Isabelle Bour
WHAT MARIA LEARNED: MARIA EDGEWORTH AND CONTINENTAL FICTION
Abstract:
This essay examines Maria Edgeworth's complex relationship with continental fiction by women writers, starting from a discussion of the advertisement to Belinda (1801), in which Edgeworth somewhat surprisingly praises the fiction of Isabelle de Montolieu (Madame de Crousaz), alongside that of Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney and John Moore. As Edgeworth freely admitted in her correspondence, when reading highly sentimental scenes in fiction, whether that of Montolieu or that of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, for instance, she was overcome by emotion. Her statement about her preferring to read an account of the discovery of the Savage of Aveyron to Isabelle de Charrière's Lettres écrites de Lausanne (Letters from Lausanne) (1785) makes it possible to hypothesize that Edgeworth displaced her libidinal investment in passion onto facts, which are given a specific “voice” in her didacticism. This hypothesis is tested in a study of Belinda and Leonora (1806). Belinda is shown to contain submerged references to Isabelle de Montolieu's most famous novel Caroline de Lichtfield (1786), intertextual links which comment on and subvert the famous Swiss novel. Belinda only shows dysfunctional passion, and the happy resolution is made both theatrical and metafictional, which ensures that happy love is only displayed at a remove. Edgeworth's quick rejection of her protagonist, Belinda Portman, who is an empty signifier for the projection of the passions of others, shows her dim awareness that the cognitive could not stand in for the passionate. Leonora, a response to Germaine de Staël's Delphine (1802), shows sensibility as a deleterious cultural paradigm, as a fiction; this radicalization of the criticism of sensibility, which was a topos of early nineteenth-century literature, is also an oversimplification of Staël's much more ambivalent depiction of sensibility. Leonora is further shown to be a parody of the anonymous Mémoires de Séraphine (1802) and Madame Vildé's Adolphe et Zénobie (1803), two of those “little novels” which the ton loved to discuss and which Edgeworth would have read during her stay in Paris in 1802-03. After the partial failure of her attack on sensibility in Leonora, Edgeworth much more successfully did away with interiority in her Irish tales, in which she turned away from Continental models.
SvD, February 2011
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