| Summary: | This thesis considers dominant assumptions and polemical arguments about
femininity, female desire and domestic happiness in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, and how Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, respectively,
negotiate these ideas through the dynamic of female-female relations in their novels
Camilla (1796) and Belinda (1801). These novels register the principles of female
education and desire outlined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762) and
espoused by later eighteenth-century conduct-book writers, moralists and pedagogues,
as well as the polemical arguments forwarded by Mary Wollstonecraft and other
feminist writers in the 1790s. Camilla and Belinda exemplify the fraught relationship
between women’s same-sex relationships and a dominant ideological vision of
domestic heterosexuality and happiness. As Burney and Edgeworth depict and
comment on various relationships between their female characters, they engage with
this gendered dialectic, and position themselves and their novels within a discussion
about both appropriate female role-models and appropriate reading material for young
women.
I begin by considering changes in popular conceptions of the family in the
eighteenth century, and women’s place in it. Focusing on Camilla, I consider how the
loving mother-daughter relationship was instrumental in ensuring the authority of the
father, and in upholding hegemonic gender relations generally. I then consider anxieties
surrounding the young woman’s “coming out.” Camilla and Belinda register the
different ways in which women’s social relationships might threaten an ideological
vision of domestic happiness and heterosexuality that rested on female passivity and selfdenial.
I conclude this thesis by considering how Burney and Edgeworth address
simultaneously issues surrounding women’s same-sex relationships and novel reading, as
they forge virtual (homosocial) relationships with their imagined readers, through their
depiction of textual relationships between characters. The novels present polemical ideas
about women’s female happiness and independence. However, Burney and Edgeworth
register the fact that dominant discourse: defines women as passive, prescribes women’s
happiness in domestic terms, regulates women’s relationships with other women, and
circumscribes, even penalizes, women’s attempts to articulate their experiences. As
Burney and Edgeworth accentuate the pressure exerted by this discourse (on their
characters and on their novels), they implicitly challenge it.
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