Like a Spoiled Actress off the Stage: Anti-Theatricality, Nature, and the Novel

TERESA MICHALS

arly-modern anti-theatrical pamphleteers claimed that the theatre turns men into women. Eighteenth-century anti-theatrical novelists claim that the theatre turns women into actressesthose in the fashionable boxes as well as those on the stage. That is, while early-modern anti-theatricality often focuses on anxieties about the patriarchal man, the anti-theatricality of eighteenth-century novels more often focuses on anxieties about the domestic woman. Moreover, I will argue that eighteenth-century novelists mobilize this anti-theatrical rhetoric not only to promote the domestic feminine ideal, but also to promote the domestic novel as a genre. This changed rhetoric is made possible by the widespread (although not total) replacement of boys with women in the Restoration theatre onwards. More broadly, it reflects changes in both the nature of political authority and the political authority of Nature. The anti-theatrical rhetoric of the early-modern period has been central to Renaissance New Historicist criticism since the 1980s. More recently, the anti-theatrical rhetoric of the eighteenth century has received sustained and productive attention from critics of drama such as Susan Staves, while Gillian Russell has placed such rhetoric in the wider context of fashionable sociability, a concept that links institutions such as Drury Lane and the theatricality of the fine lady and the fashionable world in
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general.1 Margaret Doody and Emily Allen have helped to open up antitheatricality in the eighteenth-century novel as a subject of critical inquiry. This essay pursues this connection between anti-theatricality and the novel, a connection that seems especially rich because it links characteristically early modern and eighteenth-century genres to historically changing ideas of gender. In particular, anti-theatricality in the novel foregrounds the eighteenth centurys increasing association of the private and the authentic: both the domestic novel and the domestic woman scorn the public stage. Written across half a century, three novels persistently explore the relationship of gender to theatricality, and the generic relationship of the novel itself to the theatre: Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1742), Frances Burneys Evelina (1778), and Maria Edgeworths Belinda (1801). All three works foreground the dubious status of the novel as a genre, and all three try to strengthen the novels claim to social and critical respectability by distancing themselves and their eponymous heroines from theatricality. In terms of both gender and genre, all three equate the private with the authentic, furthering the popular connection between the domestic woman and the domestic novel. Although all three of these novels are anti-theatrical, they each have a different relation to theatres, outside of their pages as well as within them. Pamela was adapted for the stage multiple times. I will look closely at Pamela. A Comedy., a theatrical adaptation from 1741. By casting a crossdressed man as Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela. A Comedy presents the un-domestic woman as a female impersonator, a farcical stage dame. This idea remains important in Evelina, which translates stage conventions to the pages of the novel.2 The outrageously theatrical Madame Duvall is in effect another stage dame: although she is Evelinas biological grandmother, she dresses, speaks, and moves like a male comic actor in drag.3 Like Mrs. Jewkes, she was also played by a man, although in a private domestic setting rather than on a public stage. A letter from Susanna Burney to her sister Frances enthusiastically describes Samuel Crisp personifying Madame Duvall: Monday Night after Supper we were all made very merry by Mr. Crisps suffering his wig to be turnd the hind part before, & my Cap put over it Hettys Cloak& Mrs. Gasts Apron & Rufflesin this ridiculous trim he danced a Minuet wth Hetty, personifying Made Duval . . . the Maids were calld in.4 Belinda offers a contrast both to these two novels and to earlier antitheatrical rhetoric. Like Mrs. Jewkes and Madame Duvall, Lady Delacour is vilified because she is theatrical rather than domestic, a public presence in London rather than a private blessing in the homebut she is no stage dame. Rather, as Russell suggests, Lady Delacour is a haunting trace of

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the feminization of the public sphere that marked the 1760s and 1770s. Lady Delacour has the visibility enjoyed by not only women writers but also women in public culture, as actresses, entrepreneurs, and, indeed, as women of fashion.5 In comparison to early-modern anti-theatrical writing, the most terrifying figure that Belinda can imagine is not a man in womans clothing but rather this woman in womans clothing. While Clarence Hervey in a hoop skirt is perfectly acceptable, Lady Delacour in the horribly expensive gowns that turn domestic spaces into public theatre haunts the novel like a specter. Nancy Armstrong has linked the growing popularity of the domestic novel to the growing popularity of the ideal of the domestic woman in the eighteenth century. An increasing number of conduct books targeted the middle classs hunger for guidance on how to appear respectable, on how to distinguish itself from both the dissolute working classes below them and the equally dissolute aristocrats above them. As Armstrong argues, eighteenth-century novels improve on the conduct books formula by advocating a similar set of values in a more compelling form. From Pamela onwards, the domestic novel offers a compelling focus on the domestic womans feelings as well as on her outward behavior, on virtue and desire as well as respectability and appearance. There is some tension, however, between this claim to create a world of feeling that is authentic because it is private and such novels continuing conduct-book-like respect for public opinion, for the world of outward show. This public display of private goodness reflects the doubleness that Diedre Lynch explores more generally in her study of the increasing importance of novelistic character in market culture. She points to the doubleness of those loaded words, like character, that calls attention to that externalizing of meaning that accommodates what is personal to social scrutiny, that describes a private process as if it occurred in public.6 The domestic novels anti-theatrical language reflects this tension. Emily Allen has remarked that the novels rise depends on the theatres fall.7 Like Armstrong, she argues that in contrast to the theatricality of public display, eighteenth-century novels hope to corner the market on the private, to become the premiere guidebooks on how to feel as well as how to behave in a domestic setting. Allen claims that this novelistic ideal of the private domestic woman is also an attack on theatricality. Discussing the anti-theatricality of Frances Burneys Evelina, for example, she describes the generic coding of the novel as an appropriate inwardness that deliberately opposes the theatres inauthentic display or externality. Allen examines the generic implications for Evelina of the privatizing shift from

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spectacular public entertainments to novel reading among the increasingly middle-class audiences of the eighteenth century.8 As Allen suggests, Evelina attacks theatricality rather than the theatre itself. That is, the problem is not so much playing a part as being caught playing to the audience, not acting but affectation. This deliberately public self is not identified with professional actors alone; indeed, as Russell has argued, such fashionable sociability could become a dangerous rival to the theatre proper. For example, both Evelina and Belinda stress the idea that fashionable audiences come to the theatre to see and to be seen, and stress the ways in which the visual appeal of this audience could be imagined as eclipsing that of the professionals. As Evelinas Mr. Lovell remarks, one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out ones acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. Pray, most affectedly fixing his eyes upon a diamond ring on his little finger, pray what was the play tonight?9 In this moment Mr. Lovell seems to try to turn Drury Lane into the Pantheon, described by Russell as the sublime of Georgeian sociability, a theatre without actors, in which the audience could most successfully perform itself.10 Although Evelina rejects such theatricality, she enthusiastically attends the theatre, with the narrators evident approval. And the first actor Evelina sees on stage is David Garrick, the icon of a new, more naturalistic acting style: O, my dear Sir, in what raptures am I returned? Well may Mr. Garrick be so celebrated, so universally admiredI had not any idea of so great a performer.11 Straub describes the significance of Garricks innovations: the new, natural style in acting . . . demanded that an actor behave as if unaware that he was being watchedas if he were not, in short, a spectacle.12 As Allen notes, Evelinas raptures about Garrick are a celebration of the natural [that] is central to the novels elevation of Evelinas overdetermined artlessness.13 Garricks easy, free motion is the opposite of Mr. Lovells affected flourishing of his diamond pinky ring: his actionat once so graceful and so free! His voiceso clear, so melodious, yet so wonderfully various in its tones! Such animation!every look speaks!14 Garrick is like the unsophisticated but unfailingly graceful Evelina herself, the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire.15 Garricks untheatrical theatre is like a domestic space, one presided over with graceful ease by a good woman who makes the performance of a cultural ideal look like Nature itself. So great a performer makes performance itself seem natural: such ease! such vivacity in his manner! such grace in his motions! such fire and meaning in his eyes!I could hardly believe he had studied a written part, for every word seemed to be uttered from the impulse of the moment.16

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In addition to registering the vogue for naturalistic acting, however, Evelina also reflects, and reflects on, a very different theatrical practice: the presence on the stage of cross-dressed men playing comic dame roles. The novel draws on conventions of the dame role to represent a woman who does not conform to the domestic ideal. In contrast to the naturalistic actor, the eighteenth-century stage dame revels in the space between performer and performance. Pointing to the popularity of such cross-dressed roles as Samuel Footes Lady Pentweazel, Doody notes the significant place of the dame role: transvestism is a feature of eighteenthcentury theatre, leading to the pantomime dame role as we know it.17 Kristina Straub sees a movement from imitation to travesty in such male theatrical cross-dressing, one reflected in Garricks own practice:
Later in the eighteenth century, male theatrical cross-dressing had become more a travesty of femininity than an imitation. Drag roles such as Sir John Brute were as popular in Garricks repertoire as in Cibbers, but responses to them suggest that performances tended to emphasize the contrast between the actors masculinity and the femininity he put on.18

Laurence Senelick also describes Garrick in womens clothes in terms of parody: the actor-manager parodies womens fashions by wearing a most extraordinary ladys cap ornamented with such a plume of feathers, ribbons of various colours, oranges and lemons, flowers, etc., so formidable a toupee that the audience gave repeated bursts o laughter.19 Garricks prompter at Drury Lane remembers the audiences response to such burlesque femininity: when [Garrick] was in a womans cloaths he had a head drest with feathers and fruit, as extravagant as possible to burlesque the present mode of dressing. It had a monstrous Effect. Russell describes the amazing headdresses of the cross-dressed Garrick and Foote as an assertion of masculinity: these attempts to travesty the woman of fashion indicate the threat she was perceived to be, both to the theatre as an institution in the manly public sphere, and to the gendered identity of Foote and Garrick as men of the theatre.20 Such men in womens clothing are funny because they parody a certain version of public, fashionable femininity. Moreover, as we shall see, a woman can also trigger this satirical laughter if she offers the same implicit contrast between a domestic ideal of femininity and a public, theatrical presence. Theatrical women are in this sense as unnatural as stage dames, a female body being no guarantee of a feminine identity.

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Margaret Doody explains how the figure of the stage dame shapes the character of Evelinas outrageous grandmother: Madame Duvalvain, overdressed, highly painted, simpering, and rude-has all the traditional larger-than-life qualities of the stage dame.21 Madame Duval is modeled on a femininity that is preeningly theatrical rather than properly interiorized. Although they cannot rival Garricks memorable fruit-and-feather extravaganza, Madame Duvall talks incessantly about her elaborate wigs and headdresses. She represents a kind of femininity that Evelina herself rejects at first sight, and must continue rejecting vigorously throughout the novel. Acknowledging Madame Duval as her blood relation is nearly a fate worse than death:
I heard no more: amazed, frightened, and unspeakably shocked, an involuntary exclamation of Gracious Heaven! escaped me, and, more dead than alive, I sunk into Mrs. Mirvans arms. But let me draw a veil over a scene too cruel for a heart so compassionately tender as yours; it is sufficient that you know this supposed foreigner proved to be Madame Duval,the grandmother of your Evelina!22

More dead than alive, Evelina rejects the supposed foreigner. English by birth, Madame Duval has become French by acting a part as well as by marrying a Frenchman. Although Evelina is distressed by Captain Mirvans crude Franco phobia, in every scene with Madame Duvall she herself embodies an opposition between true English womanhood and inauthentic French theatricality that is equally stark. For example, Evelinas natural color contrasts pointedly to Madame Duvalls outrageous rouge. Her blushes are the outward sign of her otherwise inexpressibly true femininity. As Lord Orville puts it, the difference of natural and artificial colour seems to me . . . that indescribable something, which, even now that I see it, wholly surpasses all my powers of expression.23 Like Garricks flashing eyes, Evelinas blushes are that indescribable something that establishes the difference between the natural and the inauthentic. While Evelinas blushes express her true femininity, Madame Duvalls make-up calls her very humanity into question. As Doody points out, when thrown into a ditch in a brutal practical joke Madame Duvall is both grotesque and comic, like the stage dame. She hardly looked human, we are told, but to the audience within the novel, she is screamingly funny: her face was really horrible; for the pomatum and powder from her head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which, with her rouge, made so frightful a mixture, that she hardly looked human. The servants were ready to die with laughter the moment they saw her.24

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When Madame Duvalls rouge mixes with her tears, the result is not pathos but explosive laughter. A brief look at Early Modern anti-theatricality reveals just how much changed between the time of the stage dame and the time when boys routinely appeared on stage in womens clothing, not to draw laughter, but to play serious female roles. Male cross-dressing in the early modern theatre does not reflect an equation of the private and the authentic. That is, it does not contrast a public and inauthentic version of identity to a domestic ideal. Indeed, in discussing the conventional publicness of aristocratic bodies, Thomas King argues that the periods most highlyvalued version of identity is located in the public space of the court and constituted by the gaze of the monarch.25 What matters most in this context is not the domestic woman but rather the patriarchal man. Although the commercial nature of public theatres (in contrast to court performances) did cause concern, early modern anti-theatricality expresses most strongly a gender anxiety that is directly related to theological defenses of political power.26 Although it is also focused on costume, this version of anti-theatricality raises a different set of issues about the relation of clothes, the body, and gender than does the later dame role. In Laura Levines influential formulation, early modern anti-theatrical pamphlet wars express a fullfledged fear of dissolution, expressed in virtually biological terms, that costume can structurally transform men into women.27 The male actors who appeared on stage playing serious womens roles triggered profound anxieties about the instability of patriarchal identity. As Thomas Laquer has argued, masculinity was central to patriarchal authority, but this masculinity was not grounded in a two-sex model of the human body.28 More recently, Will Fisher examines Renaissance handkerchiefs, codpieces, beards, and hairstyles, arguing that Renaissance anti-theatricality has everything to do with the prosthetic nature of gender difference in the period, off-stage as well as on.29 He argues that early modern masculinity is at once socially constructed and divinely ordained. That is, although gender differences are largely created by prosthetic devices rather than by bodies themselves, God still wants everyone to keep the right prosthesis firmly attached. In this account as in Levines, early modern cross-dressing triggers violent anxieties about patriarchal masculinity, not satirical laughter. Anti-theatrical elements in eighteenth-century novels work differently than do these attacks on the early modern stage. Pamela and Belinda share some of the concerns outlined by Allen and Doody. They share both Evelinas desire to elevate the novel as a guide to private life and its complex relation to the theatre. Both Pamela and Belinda offer to do their part to

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further the triumph of private, domestic, middle-class virtue over public, aristocratic, theatrical display. In this sense the title of Maria Edegworths original sketch for Belinda, Abroad and at Home, is typical of the domestic novel, marking, as Susan Greenfield notes, an opposition between the public, or artificial female self, and the private, or genuine one.30 Both Pamela and Belinda begin with well-known, interlocking expressions of generic defensiveness. Richardson famously insists that he is a mere editor rather than a novelist, the compiler of a series of letters upon the most important and entertaining subjects, in genteel life rather than a salacious trafficker in impure images.31 Although she invokes Richardson as an eminent novelist forebear, Burney too prefers to call herself an editor rather than a novelist. She calls novel-reading itself an incurable disease, one that can be palliated at best by relatively inoffensive fictions such as her own:
Since the distemper they [novels] have spread seems incurable, since their contagion bids defiance to the medicine of advice or reprehension, and since they are found to baffle all the mental art of physic, save what is prescribed by the slow regimen of Time, and bitter diet of Experience; surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged than contemned.32

Pointing to Burney as Burney pointed to Richardson, Edgeworth too apologizes for her novel by denying that it is one:
The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel. Were all novels like those of madame de Crousaz, Mrs Inchbald, miss Burney, or Dr Moore, she would adopt the name of novel with delight: But so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination, that it is to be hoped the wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable, and not fastidious.33

If the rise of the novel depends on the fall of the theatre, then the novel also inherits the theatres suspect status, the suspicion surrounding its claims to combine moral instruction with popular pleasure. Ironically, one marker of the cultural success of the novel is its increasing tendency to draw the kind of criticism once identified with the theatre. For example, as Kristina Straub remarks, in the second half of the eighteenth century the focus of moral concern for conduct-books intended for domestic servants

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shifts from the one to the other: plays are the most widely distrusted genre in Samuel Richardsons generation, with novels assuming a comparable role by the end of the eighteenth century.34 Yet despite their opening claims to provide moral instruction, both Pamela and Belinda find themselves on stage, entangled with the theatre itself as well as with broader issues of public performance, commerce, and authenticity. Pamela literally crosses over to a London theatre, and theatrical elements dominate Belinda. With its stage adaptations, parodies, painted fans and other trendy consumer goods, the Pamela media event reminds us how enmeshed in the marketplace were even the most didactic novels. Richardsons title-page declares that Pamelas letters are published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes, but as he and so many others reaped their profits, that didactic intention could come to seem as fictitious as his epistolary servant-girl herself.35 Pamelas profits raised the issue of theatricality outside of the novel, just as Pamelas profits raise this issue within it. Many of Pamelas characters and first readers remark on a problem of genre as well as of character: the problem of deciding whether Pamela herself is either a virtuous novelist who saves both herself and Mr. B. through her writing, the kind of successful didactic author that Burney and Edgeworth will aspire to become, or a vile actress who theatrically manipulates him into a spectacularly profitable marriage. Nancy Armstrong has celebrated Pamela as a novelist, persuasively describing the new structure of desire that Pamelas epistolary inwardness creates within the novel. When Mr. B. threatens to strip Pamela, for example, he wants to see her letters and the inner feelings that these letters represent even more than he wants to see her body: Are they [the letters] hidden in your garters about your knees? Ive never undressed a girl in my life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela.36 I would suggest that Pamelas textually-produced desirability suggests not merely the rise of the novel, but also the fall of the theatre. Mr. B himself describes this problem in generic terms: if Pamela is a novelist, then she is sincere. She is Mr. Bs collaborator, and a good future wife:
Why, said he, tell me truly, have you not continued your account till now? . . . Thats my good girl, said he, I love sincerity at my heart. And you will greatly oblige me, to show me voluntarily what you have written. I long to see the particulars of your plot. . . . As I have furnished you with a subject, I think I have a title to see how you have manage it.

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Besides, there is such a pretty air of romance, as you tell your story, in your plots, and my plots, that I shall be better directed how to wind up the catastrophe of the pretty novel.37

In this moment the pretty novel and the pretty Pamela are one and the same, sincere and therefore desirable. They both should be welcomed into any domestic space; marriage is the natural catastrophe of this story. On the other hand, if Pamela is an actress, then she is really a prostitute. Mr. B is repulsed by the idea of Pamela as a mistress of arts, performing her first part over and over again:
I shall not touch her: no, said the cruel man, let such fellows as Williams be taken in by her artful wiles! I know her now, and plainly see, that she is for any fools turn, that will be caught by her . . . . She is mistress of arts, I assure you; and will mimick a fit, ten to one, in a minute . . . . When she has acted this her first part over, perhaps I will see her again.38

As an actress, a mistress of fake fainting fits and equally fake statements of feeling, Pamela is no longer desirable, no longer a good potential wife. As Mr. Bs attention to Pamelas garters and petticoats in this scene suggests, Pamelas clothes are a subject of intense interest: to herself, to other characters, and to Richardson, from the sexually suspicious gift of expensive hand-thee-downs that prompts her initial letter onwards. When Pamela changes clothes, she changes roles. Her famous round-eared cap, her homespun dress trimmed with calico, her fine white silk gown: her clothes are theatrical costumes. Within the novel, her audience speculates about the meaning of what she wears. What a plague . . . do you mean then by this dress? demands Mr. B when Pamela appears in homespun.39 When Pamela dresses as a lady, everyone assumes she is a prostitute. When she dresses as a farmers daughter, she is taken for her own sister.40 Dramatizations of the Pamela both as a play and an opera pick up on the staginess of such scenes, as well as on the novels runaway popularity. Henry Giffords particularly successful Pamela. A Comedy went through eighteen performances at the Goodmans Fields Theatre in the 174142 season and was also produced in Dublin. Because Pamela. A Comedy is a comedy, not an epistolary novel, in it the question of Pamelas sincerity figures differently than it does in the original. It is still debated in the plays Epilogue, which reflects on the choices made by the author, who is conspicuously not the heroine:

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Was ever such another Blockhead seen! To choose a Servant for his Heroine! Gad, on our Sex, a genral Satires thrown, Who love more cheap to part withwhats their own. If this should pass, all Womankind must fear, For none will purchase, if the Sales so dear.

Here the only difference between marriage and prostitution is the question of how high to set the price. The question is not whether Pamelas body is for sale, but whether her example will lead women to charge more than the market will bear: for none will purchase, if the Sales so dear.41 In this comedy, interpreting Pamelas actions still turns on the interpretation of her clothes. When her father incoherently exclaims that he wishes he were not her father, he insists that her clothes will explain his meaning:
Alas! What mean you, Sir? Pamela demands. View thy own sumptuous Dressand tell thyself my Meaning. Oh! my lovd Father, banish your Fears, nor think your Daughters Innocence the hateful Barter for this costly Habit; tis made the Purchase, not the Exchange: for know, this worthy Gentleman, . . . has raisd me justly to the Honor of his Bed; I am his Wife.

Pamelas sumptuous Dress raises a cloud of economic terms: Pamela contrasts the Purchase of such dress with innocence to hateful Barter and Exchange, but these terms seem to mark no real difference. Rather than affirm her sincerity, they undermine it. The success of Pamela. A Comedy was due in part to Giffords good fortune in casting the brilliant young David Garrick as Jack Smatter (the dramatized role of Lady Danvers nephew Jacky). But it was also due to another piece of crowd-pleasing casting: after making his name playing Shakespeares fools, the comic actor Richard Yates played Mrs. Jewkes.42 This cross-dressed role functioned on stage as Straub describes theatrical male cross-dressing functioning in general in the later eighteenth century, as more a travesty of femininity than an imitation.43 In some ways, however, Mrs. Jewkes is already a stage dame in the pages of Richardsons novel, as Madame Duvall is in Evelina. Richardsons Mrs. Jewkes is not only a mannish figure but also, as critics have noted, an oddly comic one, with her horselip, her huge paws, and her tendency to waddle. A broad, squat, pursy, fat thing she has a hoarse man-like voice, and is as

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thick as shes long.44 She is already an ambiguously gendered figure who has no inkling of feminine propriety, which Pamela defines as the nature of a woman: a woman! surely she cannot have the nature of a woman!45 Like a stage dame, Mrs. Jewkes is funny in part because she combines sexual unattractiveness with an indiscriminate enthusiasm for sex: she urges Pamela are not the two sexes made for each other? And then the wretch fell a laughing, and talked most impertinently.46 She kisses, flirts with and bullies Pamela, just as does her master. I dont like this sort of carriage, Mrs. Jewkes; it is not like two persons of one sex to each other, Pamela protests, dodging a kiss.47 This aspect of Richardsons Mrs. Jewkes seems to have both titillated and horrified contemporary readers: there are at present, I am sorry to say it, too many who assume the Characters of Mrs. Jewkess Cast, I mean lovers of their own Sex, chides the anonymous Pamela Censured.48 Mr. B himself cross-dresses as the drunken maid Nan as part of an elaborate attempt to rape Pamela, but this act does not trigger either early modern identity-dissolving anxiety or eighteenth-century dame-role misogynist laughter. Decked out in Nans gown, petticoat, and apron, Mr. B is wicked and guilty of meanness, but he is not unmanly. The charge of violating nature attaches instead to the woman holding down Pamelas arms while Mr. B fondles her, the theatrical Mrs. Jewkes: what a vile unwomanly part that wicked wretch, Mrs. Jewkes, acted.49 Giffords dramatization takes these elements of Richardsons Mrs. Jewkes a step farther, as it makes the character a more important figure in the piece as a whole. Yatess Mrs. Jewkes, like Richardsons, makes sexually suggestive comments to her delicate tender lambkin, Pamela.50 Theres no manner of Comparison between a Man, and a Woman, remarks one of the maids as they gossip about dreaded Mrs. Jewkess possible arrival in the household, to which the others chorus None at all, none at all.51 When Mrs. Jewkes enters at the start of the third act, the humor of the role turns on just this comparison, which is highlighted in moments such as her coarse and chatty reminiscences of her deflowering: young Girls are always squeamish and coy before-handI remember I was so myselfGood lack! good lack! what a Racket did I keep! And, to say truth, I woud I had been more chary than I wasfor a faithless Wretch I met withwell!he has a deal to answer for. Yatess Mrs. Jewkes here parodies not just the virginal young Pamela standing on stage with her, but also the ideal of feminine propriety itself. This stage version also gives Mrs. Jewkes a new sub-plot of her own, one whose low comedy highlights not only the importance of Nature understood as feminine domestic propriety, but also the importance of the ticket-buying public. Like Madame Duvall flirting with her Monsieur Du

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Bois, this travesty of the feminine marries and is betrayed by a comic Frenchman. He is after Mrs. Jewkes money, not her body. He reveals his plot in a ridiculously accented and miswritten letter that was written by Garrick himself and read on-stage by Jack Smatter to great comic effect, as a highlight of the evenings performance: I send a you dis Lettre, to let a you know you fal never fee me nay more, upon my Vard . . . Madame Jewkes, you are a damnd heretique old Vitch. Garrick describes the success of his French Letter, as well as his general sense that Pamela. A Comedy is a come-down after Richard III. This play is not an aristocratic production in any sense: Pamela is wrote by Mr. Gifford himself. I had no hand in it at all excepting writing ye French Letter wch was vastly likd . . . It is very hungry [unsatisfactory] & was chiefly likd by ye Middling and low Kind of Spectators.52 Garrick playing Richard III, or even Yates playing Shakespeares fools, might pretend to some distant connection to an earlier ideal of theatre as masculine, monarchical spectacle, an ideal that Garrick will exploit effectively throughout his career. Playing Jack Smatter and Mrs. Jewkes to please the Middling and low Kind of Spectators, however, Garrick and Yates are located squarely in the commercial society of the eighteenth century. The version of identity that matters on this stage is not constituted publicly by the gaze of the monarch. Rather, it is founded on Nature, understood as the private, domestic self that grows in cultural importance with the growth of commercial society. Identified with the domestic woman, this idea of Nature could be imagined as a refuge from market relationships, while Natures opposite, Affectation, could be scapegoated for them in the figure of the society lady. Joseph Whartons satiric 1742 poem Fashion develops this idea of Nature. Warton first lumps together David Garrick, Vauxhall, and Pamela (an actor, a pleasure-ground, and a novel) as examples of consumer crazes, as it lumps together male and female consumers: With him the Fair, enrapturd with a Rattle, / Of Vauxhall, Garrick, or Pamela prattle. In this line the male fop and the female Fair are the same kind of person. The distinction that matters here is not one between male and female bodies, or between the masculine and the feminine as theologically-grounded categories of identity, but between fashionable consumers and everybody else. As the satire moves on, however, it focuses instead on a distinction between two different kinds of women: the good domestic woman and the bad society lady. Warton satirically describes a number of fashion-crazed men, but none get quite the same kind of condemnation as does the society lady. Behavior that in the fop is merely French, in the lady is a more dangerous kind of aberration: a departure from Nature itself. Spending her time and her money on fashion rather than on children, she is worse than a parent-

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snake or a mother tiger or mother vulture, who all dote on their young. The splendidly-dressed woman is a more sinister figure than the splendidlydressed man; he is a fop, but she is a bad mother:
By three each curl and feature justly set, She dines, talks scandal, visits, plays piquette: Meanwhile her babes with some foul nurse remain, For modern dames a mothers cares disdain; Each fortnight once she bears to see the brats, For oh they stun ones ears, like squalling cats!

Like Wartons poem, conduct books, educational treatises, childrens stories, and novels by both radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and conservatives such as Maria Edgeworth all tirelessly contrast the ideal of the thrifty domestic mother to the evil figure of the spendthrift, splendidlydressed society lady. By the time the society lady makes her appearance in Belinda as Lady Delacour, putting on evening dress seems the moral equivalent of infanticide.53 The kind of misogynist laughter that is triggered by a stage dame such as Yates Mrs. Jewkes reflects the increased significance of the nature of a woman in this society. Domestic femininity has value in part because it can be imagined as a private alternative to fashion-conscious public performance. But domestic femininity also is the public standard that makes parodies such as Yates Mrs. Jewkes unnatural, funny, and profitable. It is both intensely private and immediately recognizable in a public space. Like a character in a novel, or like David Garrick on stage, a domestic woman must be carefully crafted to create the public perception of private depth. As Lynch points out, even Garricks naturalistic acting style was recognized as a set of conventional gestures, one that could be dismissed as mere affectation by a hostile competitor. Theophilus Cibber, for example, attacked Garricks hyper-expressive face and body as the opposite of Nature, criticizing his frequent affected starts, convulsive twitchings, jerkings of the body, sprawling of the fingers, slapping the breast and pocketsa set of mechanical motions in constant use.54 Maria Edgeworth often foregrounds the paradoxes of this carefully constructed and carefully scrutinized version of Nature. Her educational writing, in particular, describes in sympathetic detail the difficulties of learning how to please an audience by appearing oblivious to its existence. Her story Airs and Graces focuses on the struggle of fourteen year-old Rosamund to overcome affectation and to acquire a natural manner. Although she is just as virtuous as Evelina and just as carefully brought up,

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Rosamund has not yet mastered the art of appearing artless. She points out the double-bind that girls are put in by the demand to cultivate pleasing manners: When young people, girls I mean particularly, do their best to try to have these agreeable manners, and begin to imitate what other people do, they are told not to imitate, and they are laughed at for being affected; they are told to be themselves, and to be natural; but then, again, I dont know what is meant by being natural.55 A fashionable manner looks inauthentic because it is obviously imitated from fashionable models, but the problem of imitation goes deeper than that:
It is not natural, it is not born with us, to have any manner, is it? asked Rosamund. Even to use our knives and forks in the way we do, or to make a bow or a courtesy, or in our ways of sitting and standing, must we not imitate others? You would not call this affectation? . . . But if one begins to imitate any pretty ways, motions, words, manners, even of those who are most admired, then comes the outcry against affectation. . . . there is my great difficulty, papa, to know where wrong imitation begins, and where right imitation ends. 56

In articulating her great difficulty, Rosamund turns the difference between two morally-charged opposites, the inauthenticity of affectation and the truth of Nature, into a mere question of degree. Distinguishing where wrong imitation begins, and where right imitations ends is only a question of practice. Unlike Madame Duvall and Mrs. Jewkes, Lady Delacour does not reflect the figure of the stage dame. Instead, she is the real thing, the fashionable society lady who Garrick ridiculed by piling lemons and feathers on top of his head. As Russell has suggested, Lady Delacour is part the unquiet ghost of the fashionable sociability of the 1760s and 1770s, and in this novel the dream of a feminized public sphere dies hard. It takes Gothic horrors, illness, wounds, and two dead children to dispel its appeal. As critics have often noted, this novel is an unusually varied sampler of crossdressing. For example, Lady Delacour and her friend Harriet Freke dress as men in order to fight duels and to visit Parliament. Openly proclaiming her belief in the rights of women and barely veiling her erotic attraction to Lady Delacour, the mannish, cross-dressed Harriet Freke has rightly attracted a good deal of critical attention. Clarence Hervey, the heroines future husband, also makes a memorable public appearance in full female court-dress, complete with hoopskirt. However, in contrasting the domestic ideal and the society lady, this novel finally presents a womans body in a

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ladys clothes as more dangerous than either a mans body in womens clothes or a womans body in mens clothing. Belinda recognizes and draws on the appeal of fashionable sociability. In his cross-dressed scene, for example, both Clarence Hervey and the novel seem, for the moment, to embrace the feminization of public life, to embrace a public world of hoopskirts, high headdresses, court appearances, and witty political hostesses. Ultimately, however, both hero and heroine must leave this world for the home. That is, what Edgeworth objects to is not the feminization of public life, but rather public life itself. In this sense, her heroes as well as her heroines are domestic women, renouncing politics and fashion in favor of domestic respectability and the education of their children. Like Maria Edgeworths own ideal man, the father who co-authored much of her educational writing, Belindas ideal man, Mr. Percival, is as absorbed in the home as is his wife.57 Feminization is good for everyone, as long as feminine nature is clearly understood as private and domestic. Unlike Madame Duval or Richard Yates Mrs. Jewkes, Clarence Hervey in a hoopskirt is not a travesty of the domestic ideal. Neither is he represented as unmanly, any more than is Mr. B when he lurks in an elbow-chair in Nans gown and petticoat, plotting rape. Here how one manages a hoopskirt seems to reveal above all else ones proper class position. Lady Delacour explains the connection between hoops and true gentility, or its lack:
Theres my friend Lady C; in elegant undress she passes for very genteel, but put her into a hoop and she looks as pitiable a figure, as much a prisoner, and as little able to walk, as a child in a go-cart. She gets on, I grant you, and so does the poor child; but getting on, you know, is not walking. . . . I wish you had seen the two Lady R.s sticking close to one another, their father pushing them on together, like two decanters in a bottle-coaster, with such magnificent diamond labels round their necks!58

As a true gentleman and a genius, Clarence insists that he can manage a hoop as well as any woman in England, well enough to fool easily a short-sighted acquaintance: she would not know my face, she would not see my beard, and I will bet fifty guineas that I come into a room in a hoop, and that she does not find me out by my airthat I do not betray myself, in short, by my masculine awkwardness.59 Clarence is successful: he really made his entre with very composed assurance and grace. He managed his hoop with such skill and dexterity, that he well deserved the

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praise of being a universal genius.60 Despite his beard, Clarence in a hoop skirt makes a convincing society lady, and triggers no panic about feminization. Belinda does not panic about either men dressed as women or women dressed as men. The novel panics instead over Lady Delacour, and Lady Delacour is most theatrical and most dangerous when she dresses as a lady: view thy own sumptuous dress, the narrator all-but warns her. Clothes are clearly costumes for Lady Delacour, who spends a great deal of time dressing and undressing for masquerades, campaign appearances in support of Parliamentary candidates, and amateur theatricals, as well as for the visits, dinners, balls, and theatre. Lady Delacours clothes are prosthetic, but in a different sense than Will Fisher describes clothes as prosthetic in the early modern period. Fisher argues that there is no natural gender difference grounded in the early-modern body, waiting to be either revealed or disguised by clothes. In contrast, in Belinda the feminine domestic ideal has become womans true nature. Lady Delacours preference for being a society lady rather than a good mother appears as a kind of disease, one given terrifying visible form in her cancerous breast. If Burney sees novel-reading as an incurable disease, then Edgeworth sees Lady Delacours theatricality in similar terms. Rather than implying that the woman who does not embody the ideal of domestic propriety is ridiculous, Belinda claims that she is sick. Like Madame Duvall, Lady Delacour appears with ruined make-up on her face in an emotionally intense scene. The rhetorically overheated description of her streaked cosmetics, however, is not a comic spectacle but rather a Gothic one, designed to trigger not laughter but rather horror: she then, with a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light full upon her livid features. Her eyes were sunk, her cheeks hollow; no trace of youth or beauty remained upon her death-like countenance, which formed a horrid contrast to her gay fantastic dress.61 Lady Delacours clothes have an equally Gothic relation to actual prosthetic devices. Her body is diseased and incomplete, something that is patched up for public view at the dressing table in her secret room. In this novel, dressing includes changing dressings on running sores. Lady Delacour has an ulcer on her breast that is believed to be cancerous, a sore that requires laborious dressing in her locked boudoir. All the fashionable London spectacles that she stages are reduced to failed attempts to conceal this hideous spectacle. Disappearing into her sinister boudoir with her ladys maid, she spends hours putting on bandages as she puts on clothes and cosmetics, but the work of repairing herself can never be completed. Lady Delacour herself loathes her

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prosthetics and urges her young friend Belinda to see through them before it is too late for her to escape a similar ghastly fate: you are shocked, Belinda, said she; but as yet you have seen nothinglook here,and baring one half of her bosom, she revealed a hideous spectacle.62 After this revelation, Lady Delacour reassembles herself once more, with the help of drugs, cosmetics, and more expensive new clothes that she will go even deeper into debt to buy. Belinda finds Lady Delacour with her face completely repaired with paint, and her spirits with opium. She was in high consultation with . . . Mrs Franks, the milliner, about the crape petticoat of her birthnight dress, which was extended over a large hoop in full state.63 The hideous spectacle of Lady Delacours bosom is a nightmarish object lesson in the importance of the domestic ideal. It has convincingly been read as a Gothic image, one that links Edgeworth to contemporary authors such as Anne Radcliffe. In this sense, the corrupt body hidden in Lady Delacours mysterious boudoir is like the wax model of a decaying corpse hidden behind the mysterious black veil in the castle of Udulpho. However, in its link with cosmetics and other theatrical devices, this spectacle looks backwards as well, towards a satiric tradition. Busy with her dressing, undressing, and wound-soiled dressings, Lady Delacour recalls Jonathan Swifts prostitute busily taking off and putting on body parts as well as petticoats. Both women are satiric objects. As she takes off her clothes, Swifts prostitute also famously removes her hair, an eyeball, eyebrows, teeth, hips, as well as re-bandaging her sores. And if the process of undressing is bad, getting dressed again in the morning is even worse:
The Nymph, tho in this mangled Plight, Must evry Morn her Limbs unite. But how shall I describe her Arts To recollect the scatterd Parts? Or show the Anguish, Toil, and Pain, Of gathring up herself again? 64

Despite their similarities, however, Swift and Edgeworths satiric scenes have different goals. This painted, dizened, and diseased nymph is a danger to the men who might pick her up on the street. Her running sores are the symptoms of sexually transmitted disease, the pains of love. In contrast, Lady Delacour is a danger not to her sexual partners but to her own children, the first two of whom died in infancy. While Swifts anticosmetic satire continues an older tradition of attacking painted women as sexual predators, Edgeworth uses this tradition for a different end, attacking

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these women as bad mothers. The ideal figure that Edgeworths satire implies is the domestic woman, not the young, clean sexual object.65 Unlike Swifts painted nymph and Richardson and Burneys stage dames, Edgeworths Lady Delacour foregrounds the role that the feminine domestic ideal plays in a credit economy. We have seen how in Pamela and Evelinas theatrical entanglements, even domesticity itself is revealed to be a public performance. Belinda goes a step further and focuses at length on the commercial importance of the public performance of the domestic ideal, describing it as the guarantor of a household creditworthiness. Ultimately, Lady Delacour renounces her public role as a society lady for an equally public role as an embodiment of the private domestic ideal. Initially, she not only prefers attending theatrical events to making a home, but also makes her home into a theatre, a public space designed to dazzle crowds with commercial display. As Teresa Michals points out, although Lady Delacour is accused of any number of sexual crimes, her real sin is her use of credit to adorn herself and her house.66 Dressing as a lady means spending moneyenormous quantities of money, often money that one does not possesson the costumes and on the stage set required to theatricalize a domestic space. My lady, your cursed theatricals, her bankrupt husband protests when she reminds him of the money he has squandered on horses. Without an admiring audience, Lady Delacours home is merely an empty theatre:
she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage, over stimulated by applause and exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character. When her house was filled with well dressed crowds, when it blazed with lights, and resounded with music and dancing, Lady Delacour, in the character of Mistress of the Revels, shone the soul and spirit of pleasure and frolicBut the moment the company retired, when the music ceased and the lights were extinguishing, the spell was dissolved. 67

Lady Delacours performances are enthusiastically reviewed: The newspapers were full of Lady Delacours parties, and Lady Delacours dresses, and Lady Delacours bon mots.68 To achieve this public success, Lady Delacour has squandered two fortunes. Lord Delacour has also gambled and drunk away immense sums. The novel asserts that he will share his wifes new domestic virtue. Id see Lord Studley at the devil, sir, and his burgundy along with him, before Id go to him to-day, and you may tell him so, if you please, cried Lord Delacour, happily renouncing a masculine world of aristocratic excess for a quiet family dinner. 69

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This novel identifies theatricality with the danger of commercial consumption. Wigs, stays, cosmetics, and padded undergarments are still gender-coded prosthetic devices, but what they say about gender now seems subordinated to what they say about credit-worthiness. That is, rather than connecting theatricality to anxiety about the instability of gender differences, Belinda most directly connects theatricality to anxiety about the instability of the marketplace. The eighteenth-century marketplace is unstable because it is built on nothing more substantial than creditthe theatrical performance of personal and financial trustworthiness. Craig Muldrew describes the performative nature of credit: more than anything credit was a public means of social communication and circulating judgement about the value of other members of communities70 As a theatrical woman, Lady Delacour stands in part for the larger problem of acting credible, the problem of the unreliability of the public display of personal qualities. Although she is finally reformed, reunited with her neglected daughter and her estranged husband, the novel acknowledges that Lady Delacour, like her readers, must continue to live in a commercial society, which means continuing to live by making a public spectacle of private virtues. The best solution that this novel can offer is to move its heroine from a world of generalized fashionable theatricality to something closer to literal theatre. If Lady Delacour no longer appears to be a spoiled actress off the stage, it is because she simply goes onstage, as the novel concludes with a curtain-call and an after-piece. Although she prides herself on writing eloquent and entertaining letters, Lady Delacour is no epistolary novelist. Unlike Pamela or Evelina, she cannot make even a plausible attempt to portray sincerely domestic feeling. Belinda concludes instead with Lady Delacour paraphrasing The Critic, arranging everyone into a striking tableau on an invisible stage and stepping forward to speak the epilogue to her invisible audience. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so? she demands, ironizing the domestic bliss that the novel has worked so hard to achieve for her:
Yes, said her Ladyship; it is so difficult, as the Critic says, to get lovers off on their knees. Now I think of it, let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so? . . . Clarence, you have a right to Belindas hand, and may kiss it. Nay, Belinda, it is the rule of the stage. . . . Enter Lord Delacour, with little Helena in his handvery well! . . . Now, Lady Delacour, to show that she is reformed, comes forward to address the audience with a moral . . .71

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Lady Delacour renounces the public life of a society lady not for the private life of a good domestic woman, but for sentimental comedy. The ironic moral of this final tableau appears to be that domestic life may be saved from the taint of commercial theatricality only by disappearing into theatre proper. This paradox suggests the pressure of theatricality and its double, the credit economy, on the home and on the novel. That is, I would suggest that through its treatment of theatrical display, Belinda acknowledges the public and commercial dimension of the private domestic ideal.

NOTES
The author would like to thank Misty Krueger for organizing and chairing Anti-Theatricalitys Legacy in the Long Eighteenth Century, the 2008 Southeastern American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies panel that was the origin of this article. 1. Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 119. 2. Widespread although not absolute, the replacement of boy-actors with adult actresses arguably reflects a larger cultural replacement of an older onesex model, in which both women and boys figure as inferior versions of adult men, with a modern two-sex model of human sexuality. See Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Cross-dressed men, however, remained a presence on stage. Jill Campbell discusses both the male players in female roles and female players in male roles that were an important part of English farce tradition. Jill Campbell, When Men Women Turn: Gender Reversals in Fieldings Plays, Crossing the Stage: Controversies on cross-dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (New York: Routledge, 1993), 61. Kristina Straub also suggests that some crossdressed actors continued to appear in serious roles in the eighteenth century, questioning whether the homophobic exclusions of ambiguous masculinity were as totalizing as they would seem at first glance (Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 34). 3. Margaret Doody has identified the influence of the stage dame in the characterization of Madam Duvall. See Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: A Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 50. 4. Susanna Burney to Frances Burney, August 24, 1779, Egerton Manuscripts (originally in the Barrett Collection) British Library, London, 3691, p. 14r. Quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, 51.

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5. Russell, Women, Sociability, and Theatre, 228. 6. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 44. 7. Emily Allen, Staging Identity: Frances Burneys Allegory of Genre, Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1998): 436. 8. Allen, Staging Identity, 43536. Joseph Litvak analyzes a later stage in the novels incorporation of theatricality in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On the decline of the eighteenth-century theatre in terms of both prestige and ticket-sales, see Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), and Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 16601900, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Terry Castle also discusses internalization of public, carnivalesque impulses in eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 9. Frances Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Ladys Entrance into the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 69. 10. Russell, Women, Sociability, and Theatre, 104. 11. Burney, Evelina,15. 12. Straub, Sexual Suspects, 33. 13. Allen, Staging Identity, 438. 14. Burney, Evelina,15. 15. Burney, Evelina, original preface. 16. Burney, Evelina,15. 17. Doody, Frances Burney, 50. 18. Straub, Sexual Suspects, 34. 19. Laurence Selenick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), 233. 20. Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 196. 21. Doody, Frances Burney, 50. 22. Burney, Evelina, 41. 23. Burney, Evelina, 68. 24. Burney, Evelina, 134. 25. Thomas King, The Gendering of Men, 16001750 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 8. 26. For a discussion of the Early Modern theatres relation to the development of capitalism, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 15501750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 27. Laura Levine, Men in Womens Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization 15791642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 28. Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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29. Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 935. 30. Susan Greenfield, Abroad and at Home: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworths Belinda, PMLA 112 (1997): 214; see also, 21428. 31. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 31. 32. Richardson, Pamela, 31. 33. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Siobhan Kilfeather (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 5. Early Modern Europe, 15501800, ed. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 146. 35. See Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18. 36. Richardson, Pamela, 271. 37. Richardson, Pamela, 268. 38. Richardson, Pamela, 222. 39. Richardson, Pamela, 90. 40. Richardson, Pamela, 89. 41. John Giffard, Pamela. A Comedy, The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and adaptations of Samuel Richardsons Pamela 17401750, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, 6 vol. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001). 42. On Richard Yates career, see Christian Deelman, The Original Cast of The School for Scandal, The Review of English Studies, 13, no. 51 (1962): 25766; and Terence Freeman, Best Foote Forward, Studies in English Literature, 15001900, 29 (1989): 56378. 43. Straub, Sexual Suspects, 34. 44. Richardson, Pamela, 152. 45. Richardson, Pamela, 176. 46. Richardson, Pamela, 148. 47. Richardson, Pamela, 145. 48. Keymer and Sabor, ed., Pamela Controversy, 2:64. 49. Richardson, Pamela, 237. 50. Giffard, Pamela, act 3, scene 1. 51. Giffard, Pamela, act 1, scene 7. 52. Keymer and Sabor, ed., Pamela Controversy, 2:72.53The cautionary tableau of evening dress morphing a good mother into the society lady is remarkably long-lived: it is when Mrs. Darling turns her attention away from domestic economy, dressing up in a white evening gown and necklace for a dinner party, that Peter Pan flies through the nursery window and steals her children. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan: The Original Story (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 1848. 54. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 73. 55. Maria Edgeworth, Air and Graces, Rosamond: with Other Tales (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), 177.

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56. Edgeworth, Air and Graces, 178. 57. On the Edgeworths ideal of both husband and wife acting as full-time educators of their children, see Teresa Michals, Experiments Before Breakfast: Toys, Education, and Middle-Class Childhood, The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 29 42. 58. Edgeworth, Belinda, 59. 59. Edgeworth, Belinda, 59. 60. Edgeworth, Belinda, 59. 61. Edgeworth, Belinda, 28. 62. Edgeworth, Belinda, 28. 63. Edgeworth, Belinda, 30. 64. Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 45455. 65. Siobhan Kilfeather also notes this connection to Swift: these scenes appear to be indebted to Jonathan Swiftto such poems as On Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed and to Gullivers view of the enlarged breast cancer in Brobdignag (Introductory Note, xxxv). 66. See Teresa Michals, Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth, Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (1994): 120. 67. Edgeworth, Belinda, 12. 68. Edgeworth, Belinda, 12. 69. Edgeworth, Belinda, 220. 70. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), 2. On the uncertainties of living within the credit economy, see also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 17801850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). Muldrew focuses mainly on the period from 1540 to 1720 and notes the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, changes in the law of bankruptcy, and the rise of insurance companies among other developments marking the beginnings of the changes that would eventually take place in the institutional organization of the society and economy of England. But he also claims that the culture of credit remained strong throughout the eighteenth century: the amount of credit in society, however, did not decline in the eighteenth century. The scarcity of ready money became, if anything, more rather than less acute. [evidence suggests] that credit formed as important a part of the economy in the eighteenth century as it had in the century preceding it. . . . At a popular level . . . the morality of credit, and the ethics of trust seem to have remained as prevalent as they had been earlier (328). 71. Edgeworth, Belinda, 366.