MCGIRR, Elaine - Interiorities

Cambridge Histories Online
http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/
The Cambridge History of the English Novel
Edited by Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952
Online ISBN: 9781139013796
Hardback ISBN: 9780521194952
Chapter
5 - Interiorities pp. 80-96
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.007
Cambridge University Press

5
Interiorities
elaine m c girr
Pamela (1740) was not the first novel to start a craze – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
(1719) inspired sequels, pamphlets, and even a restaurant – and nor was it the
first novel to be denounced; but the quality and intensity of attention it
received resonated far beyond that particular book and the characters and
fashions described therein. Pamela, and the controversy it sparked, trans-
formed a loose, inchoate form into the modern novel. Pamela shifted attention
away from events and questions of truthfulness onto character and questions
of believability. Early novels, like Oroonoko and Moll Flanders, made truth
claims, stressing that the events they described really happened.1 Pamela
purported to be a true story as well, but because the stakes were so high –
social advancement through the power of narrative – Pamela’s believability,
rather than Pamela’s fictiveness, took center stage: responses such as Henry
Fielding’s Shamela (1741) argued that Pamela was a hypocrite; he asserted that
her virtue was fictional, not her existence. Pamela’s epistolary format, its
insistent location in the present tense, instantly raised questions of character,
of self-presentation, and of the ability ever really to gain access to the workings
of another person’s mind, in life or fiction. Pamela did not just spark a craze: it
redefined the way both writers and readers approached the novel. Carolyn
Steadman argues that Pamela “is all selfhood, all inside, and [her] depth as a
point of reference for female interiority has been immense.”2 But it was not
only women who viewed both Pamela and Pamela as touchstones. Male
novelists, readers, and even fictional characters were also quick to respond
to the possibilities and potential dangers posed by Pamela’s radical, seemingly
unmediated self-representation. Master and servant: love and labor in the
English industrial age.
After Pamela the question of identity was never far from readers’ minds, and
the difficulty of presenting legible and believable characters plagued authors.
Readers wanted characters who were individuals rather than types, who
had subjective interiority. However, identity, which is personal and public,
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Interiorities
internal and external, is itself an unstable category. As we shall see in Pamela,

identity – wife or whore, Mistress Andrews or Mrs. B. – can be unstable even
when character – Pamela – is fixed. Finally, the furor surrounding Pamela also
reminds us that questions about identity are always also bound up in questions
of representation and interpretation. Pamela’s protestations of her truthful-
ness and innocence raised as many suspicions as they assuaged and sparked a
debate about identity, self-expression, and interpretation still raging today. Is
the self knowable? If so, can that self be reliably communicated? Representing
oneself is always an act of translation or metaphor; interpreting another’s
character is always an act of reading. Bodies and words are made to signify
hearts and minds, but that externalizing process also calls attention to the very
gap it attempts to overwrite.
Debates about the self quickly become debates about the reliability of the
tools available for writing and reading the self. Anxiety about the legibility of
character was not, of course, limited to fiction. But novels, unlike real life or
even drama, could give readers access to both faces and hearts. Reading
character, whether on a page or in the street, is an interpretive act that, as
John Locke argued in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
“depends much less on a belief in essence than upon the empirical data of
appearances and situation.”3
Unfortunately, appearances and situation are nearly always misleading.
Deceitful intentions are thus not the only cause of misreadings. Character is
judged and evaluated by appearances and situations because those are the only
gauges available, but experience – and novels – teach us just how inadequate
those gauges are.
The novel was the perfect medium in which to present individuality and
interiority. It could tackle the question of reading other people and paint
characters who were credible, for it could employ means that were not available
in other media: it could convincingly narrate thoughts, point out interpretive
clues, and describe events from multiple perspectives. Novels created space not
just for complex and contradictory emotions, but for their adequate expression.
The novel could make use of the poetic and imaginative power of language.
Metaphors and similes, comparisons, direct addresses, descriptions, and expli-
cations have force in the novel because readers, unlike theater-goers, are not
presented with visual distractions. The novel can expose what is invisible and
intangible. At the same time, the novel can also imitate reality and encourage
readers to trust its narrative. So Pamela’s epistolary form not only created an
intimate relationship between reader and character, but it also created a
plausible reason for both the heroine’s volubility and her isolation.
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The novel form had other advantages as well. Unlike biography it was not
bound by known or knowable fact. It is no accident that most early novels are
fictional biographies: they are ultimately more satisfying than actual biogra-
phies because they fill in the gaps of what we know by including thoughts,
motives, and conversation. Conversation would be key in the novel’s creation
of characters with lifelike interior depths: characters in novels could speak and
think for themselves in their own distinctive voices. Only in novels can
individuals be truly legible, can external signs be correctly matched with
their interior causes; only in a novel can we know for sure if a woman blushes
from confusion or guilt. This surety is comforting, but also alarming, for while
readers are reassured that the “real” Evelina or Camilla or Pamela can be
known, their travails also remind us of how misleading surfaces can be, and
how prone to error are our judgments.
Providing characters with more voice and providing readers with unme-
diated access to their thoughts may have helped develop legible and recog-
nizable characters, but it did not solve the problem of believability, or
necessarily close the gap between seeming and being. For although Syrena
Tricksy and Shamela Andrews were obliging enough to tell their mothers –
and their readers – what their real thoughts were, thus exposing their true
characters, their illegibility to the men in their stories highlighted the danger
of relying on a single perspective. Starting with Joseph Andrews (1743), his
second response to Pamela, Fielding moved away from Richardson’s intimate
first-person narratives. His omniscient narrators tell readers what characters
do not know or do not want to tell, and Fielding’s tone does not leave the
reader in any doubt as to interpretation. The narrator’s ironic voice punctures
characters’ duplicity and self-deception. Fielding’s narrator directs readers’
responses to characters, both within and without the novel: he teaches us how
to read through misleading surfaces to the “true self” hidden beneath.
Richardson continued to refine his first-person narratives, but he too
worried about misreadings, not least those of readers attracted to his villain
Lovelace. With each novel he added more perspectives. In Clarissa (1747–1748)
he balanced his heroine’s correspondence by including more responses and
opposing viewpoints from the Harlowes as well as Lovelace’s correspondence
with Belford. By his third novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), his hero and
heroine even comment on and respond to each other’s acts of self-
representation. This layering of perspective allowed Richardson to maintain
his intimate focus on “his girls” without repeating the Pamela problem: in
contrast to Pamela’s voice, Clarissa and Harriet’s voices are complemented by
their correspondents, as well as contrasted by others. This matrix of letters
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works to confirm the heroines’ characters and reassure readers that Clarissa’s
and Harriet’s self-representations are accurate portrayals.
Half a century after the Pamela controversy, novelists were still torn
between articulating character from within and drawing it out from an
external perspective. Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778), echoes
Pamela in more than the ingenuous narrative voice of its heroine. But
Burney escaped the Pamela problem: her exemplar of female virtue is beset
by misinterpretation within the novel, preempting and correcting potential
bad readers. Despite the success of Evelina, Burney turns away from the
epistolary form in her later novels, most spectacularly in her last, The
Wanderer (1818). Like Evelina, Juliet’s true identity is obscured – readers do
not even learn her “real” name until the third volume – but here the
comparison ends. Whereas Evelina speaks for herself, Juliet’s inability to
name herself – she is known only as “Ellis” in the novel’s first part – is central
to her inability to tell her own story of paternal abandonment and forced
marriage. She is as voiceless as she is nameless. Burney uses third-person
narration to distance readers from her beleaguered heroine in order to create
pathos and to encourage readers to view Ellis sympathetically. She does not
want readers to identify with her heroine or to see and feel the novel’s events
through her eyes. Interiority is here expressed by obscuring it: instead of
offering unmediated access to Juliet’s inner life, Burney narrates the difficulty
of unburdening oneself.
Problems of believability
Pamela did more than allow a servant to tell her own story of resistance to
sexual predation. Its ambiguity, and the excitement and unease it generated,
stem in part from its exposure of the fundamental insecurity of personal
identity, of the ways in which external signs and associations can impart
new values and assign new characterizations. The novel demonstrates how
identity shifts according to circumstances, and offers readers an unparalleled
glimpse into the heroine’s mind to prove its case. Whereas earlier novels, like
Moll Flanders (1722), were presented as retrospective memoirs – a Life told after
it had been lived – Pamela is written to the moment, in the present tense,
before the heroine’s status is fixed as wife or whore. This ambiguity highlights
the problem of interiority: readers are exposed to characters still in the
making, whose choices and adventures shape and change them. In contrast
Moll Flanders and other, similarly retrospective Lives, suggest that character is
fixed, static, essential.
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Moll Flanders asserts not only its truthfulness – as opposed to fictiveness –

but also common fame: “My True Name is [. . .] well known in the Records, or
Registers,”4 Moll tells readers, reassuring them that her narrative can be cross-
referenced and certified. But it also reassures readers that her narrative has
already happened, that the story is fixed: before the novel even begins, we
know that “in her last Scene at Maryland, and Virginia, many pleasant things
happen’d, which makes that part of her Life very agreeable” (5). There is no
suspense about Moll’s character or her fate: she was born and bred into
wickedness and sin, but grew into penitence. Defoe, claiming status as editor
rather than author, uses his preface to explain the novel’s retrospective present
tense:
Throughout the infinite variety of this Book . . . there is not a wicked Action
in any Part of it, but is first or last rendered Unhappy and Unfortunate: There
is not a superlative Villain brought upon the Stage but either he is brought to
an unhappy End, or brought to be a Penitent: There is not an ill thing
mention’d, but it is condemn’d, even in the Relations, nor a virtuous just
Thing, but it carries its Praise along with it. (3)
Thus, even though his heroine is “made to tell her own Tale” (1) in the present
tense, as if her story were still unfolding, the conclusions that have already
been drawn from them ensure that access to Moll’s “true” thoughts and
feelings are unnecessary, for we already know how to read her. She is an
exemplar, not an individual. Her life has literally been rewritten: “her” original
thoughts and style were unacceptable. The new-dressed Moll is “made” by
Defoe; he explicitly tells readers that he is not negotiating access to someone
else’s real thoughts, feelings, or self-expression. Despite its first-person,
present-tense structure, Moll never speaks for herself in the novel that bears
her name.
In contrast, Pamela tells a story that is as immediate as it is unapologetic.
Pamela’s voice and the structure of Pamela mark its complete divorce both
from idealized romance and from rogue’s tales. Pamela, as Ian Watt argues, is
an individual, with an individuated life story and singular character.5
Singularity, however, is also a reassurance of exceptionality. Pamela, and
the contest over her character, demonstrates not just the dangerous gap
between seeming and being, but also the gap between difference (singularity)
and identity (similarity). Michael McKeon argues that the new bourgeois form
of the novel posed a challenge to the older aristocratic form of the romance:
the novel, with its insistence on verisimilitude (as seen in Richardson’s “epic of
the everyday”) and individuality defines itself against the ideals and universals
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of romance and epic (McKeon, Origins, 20–22, 131–175). Deep characterization

is revolutionary: by making heroes out of private people, and by making
private people knowable, the novel insists that personal merit, rather than
birth, makes worth. As is the case with Pamela, this can be seen as an attack on
class privilege. Pamela tells us as much:
were my life in question, instead of my virtue, I would not wish to involve any
body in the least difficulty for so worthless a poor creature. But, O sir! my soul
is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but
upon a foot with the meanest slave.6
Pamela admits her social “worthlessness,” but asserts the pricelessness of her
soul. She frequently asserts both her independence and her intrinsic worth. As
Mr. B. is also the local justice of the peace, resisting his will should also be read
as resisting the law. Yet Pamela refuses to submit, and claims a status as an
individual and a woman that would normally be denied her – in the romance
tradition, a lady’s maid would not even have a name of her own, but would be
assigned a trait name like Pert or the category name Betty. This individualism is
seen in Pamela making herself into a novel. It is Pamela’s story we are getting,
not that of Mr. B. her social (and sexual) superior. Not only is she our narrator,
as she writes to the moment in her letters and diary, but she quite literally
fashions herself; for instance, she conflates her “story” and her person by
sewing her diary into her petticoats, thus making the tale of her resistance to
sexual predation the physical barrier between herself and Mr. B. Pamela
makes herself legible, and in so doing lays claim to a new identity, a new
status.
Pamela’s “virtue” defines both her sex and her status, and the signification
of this intangible quality changes slightly over the course of the novel. In
Pamela’s conflict with Mr. B., her virtue seems to be little more than her
virginity – the point Fielding makes with Shamela’s “vartue.” However, once
Pamela’s virtuous tale seduces Mr. B. into making her his wife, her “virtue”
becomes something a little less sex-specific; virtue becomes her narrative
voice and her personal merit, intangible qualities that do not disappear after
the marriage night. This virtue is also seductive: Pamela wins over the local
gentry and Lady Davers, convincing all of them that she deserves her new
place in society. This secondary conflict – over status, not sex – is the stage on
which the debate of personal “goodness” rather than inherited “greatness”
described by McKeon is fought and won. Not only is Lady Davers forced to
acknowledge her brother’s misalliance and recognize Pamela as her sister and
equal, but she, prompting readers, is forced to admit that Pamela deserved
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to be elevated from servant to lady. Pamela’s legibility, her ability to make her
heart and her virtue transparent and knowable, inspires both confidence and
love. Her ability to narrate her “self” ennobles Pamela and makes her worthy
of Mr. B.’s honorable addresses.
The perfections of Pamela seem to turn social hierarchy on its head. The
personal qualities of Pamela are measured against the reigning signifiers of
wealth and birth, and hers come out trumps. The dialectical relationship
between the novel and the romance means, however, that while the novel
has progressive impulses that are in conflict with romance ideology, it also
necessarily has conservative impulses that align it with romance, which, after
all, carried more cultural authority than its rival. This is the case in Pamela.
Although her virtue is rewarded, her singularity is emphasized throughout.
Pamela may merit social elevation, but the novel is far from democratic:
nowhere is it suggested that social hierarchy should be abolished, or even that
everyone has equal intrinsic merit. Furthermore, despite her frequent “saucy”
observations about the inadequacies of the nobility, of their faulty educations,
their intemperance, and frequent dullness, Pamela wants nothing more than
to be absorbed into that world. Her gender ensures that she will be, because
the difference is, a man ennobles the woman he takes, be she who she will; and
adopts her into his own rank, be it what it will: but a woman, though never so
nobly born, debases herself by a mean marriage, and descends from her own
rank, to that of him she stoops to marry . . . when a duke lifts a private person
into his own rank, he is still her head, by virtue of being her husband: but,
when a lady descends to marry a groom, is not that groom her head? Does not
that difference strike you? and what lady of quality ought to respect another,
who has set a groom above her? (441–442)
Pamela’s virtue is gendered, something Fielding seized upon in Joseph

Andrews. Her intrinsic worth as a human being can only be valued because
by marrying Mr. B. she gives up her individuality and is subsumed into her
husband’s identity. Pamela becomes, then, not so much the story of a servant
worth as much as a princess – the radical reading – but a much more
conservative plot: the story of status inconsistency, of a “lost” princess
returned to her rightful place. Pamela’s identity is confirmed through mar-
riage to Mr. B.: it is a place she belonged in all along, not a new character she
will assume. When Pamela becomes Mrs. B., she ceases to be the radically
individual subject, a problem Richardson tackles in the continuation of Pamela.
However, her status, her identity, is assured, so narrative focus naturally turns
to more external events and concerns.
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Ultimately, Pamela is an ambiguous novel, and this ambiguity provides

ample space for resistant, parodic, and oppositional readings. But Pamela is
also unambiguously sincere. While the tensions in the plot and form suggest
wildly different interpretations of Pamela, both readings agree on her essential
goodness and encourage the reader to trust her narrative. However, two of
the first responses to Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Eliza
Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741) do challenge her goodness. Both articulate a
cynical belief in the disjunction between self-representation and self, between
seeming and being. Both parodies abandon ambiguity and demand the same
negative interpretation of all acts of female self-representation. Shamela and
Syrena are both expert whores, practiced in the art of deceiving men by
appearing to be what they desire, by appearing virtuous and concealing
their sexual appetites. For Fielding and Haywood, first-person narration is
the least trustworthy form because personal correspondence, whether written
or told, is always a carefully crafted fiction. In this fallen world, Fielding warns,
hypocrisy is the norm, not the exception, and anyone who seems too good to
be true is in reality no better than she should be. But this cuts through the
tricky question of being and seeming as neatly as Richardson’s transparent
heroines and villains: readers can assume characters are the opposite of what
they would seem. Fielding and Haywood are just as didactic as Richardson,
but where he wanted to teach the art of self-expression, they warn of the
danger of deception. Fielding and Haywood are worried about readers falling
prey to fictions. Shamela and Syrena are extreme and cynical responses to
Pamela, but they usefully demonstrate both the public concern with reading
character and the tools at the novelist’s disposal.
Fielding’s great fear is that if supposedly intrinsic qualities, like virtue, can
be learned, then they can be counterfeited or assumed: someone who does not
possess virtue can learn to “act” like someone who does and be rewarded. In
Pamela – as in conduct books – the underlying assumption is that by following
the pattern of virtue (e.g. Pamela) the reader can become truly virtuous.
Fielding is less sure. Shamela’s performance of virtue does not reform her
character, but confirms her in vice. Most troubling is the ease with which she
acts her part: the immediacy and claustrophobia of writing to the moment
leaves no time for rational reflection or space for critical distance.
Acting is central to any understanding of the construction of identity in the
eighteenth century. In Shamela, in his opening letter of false praise, Fielding
has Parson “Tickletext” extol Pamela for the closeness with which “Thought is
everywhere cloathed by the Expression”7 and then reminds us of how tight
Pamela’s country dress is and how often we see her naked – with “pride of
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ornament” cast off. It is a nice conceit – that Richardson’s words perfectly

represent the ideas – but when parsed, we can see the problems inherent in the
metaphor. First, there is the obvious problem that Tickletext himself cannot
escape – the closeness of expression, the immediacy of description, and
detailed descriptions are closer to pornography than moral discourse: “oh! I
feel an Emotion even while I am relating this!” (322) ejaculates the Parson.
Despite Richardson’s claims to the contrary, Pamela was a sexy book;
Richardson’s own affection for his creation turned the scenes of her virtue
in distress into an opportunity for voyeurism. But that is not the only problem
with the clothing analogy. Pamela’s wardrobe is used to chronicle her social
position, from her country maid’s dress to the fashionable silks Mr. B. insists
she wear after their marriage. Throughout the novel, the transformative
power of clothing is highlighted: Pamela is assumed to be what she wears.
Her country garb “metamorphoses” her and makes her unrecognizable to her
friends and master. Her ability to change clothes reminds us that identity is not
fixed but rather assumed, and, moreover, that clothes are often false symbols
of status. Both Pamela and Mr. B. disguise themselves frequently: Pamela is
not a country maid; Mr. B. is not a maid. If clothes, the most external of
signifiers, have such power to confer identity, then what need is there for
interiority? Indeed, if clothes really do make the man (or woman), then is there
any interior self to express?
Pamela raises fundamental questions about the legibility of identity.
Pamela argues that it is possible to articulate the self through novelization:
Pamela makes herself known by transforming her distracting and unclear
physical body into a coherent and readable text. Pamela’s papers are both
her armour and her unveiling; they keep her physically safe long enough for
first Mr. B. and then Lady Davers to gain greater intimacy. This tantalizing
promise – the transmutation of identity into word – was as frightening as it
was intoxicating, for any act of translation leaves room for distortion, deceit,
or mistake. The novel seemed to provide an index to humanity, and
reassured readers that true character could be divined and adequately
rewarded. But at the same time the novel’s patent recourse to narrative
devices reminded readers that the dream of legibility of character, of self,
was fiction after all.
Problems of authority
The impossibility of ever really transcribing the self is humorously described
in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1751), whose heroine, Arabella,
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wants to be as transparent as a character in a novel. She instructs her maid

Lucy as follows:
Recount all my words and actions, even the smallest and most inconsiderable,
but also all my thoughts, however instantaneous; relate exactly every change
of my countenance; number all my smiles, half-smiles, blushes, turnings pale,
glances, pauses, full-stops, interruptions; the rise and falling of my voice;
every motion of my eyes; and every gesture which I have used for these ten
years past; nor omit the smallest circumstance that relates to me.8
Arabella’s imperious command is the logical expectation of a confirmed novel-

reader. She is not questing after fame or even feminine agency, but trans-
parency: she longs to be legible, for her self to be clear to her readers. She
wants her external signs to be itemized and glossed so that their significance
can be known. That this task is impossible is at once the source of the novel’s
humour and also its pathos.
The novel’s increasing focus on interior life goes beyond contemporary
anxiety about hypocrisy and acting. The novel was engaged in serious debate
about the very nature of human existence, and raised many of the same
questions about the nature of the self as did the “serious” genres of moral
philosophy and biography. Debate about the nature and meaning of human-
kind was not new to the eighteenth century, but John Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding signaled a paradigm shift by arguing that consciousness
begins as a blank slate – without innate ideas – and is formed through
experience, through sensation and reflection. Humanity, therefore, is made
by its surroundings, education, and relationships. Furthermore, if conscious-
ness is the defining feature of selfhood, then moral responsibility – virtue – is
fully attributable to the subject, rather than to fate.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) tackles the
same existential problems with gusto and provocative humor. Tristram, a
first-person narrator displaced from his own “life,” makes light of the impos-
sibility of ever expressing, let alone knowing, the self. Laurence Sterne uses
Tristram to ask what constitutes a character or a life. Sterne argues that the
only way to understand a character is to follow his mind through its musings
and associations. Therefore his novel does not narrate his hero’s coming of
age, or even his picaresque misadventures, but rather allows Tristram to
express whatever seems relevant to him and to share the stories, experiences,
smells, and books that made him. As John Locke explained in his 1693
reflections on education: “the little and almost insensible impressions on our
tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences.”9 Tristram is
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not in fact displaced from his fictional Life, which famously digresses from
his conception and does not get around to his birth until the end of the
third volume: the unwound clock, the pre-nuptial agreement, and the bad
weather are at the heart of Tristram’s character. Likewise, Uncle Toby’s
centrality in Tristram’s life means that Toby should be the central figure in
his Life.
Digression, then, is not losing track of the narrative, for it is the narrative:
I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such
intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and
progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine,
in general, has been kept a-going; – and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going
these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with
life and good spirits.10
Tristram’s digressions, like the cogs in a clock, may appear to be flying off in

separate directions, but they combine perfectly to move the narrative – and
time – forward. The chapter on digressions, then, is a narrative version of
winding Mrs. Shandy’s clock. And just as winding the clock was central to
Tristram’s conception, so, then, are digressions central to his Life. But
Tristram’s digressions are more than narrative foreplay. Digression, Sterne
teaches us through Tristram Shandy, is the purest expression of character
because it exposes the intricate web of allusions and associations that makes
up one’s frame of reference. By exposing the inner workings of his mind,
Tristram hopes to explain himself and make himself legible to others – a
project in which he, like the Female Quixote, is doomed to fail.
Tristram, like one of Richardson’s heroines, writes in the first person and
the present tense. He is doing his best to write to the moment, the difficulty of
which is comically epitomized by Tristram’s father, Walter. Walter’s attempts
to complete the Tristrapaedia are always doomed to failure because his son
grows faster than he can write. While the Tristrapaedia is an affectionate jab at
the logical absurdity of writing to the moment, Sterne takes the narrative
conceit to its logical conclusion. Tristram is writing his own life in the present
tense – not retrospectively telling the story of a single episode, but telling the
story of his whole life while he is still living it. Therefore Tristram’s narrative
can have no direction, no clear trajectory, because the end has not yet
happened. Tristram’s Life and Opinions will only end with his life, and no
man can foresee his own death.
The opacity of identity celebrated in Tristram Shandy reassures readers that
the novel need not smooth over epistemological failures, but can revel in
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them. Life, and indeed Lives, may not travel in a straight line, but beauty,
poetry, humor, friendship, and love are found in the serpentines and switch-
backs. Furthermore, Tristram’s inability to narrate his history is ultimately
profoundly illuminating: where moral philosophy and biography struggle, The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy offers a method for describing a life and
exposing character that is both effective and entertaining.
Problems of interpretation
The eponymous heroine of Evelina (1778) faces a different problem from
Tristram Shandy. She appears all too easy to read and to interpret, and
those about her constantly judge her character based on appearance and
situation, circumstances that are always against her. Evelina unwittingly yet
continually finds herself in the wrong company, in the wrong dress, and at the
wrong door. Her ignorance of social custom is interpreted variously as levity,
insensibility, and rudeness. With so many others all too ready to ascribe bad
character and motives to Evelina, and with the rules of decorum conspiring to
keep her silent, the epistolary format offers Burney’s heroine her only oppor-
tunity of self-expression.
Like Pamela, the plot of Evelina describes the testing and ultimate discovery
of a young woman’s identity. The novel charts her development from a
nobody to a recognized and recognizable somebody. Whereas the status of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is confirmed on the title-page, Evelina’s status is
far murkier. She is made vulnerable to misreadings because she can lay claim
to an individual subjectivity only; her mysterious history separates her from
the usual markers of class and family identity. Evelina’s name – the first clue to
her identity – derives from her mother’s maiden name, Evelyn. Because her
father will not own her, she cannot use her real surname, Belmont. But to use
her mother’s surname would admit the illegitimacy everyone assumes for her.
So her guardian Villars creates a new identity for her: Anville. Despite
Margaret Doody’s attention to Anville as an (imperfect) anagram of Evelina,11
it might be more useful to think of the suggestive connections in the surnames
found in the novel: Vill-ars, Or-Ville, and An-Ville. This triangular relationship –
Evelina, her “more-than father,” and her “more-than brother” – represents a
natural grouping whose similarity of character is represented by the similarity
of name. To be sure, Doody’s argument about the importance of maternal
inheritance and Burney’s (and Evelina’s) refusal to abandon autonomous
female identity seems absolutely central, not only to Evelina, but to any
investigation of the translation of interiority into visible and readable signs.
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Although Carolyn Evelyn died, she lives on through Evelina: it is the daugh-
ter’s marked resemblance to the mother – external signifiers, not interiority –
that finally wins the day. By inheriting her mother’s face as well as name,
Evelina can finally prove her identity, and reclaim her rightful place in the
world. Evelina narrates the complex relationship between interior subjectivity
and external signifiers in a Lockean world. Knowing and/or reading character
is of vital importance, but as Tristram and Arabella likewise discover, the self
is always mediated through external signs, associations, and surroundings.
Polly Green was not only recognized as Miss Belmont but believed herself to
be Miss Belmont because she was presented as such. Burney’s neat resolution
argues that external signifiers such as circumstances and associations might
cause confusion and mistaken identification, but that external signifiers will
also lead careful observers to the truth.
Evelina is clearly troubled about her incomplete identity, signing her first
letter to Villars “Evelina --- -----.” The blank, as Doody and other critics have
noted, links Evelina to the “Blank” in the dedicatory poem, connecting the
heroine to the “author of [Frances Burney’s] Being.” But it also has more
troubling connections to eighteenth-century figurations of female sex and the
feminine gender. She does not simply sign off “Evelina,” as she does elsewhere
in the novel: she adds a dash to signify the missing family name. The dash
signifies a lack, an absence: it is not too much of a stretch to connect it to that
other “lack,” female genitalia. In this reading, Evelina, because she lacks a
secure place in the patriarchy, is reduced to the sexual.
This is a recurring theme in Burney’s novels. In The Wanderer, and to some
extent in Cecilia and Camilla, Burney dramatizes the near impossibility of
achieving female “self-dependence” and maintaining female respectability.
And it is not just the punctuation that makes this point. Because she cannot
confidently assign herself a place in the world she has entered, Evelina is
consistently classed with more unfortunate and/or less virtuous women –
women who live by their “nothings.” Lovel and Willoughby assume that
because she is “nobody” she is therefore available for insult and sexual
predation. Evelina is slighted and neglected at Clifton Hill because its fashion-
able inhabitants (excepting Lord Orville) think her missing surname makes
her a nobody. But this is the least troubling of Evelina’s misadventures; it is
much worse when anyone actually does take notice of her. She is mistaken for
an actress and a prostitute. Willoughby attempts to take advantage of her lack
of protection. And less immediately dangerous is the assumption that she
would marry her insufferable cousin Branghton or Mr. Smith; that a girl
whose only dowry is her beauty must sell and sell quickly. Evelina draws
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Interiorities
attention to Evelina’s lifelike, interior depths by narrating the pain caused by

ignoring interiority. No one within the novel acknowledges Evelina’s right to
have her own thoughts, feelings, or soul: she is a blank to be filled in as the
interests of others determine. Burney’s moral is clear: Evelina’s story may be
singular, but her plight is all too common.
Evelina is Burney’s only epistolary novel, and the only one to be written in
the first person. In the preface to Camilla (1796) Burney draws a distinction
between the historian or biographer and the novelist, between the narration of
actions and the painter of interiority: “The historian of life finds less of
difficulty and of intricacy to develop, in its accidents and adventures, than
the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes.” 12
Mediated self-expression
In later novels Burney exposes the hearts of her heroines by combining the
disclosure of first-person narration with the contextualizing gaze of a third-
person narrator. Camilla, Cecilia, and Juliet express themselves indirectly
through an omniscient narrator. The direct speech and thoughts of the
heroines are mediated through, and combined with, narratorial commentary,
blurring the boundaries between character and narrator. This meeting of
external and internal, this free indirect discourse, combines the intimacy of
first-person narration with the objectivity and reliability of third-person narra-
tion. It allows the novelist to document his or her character’s feelings and
clearly and unambiguously to map them to physical expression or utterance,
or to mark and explain the disruption between body, word, and emotion. By
speaking through the narrator, characters are freed from charges that they are
crafting their own fictions – being Shamelas – yet still given an authorial space
from which to speak directly to readers and in their own distinctive voices.
Free indirect discourse was a popular and largely successful solution to the
problems of interpretation, authority, and believability I have detailed above.
Free indirect discourse not only lends narrative authority to subjective
utterance, but also creates a channel for unvoiced and unspeakable thoughts;
it allows characters like Burney’s to be subversively witty, judgmental, and
knowing without losing the appearance of, and reputation for, sociability.
Free indirect discourse in this vein, which Helen Dry describes as a “narrated
monologue” that “might represent a transcript of a character’s conscious
thoughts,”13 is perhaps best employed in Jane Austen’s novels, from demon-
strations of Elizabeth Bennet’s ready wit to Fanny Price’s thoughtful rumina-
tions. Free indirect discourse can also illuminate characters like Emma
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elaine mcgirr
Woodhouse, who are used to expressing themselves, but often mean more, or
at least better, than they say.14 Despite asserting that Emma would be a
“heroine no-one but myself will much like,”15 and whose social superiority
can be offputting, particularly for modern readers, Austen works hard to
contextualize, explain, and offset Emma’s faults. Her use of free indirect
discourse collapses the potential distance between reader and heroine and
creates a space for Emma’s self-awareness and interiority:
With Tuesday came the agreeable prospect of seeing him again, and for a
longer time than hitherto; of judging of his general manners, and by infer-
ence, of the meaning of his manners towards herself; of guessing how soon it
might be necessary for her to throw coldness into her air.16
The unreferenced pronoun “herself” immediately introduces Emma’s sub-

jectivity. Moving quickly and seamlessly from external description to inter-
iorized thoughts, the novel allows readers to gain both subjective and
objective views of its heroine – to undergo the process of self-discovery
with Emma.
Emma’s isolation and superiority risk alienating her not just from the
society of Hartfield, but from her self as well. However, despite opening the
novel with a playful admission of her heroine’s “disposition to think a little too
well of herself” (1), Austen’s use of free indirect discourse rather emphasizes
the fact that Emma is only too aware of her faults and failings, including her
vain disposition. Nowhere is this self-awareness more evident than after the
disastrous trip to Box Hill. When Mr. Knightley reprimands her for insulting
Miss Bates, “Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off”
(339), but the sting to her conscience went deep:
A whole evening of back-gammon with her father, was felicity to it. There,
indeed, lay real pleasure, for there she was giving up the sweetest hours of the
twenty-four to his comfort; and feeling that, unmerited as might be the
degree of his fond affection and confiding esteem, she could not, in her
general conduct, be open to any severe reproach. As a daughter, she hoped
she was not without a heart. She hoped no one could have said to her, “How
could you be so unfeeling to your father? – I must, I will tell you truths while I
can.” Miss Bates should never again – no, never! If attention, in future, could
do away the past, she might hope to be forgiven. She had been often remiss,
her conscience told her so; remiss, perhaps, more in thought than fact;
scornful, ungracious. (443–444)
Despite the third-person tags, this passage narrates Emma’s thoughts and
gives them vent – “Miss Bates should never again –.” This passage does not
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Interiorities
merely describe the state of Emma’s heart but narrates the process of her self-
examination and self-reproach. Rather than allow Emma to announce her
penitence directly to readers, which would trigger problems of believability, it
is folded into the narrator’s moral compass and voice.
Emma’s self-reflection and knowingness offer one index of how much
novelistic representation of psychological depth had changed since Pamela.
But her obsession with explaining herself, and her repeated frustrations at
being mistaken and misunderstood, also suggest that nothing had changed.
Emma, like Arabella or Evelina, is still frustrated by her inability to make
herself known and understood. Evelina suffers in part because the language of
self-expression available to her – the swoons and blushes so effective for
Pamela – has become hackneyed through repetition and satire and is no
longer trusted as an authentic index of “real” feeling. Women blush, we are
reminded again and again, through guilt as well as innocence, and innocence
can be “put on” like a mask or theatrical role. The problem for Burney’s and
Austen’s heroines is not that they do not have a “stable self” to articulate, but
that there is no reliable, shared language with which to express themselves.
For self-expression to be “authentic,” and believable, it has to be spontaneous,
personal, and unperformed. However, anything that is spontaneous, personal,
and unperformed is also illegible. Once a language becomes legible, it also
resonates as contrived and false and can only articulate a role, rather than an
“essential” self. Interiority, then, is always vexed by expression. Access to
hearts and minds, thoughts and feelings, is only ever available through fiction,
because interiority must be brought to the surface, and psychological depth
flattened out into text, in order to be made legible.
Notes
1. For more on truth claims, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the
English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) and Michael
McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002).
2. Carolyn Steadman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age
(Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 164.
3. Peter H. Nidditch, Introduction to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. viii.
4. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr
(Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 7.
5. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1957), pp. 135–173.
95

elaine mcgirr
6. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Ann Doody (Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 197.
7. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (London:
Penguin Books, 1965), p. 321.
8. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel and Margaret Ann
Doody (London: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 121–122.
9. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan
Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), p. 10.
10. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed.
Howard Anderson (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 164.
11. Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 40–41.
12. Fanny Burney, Camilla, ed. Edward Allen Bloom and Lillian Bloom (Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 7.
13. Helen Dry, “Syntax and Point of View in Jane Austen’s Emma,” Studies in
Romanticism 16 (1977), 87–99, 88.
14. See Daniel P. Gunn, “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in
Emma,” Narrative, 12: 1 (2004), 35–54.
15. James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman
(Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 157.
16. Jane Austen, Emma (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 176.
96


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Cambridge Histories Online

The Cambridge History of the English Novel

Edited by Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952

Online ISBN: 9781139013796

Hardback ISBN: 9780521194952

5 - Interiorities pp. 80-96

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.007

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

internal and external, is itself an unstable category. As we shall see in Pamela,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Moll Flanders asserts not only its truthfulness – as opposed to ﬁctiveness –

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

of romance and epic (McKeon, Origins, 20–22, 131–175). Deep characterization

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Pamela’s virtue is gendered, something Fielding seized upon in Joseph

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Ultimately, Pamela is an ambiguous novel, and this ambiguity provides

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

ornament” cast oﬀ. It is a nice conceit – that Richardson’s words perfectly

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

wants to be as transparent as a character in a novel. She instructs her maid

Arabella’s imperious command is the logical expectation of a conﬁrmed novel-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Tristram’s digressions, like the cogs in a clock, may appear to be ﬂying oﬀ in

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

attention to Evelina’s lifelike, interior depths by narrating the pain caused by

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

The unreferenced pronoun “herself” immediately introduces Emma’s sub-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

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