| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國文學所 === 95 === In my thesis, I try to explore the double bind of charity and chastity in Frances Burney’s Cecilia. Charity’s entanglement with chastity is a knotty problem for Cecilia. When Cecilia practices charity, her charity is often associated with sexual transgression and incompatible with feminine propriety. By portraying Cecilia’s difficulty of maintaining both her charity and chastity without being censured, Burney exposes eighteenth-century women’s predicaments imposed by the norm of feminine propriety in patriarchal society. Burney’s manipulation of the interrelation and conflict between charity and chastity show her great insight and distinctive ways of writing.
In the analysis of women and charity, I emphasize Burney’s three major concerns about charity: economy, “controlled sensibility” and utility. In discussing women’s crucible of chastity, I underline Burney’s depiction of patriarchal fetters on women’s feminine propriety. In addition, I specify how Burney’s ambivalence toward charity and chastity and how feminine propriety are used as a clever disguise by Burney to subvert and transcend patriarchal strictures on women. This thesis’s focus on the complicated entanglement of charity and chastity and its implication for our understanding of eighteenth-century English society are forwarded by Burney’s delicate representation of the double bind.
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