’ letters, almost to the point of substitution.81 Evelina’s letters, then, are more than prosthetics, more than a mirror that points obliquely to her. She becomes threatened by the possibility of being reduced to the image of her that her letters ‘present’; a threat analogous to what happens in any identification with an exterior signifier, like a name.82 But since no identification or representation is ever complete, a subject cannot be taken only by its texts –even if, paradoxically, that seems the only way for us here. To pretend the contrary is like pretending that a name or an exterior appearance can give us a reliable insight into a subject.

However, writing is not only a form of concealment, where the subject cannot but distance itself from ‘itself’.83 It is also a ‘medium’ through which a certain ‘revelation’ or ‘presentation’ of the subject is possible. In other words, writing not only –according to Cutting-Gray– ‘[…] does not prevent Evelina from revealing herself –to herself as well as to others,’ but is what makes such revelation possible.84 Willoughby, for example, feels he has to conceal Evelina’s letter to Orville ‘to prevent a discovery’ of her ‘capacity’ (p. 388).

To a certain extent, then, Evelina affirms her self through the inscription of her own ‘voice’ (or difference) in her letters. The writing subject –who is also, in the so-called ‘personal letter’, the subject of writing– cannot but leave its mark, to in-scribe it-self. But such an inscription does not make it any easier for the reader to recognise a specific subject, someone called ‘Evelina Anville’ or ‘Evelina Belmont’. That is because –due to the necessary ‘universal’ character of language– such a subject would be undifferentiated.85 Therefore, beyond the certifying frame where Evelina can sign with her name, another ‘signature’


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80 This is an enterprise she was initially not keen to take up, because it was the ‘unthinkable’: to raise herself against a father. For a paradigmatic example of such impossibility, see Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. by Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 2004).

81 That is, even if, according to Derrida, ‘[…] the loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, [is] in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance.’ Of Grammatology, p. 112.

82 To paraphrase Saussure –as quoted in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 35–, writing then seems to veil not only language but the appearance of the subject; it is not a guise for the subject but a disguise. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) and Robert A. Erickson, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (New York: AMS, 1986), both consider letters –particularly in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa– as a ‘clothing’ of the self.

83 As Derrida has pointed out, writing appears as ‘[…] that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of that interiorizing memory […]’ ‘Constituting and dislocating it, writing is other than the subject, in whatever sense the latter is understood.’ Of Grammatology, pp. 24, 68.

84 Joanne Cutting-Gray, ‘Writing Innocence: Fanny Burney’s Evelina’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 9 (1990), 43-57 (p. 44).

85 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, pp. 1-256. On the ‘disappearance’ of sexuality in language, cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, trans. by Christie V. McDonald, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, pp. 89-108. On the question of a subject’s representation in/through language, cf. Etienne Balibar, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing the Universal: Jacques Derrida’s Sinnliche Gewissheit’, in Adieu Derrida, ed. by Costas Douzinas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 61-83.

appears ‘throughout’ her letters.86 The very writing of Evelina’s letters then could be said to exceed the story she tries to re-present: Evelina’s letters not only ‘re-present’ her, but are also the ‘means’ through which ‘her’ self seems to be able to re-constitute or re-create itself.87

In that sense, Evelina’s posted letters seem to function as other forms of her ‘exterior appearances.’ In fact, they function in a way similar to ‘Evelina’ as an appearance: that is, Evelina as a woman, a lady, a ‘fictive’ (Villar’s) or biological (Caroline’s and Belmont’s) daughter, etc., as she appears to others and to ‘herself’; as appearances that are sent away –as representatives– by Villars, by Caroline… and by Evelina ‘herself’ –with her consent or complicity, or against the false appearances sometimes she is made to represent– to her father, to society… to ‘the world.’88

With this we are not suggesting that Evelina is, basically, only her appearances, just as we have said that she cannot be reduced to her writings. Rather, she is necessarily traversed by all those forms of appearing. What she is, the ‘real’ subject behind the name ‘Evelina’, in its all its non-representable differences, cannot but inscribe ‘itself’ in all those forms of appearing.

But from where could Evelina have appropriated the authority necessary to write? We must remember that, as a young woman, it was improper for her to pretend ‘to speak’ for herself. The fact that she was not recognised by her father could have only made her look more ‘un-authorized.’ Surely, as Joanne Cutting-Gray points out, ‘like Evelina’s unauthorized being, her letters are unauthorised, private appeals to another […]’89 But, it is precisely because of that lack of authorization that she has to put herself in her letters, and trust that they will speak for her, ‘in her name.’90

Evelina’s letters are appeals for authorisation, understanding or recognition, addressed to Villars or Orville. But her letters also contain an authority that seems to originate from ‘things’ that exist before and outside writing: as real objects, places, events, and people


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86 At this point we must remember Derrida’s ‘third modality of signature,’ ‘[…] as general signature, or signature of the signature, the fold of the placement in abyss where, after the manner of the signature in the current sense, the work of writing designates, describes, and inscribes itself as act (action and archive), signs itself before the end by affording us the opportunity to read: I refer to myself, this is writing, I am writing, this is writing […]’ Jacques Derrida, ‘From Signsponge’, trans. by Richard Rand, in Acts of Literature, pp. 346-369 (pp. 362-363). Italics are the author’s.

87 This is not unlike Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, where something that functions as a mirror could be said to allow, through the ‘subject’s’ identification, the constitution of a self, of subjectivity itself. Cf. Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’, Écrits, A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-7.

88 According to Irene Tucker, ‘because Evelina is unclaimed by her own father, she is free to be appropriated by her guardian as his representation. Thus the prospect of sending Evelina away from the self-enclosed paradise in which the two of them have lived striked [sic] him much as the prospect of sending off a carefully crafted letter might; the act of self-representation is only able to function by being made public, yet the step of making that representation public means that it is no longer Villar’s own […]’ ‘Writing Home: Evelina, the Epistolary Novel, and the Paradox of Property’, English Literary History, 60, 2 (1993), 419-439 (p. 425).

89 ‘Writing Innocence’, p. 54.90 As Julia Epstein points out, ‘letters became an especially licensed mode of writing for eighteenth-century

women writers and their heroines precisely because letter-writing was a sanctioned female activity. [However,] because it was licensed, the letter also presented a potential arena for subversion.’ Cf. Julia Epstein, ‘Evelina's Deceptions: The Letter and the Spirit’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Fanny Burney’s Evelina, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), pp. 111-129 (p. 113).

(including a subject called Evelina).91 Writing, therefore, seems to provide a way for Evelina to authorize her-self, to gain a certain authority. Quite often, then, Evelina seems to declare as truth, as real, what she can only have perceived as appearances, despite her awareness of the possible deceptiveness of all appearances. But, though she often writes that something merely ‘seems’ to her this or that, it is as if more often things can only be, as in an objective way. In other words, though there is not (cannot be) full representation, her letters seem to work as if there were.92 In that sense, writing does not require external authorization. To a certain degree, it seems able to authorize itself. The requirement that writing must come explicitly authorized by an exterior subject called the author comes from society, as a pharmakon (or ‘remedy’) against the threatening possibilities of writing as appearance, against its possibilities of representing what does not exist. Appearances then become authoritative, as they resemble presence, the measure of all authority under logocentrism. However, the problem is that –as Niall Lucy puts it, commenting on a phrase from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx– ‘events defined in terms of presence, which happen outside the text, outside ‘the ordeal of undecidability’, leave no room for decision-making and hence no room for responsibility.’93 Evelina’s desire to escape a world of deceptive appearances could then be related to a desire to escape responsibility for her own interpretation of appearances, to avoid reading.

The question of writing (here, letters) and representation proves to be, therefore, closely analogous to questions of appearances and reading, to the reading of appearances. Such questions exceed Evelina’s letters, to encompass the entire novel. Known for short as ‘Evelina’, the novel then seems to be another appearance/representative of Evelina. Evelina’s ‘entrance into the world’ then seems to bear analogies to the novel’s entrance into the world, posted to the world. Or vice versa. Like an adestinal letter, like Evelina’s appearances, the novel is sent (posted) to (here to everyone, the readers). It no longer belongs, therefore, to an author (Frances Burney). It escapes authority. To use Niall Lucy’s word, it is ‘‘destined’ to go to places that exceed the intentions of whoever sends it […]’94

The novel gives the appearance of being composed of real letters about real characters and events, most of them written by a real subject called Evelina. And we ‘know’ –thanks to the author, the publishers, and the history of literature– that what the novel seems to re-present has never been present, did not exist, in the first place, outside such an appearance, outside representation. That seems to make the novel, by definition, one of those appearances against which Evelina and Villars seem so predisposed. In that sense, fiction resembles appearances, in the same way as appearances resemble a fiction. Clearly, however, that is not just Evelina’s


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91 For Joanne Cutting-Gray, ‘Evelina’s letters are authoritative precisely to the extent to which they are filled with concrete, but ever-changing, interpretations of particular events. […] Her authority corresponds to the way her letters say what is rather than what ought to be.’ Woman as ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 25-26. In ‘Writing Innocence’, Cutting-Gray also writes: ‘The patriarchal authorities, those “magistrates of the press, and Censors for the public” […] merely assert what ought to be, while Evelina describes what is or, rather, what appears.’ (p. 53). In other words, it is as if Evelina’s letters also contain an authority (matriarchal? feminine?) of ‘the real’, that sets itself apart from (or against) a patriarchal system.

92 In other words, what Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’, as ‘the pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real,’ the naked relation of ‘what is’ (or has been) thus appears as a resistance to meaning […]’, and ‘[…] the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism […]’ Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 141-148 (pp. 146, 148).

93 Derrida Dictionary, p. 36.94 Derrida Dictionary, p. 97.

‘fault’. Rather, it is the paradox of all realist novels (‘realist’ in a wide sense). More specifically, it is the paradox of the epistolary genre, as it blurs the differences between real and false letters, truthful and deceptive (or fiction) writing.95

But how to believe in a fiction that seems to warn us against itself? In other words, if, at the level of the story, Evelina seems to warn the reader against appearances, could that warning be applicable against the appearance of reality of such a story? Or could such an application be avoided? Does not the novel deconstruct such a warning against trusting appearances? Surely, somewhere between trust and distrust of appearances some readings are possible. One of such possible readings is what we have tried to present up to now: a reading that Evelina seems to propose, almost as if without its knowledge, against what it thinks it knows; a reading of Evelina’s own deconstruction of the logocentric ideology it seems merely to re-present.

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, what I have tried to deconstruct in Evelina is a certain ideology –or way of thinking– that manifests itself through a certain position against appearances –against what is considered ‘exterior’ (as the exteriority that could be perceived by our senses, with a strong focus on the visual). In that sense –as appearances are thought to be the deceptive masking of what is real, truthful, the essence of things, etc.– such an ideology cannot but promote certain de-valorisation, neutralisation and avoidance of appearances.

In Evelina, Villars and Evelina give voice to this ideology. During certain moments in the novel, such an ideology is clearly manifest through some of their opinions and actions. But as an ideology, it is far from being present only in Evelina. It is part of what Jacques Derrida has called ‘logocentrism’, and it seems to have appeared with particular force in what Derrida has also defined as ‘the Age of Rousseau’. As a ‘product’ of her historical age, to a certain extent Frances Burney could not have escaped the influence of this logocentrism. The ‘pre-dominant discourse’ in Evelina seems to prove this –even if what we know about her position regarding appearances seems to have been somewhat different from Evelina’s. But, as such an ideology is practically unavoidable (somehow we still cannot be said to have escaped it), it has not been our purpose to criticise or deconstruct Evelina, as a subject or character, the novel, or Frances Burney’s assumedly logocentric thought. Our purpose has been –almost exclusively– to show how the novel itself could be said to deconstruct the logocentric ideology that it also seems to represent at the level of the story.

My deconstructive strategy included, basically, from the start, a reversing of the hierarchy at play in the logocentric opposition: ‘reality’/appearances; asking for a moment, what if…’ what is more important is not an essence, truth or what is real, but appearances, what is apparent, the ‘external’ manifestations of every thing or being? At one point, I state the


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95 In other words, from what Irene Tucker calls the ‘[…] epistolary novel’s “seamlessness of mimesis,” the fact that we can know it to be a fiction only if we are assured in advance or by some third person that it is such.’ ‘Writing Home’, p. 138.

possibility of there only being appearances, in order to re-think the hierarchy. Only then does it become possible to see that essences, truth, what is real, etc. (all the things defined in opposition to appearances) are in fact derived from (as effects of), or inevitably contaminated by, appearances (or by the exteriority of the visual, the materiality of the letter, writing, grafts, etc.). In that sense, therefore, I hope I have been able to make clear how appearances cannot but permeate and destabilize any attempts at their marginalization or negation.

At a more general level, our intention has been to re-open –after Glock, after Derrida– the question of appearances in Evelina. That is, first of all, as a reiteration of the importance –and the necessity– of exploring the theme or topic of appearances in Evelina; but also, of a certain need to interrogate the ideological positions implicated; and –last, but not least– to take into consideration how appearances relate –closely, inevitably– to questions of representation and mimesis, names and signatures, reading and writing, letters and fiction. In that sense, it is evident that I am far from thinking that I have completed the exploration –or reached the limits– of the theme of appearances in Evelina. The recognition of the ideological positions at play, and their subsequent interrogation, are also far from having been completed. And, as for the relationship between appearances and other type of questions, I in no way claim to have identified them all, including the ways they relate to each other. And, still less can it be said that I have tried to answer all those questions, to resolve –once and for all– the problems they pose.

In that sense, I hope to have been able to demonstrate that ‘appearances’ is not just a topic that Evelina contains, which is dealt with exclusively at the level of the story –as in Evelina’s struggles against Willoughby’s deceptive appearances. Rather, ‘appearances’ involve a whole problematic, that is closely related to our own acts of reading and interpretation. In that sense, it can be said that a question of appearances is not only contained in Evelina, but contains our reading of the novel. After all, whatever truth or essence of Evelina’s world there is, a reader, like us, can only have ‘access’ to it through the appearance of the novel: through the novel as a book, through the ‘materiality the letter’ (that is, through the text, through its writing, figures, descriptions, metaphors, etc.). And as the reader is also necessarily engaged in interpreting all those appearances, he or she also risks repeating Evelina’s logocentric gestures: repeating, for example, Evelina’s ‘innocence’, in the belief in, or desire for, some transparent appearances, as if what one reads or understands is all there is (or could be), with no possibility of deception; or hoping for a state of experience that would allow him/her to achieve the hermeneutic goal –to unveil or discover the truth of the novel.

Hugo BlumenthalLondon, 2007

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deconstructing appearances

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