Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volume 19 | Issue 4 Article 5

7-1-2007

The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth's Female Philosopher

Deborah Weiss

Recommended Citation
Weiss, Deborah (2007) "The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth's Female Philosopher," Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Vol. 19: Iss. 4, Article 5. Available at: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol19/iss4/5

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The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth's Female Philosopher

Abstract

The radicalism of Mary Wollstonecrafts critique of the social, political, and economic structures of her day has been beyond dispute since she achieved notoriety in the early 1790s. Maria Edgeworth, on the other hand, has never been considered a radical thinker despite the fact that she was as critical as Wollstonecraft of her societys gender codes and their effect on the moral and intellectual lives of women. At the level of theory, as well, Edgeworth resembled Wollstonecraft in her rejection of the periods essentialist understanding of gender. Like Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth took Enlightenment concepts of the cultural formation of the individual ideas used by radical male thinkers such as William Godwin to argue for the universal equality of mankindand applied these concepts to the formation of feminine identity. Both believedradically for the timethat female attitudes and behaviours were the product of cultural, rather than natural influences. As Edgeworths first gentleman in Letters to Literary Ladies remarks, woman, as well as man, may be called a bundle of habits.

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Weiss: The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth's Female Phil

The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworths Female Philosopher

Deborah Weiss

he radicalism of Mary Wollstonecrafts critique of the social, political, and economic structures of her day has been beyond dispute since she achieved notoriety in the early 1790s. Maria Edgeworth, on the other hand, has never been considered a radical thinker despite the fact that she was as critical as Wollstonecraft of her societys gender codes and their effect on the moral and intellectual lives of women. At the level of theory, as well, Edgeworth resembled Wollstonecraft in her rejection of the periods essentialist understanding of gender. Like Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth took Enlightenment concepts of the cultural formation of the individual ideas used by radical male thinkers such as William Godwin to argue for the universal equality of mankindand applied these concepts to the formation of feminine identity.1 Both believedradically for the timethat female attitudes and behaviours were the product of cultural, rather than natural inuences. As Edgeworths rst gentleman in Letters to Literary Ladies remarks, woman, as well as man, may be called a bundle of habits.2
1 Resolute in his belief in the impact of the environment on the individual, Godwin entitled chap. 4 of Political Justice The Characters of Men Originate in their External Circumstances. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Inuence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793; London: Penguin Books, 1985), 97. Maria Edgeworth, Letters from a Gentleman to His Friend, in Letters to Literary Ladies (1795; London: J. M.Dent, 1993), 22. ECF 0840-6286

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What is remarkable about Edgeworth is that, despite her philosophical kinship with Wollstonecraft, her writings garnered her success, esteem, and a favourable international reputation. To this day, she is not seen as an agitator, but rather as a mild reformist, a writer whose support of rational domesticity and the improvement of female education did not challenge dominant social structures. Even though Marilyn Butler recognized Edgeworths extraordinary approach to gender thirty years ago in the groundbreaking Jane Austen and the War of Ideas Butler describes Edgeworth as the most thorough-going individualist writing outside the Jacobin movementmost scholars have not followed suit.3 Instead, critics such as Julia Douthwaite, G.J. Barker-Beneld, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, and Kathryn Kirkpatrick have viewed Edgeworths attempts to assert womens capacity for reason and self-regulation as inherently conservative.4 Even Claudia Johnson, whose Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel argued for a wider political interpretation of late eighteenth-century novels by women, characterizes Edgeworth as a timid reformist unwilling to directly confront the dominant social system.5 Thus, the radicalism of Edgeworths understanding of gender has generally been overlooked owing to what scholars have taken to be the timidity of her approach to reform. What I suggest is that this interpretation of Edgeworth is based on a confusion about her
3 4 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 126. Julia Douthwaite, Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education and Belinda, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 3556; G.J. Barker-Beneld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers Daughters: Hannah More , Maria Edgeworth , and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworths Belinda , in Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Their Sisters (New York and Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), 7483. Douthwaite and Barker-Beneld see Edgeworth as an advocate for rational domesticity. Kowaleski-Wallace and Kirkpatrick describe her as working towards female Enlightenment, but nonetheless see her as trapped within the patriarchal structure. There is an anti-Enlightenment line of thinking on Belinda as well, represented by Mary Jacobus, The Science of Herself: Scenes of Female Enlightenment, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre 17891837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Jordana Rosenberg, The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworths Belinda , ELH 70, no. 2 (2003): 57596. Both Jacobus and Rosenberg rely on the assumption that the feminine is somehow inherently anti-rational. While Claudia Johnson notes that Edgeworth scrambled the codes that idealized the authority of law and custom with the intention to question and undo them, she still says that Edgeworth in conservative fashion upholds the traditional social arrangements that expose women to the problems she herself laments, on the grounds that defying such arrangement will not promote their happiness. Johnson, Jane Austen : Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24, 160.

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investment in pragmatism. Unlike Wollstonecraft, whom Edgeworth critiques obliquely in Belinda for her disruptive devotion to theory without regard to application, Edgeworths interest in reform was founded on a deep belief in the unity of theory and practice. As a philosophical pragmatist, Edgeworth was able to launch her attack on her cultures debilitating gender codes in a carefully targeted fashion, using theory to identify the precise causes of social problems while at the same time employing the generic resources of the novel to put those theories into practice in the form of psychologically complex characters manoeuvring through a difcult and largely realistic moral world. The way to a more accurate assessment of Edgeworths challenges to prevailing social codes is, I think, to go back to Butlers positioning of her as a writer in direct conversation with Enlightenment moral philosophy. Two more recent scholars also offer useful approaches for thinking about Edgeworth in this vein. Mitzi Myers, in her essay My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda : Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority, discusses Edgeworth as a gender theorist working to counter masculine fabrications of the feminine in works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Day.6 And Clona Gallchoir, in her recent book Maria Edgeworth : Women , Enlightenment and Nation , makes a larger argument, using Edgeworth to demonstrate that gender should be central to our understanding of the Enlightenment.7 In this article I have tried to take more precise stock of the nature and signicance of Edgeworths engagement with Enlightenment thought by submitting Belinda to an analysis that combines Myerss method of careful philosophical reading with Gallchoirs larger concern about the role of gender in current discussions of the Enlightenment. I will suggest thereby that Edgeworths innovative theories of sex and gender constitute a contribution to Enlightenment moral philosophy that has not yet been recognized.
6 Myerss discussion of the plasticity of gender codes in Belinda was central to the development of my argument here. See Mitzi Myers, My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda : Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority, in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century Womens Fiction and Social Engagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 10446. Clona Gallchoir identies a key problem in Enlightenment scholarship when she writes in spite of the range of attitudes to Enlightenment which we can identify among historians and critics, what unites them is their failure to consider in any depth the impact of Enlightenment on women and discourses of gender. Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women , Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 7.

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That early in her career Edgeworth began examining gender in the context of Enlightenment thought is clear from the discussions between the gentlemen in her Letters to Literary Ladies.8 But it was not until she turned to the novel, with its ability to test theory in the social laboratory of everyday life, that she was able to effectively critique, mock, and expose the dominant gender theories of the day. In Belinda , Edgeworths central concern is to dramatize the way in which her cultures ideas of natural femininity were debilitating for individual women and insidiously destructive to the society as a whole. She accomplishes this by using a character that was frequently employed in ction written during the 1790s and early 1800sthe female philosopher.9 Although modern readers have generally understood instances of this socially disruptive gure to be caricatures of Wollstonecraft, the female philosopher had a much more ideologically varied life than is usually recognized. While the female philosopher certainly was used to lampoon Wollstonecraft in anti-Jacobin publications, she was also employed by non-reactionary writers to explore issues of female rationality, equality, and autonomy. As Johnson has noted, outside anti-Jacobin literature, ctional representations of the female philosopher actually enabled women to argue a position similar to Wollstonecrafts in Vindication of the Rights of Woman at a time when her life and works were in disgrace.10 In the case of Belinda , the female philosopher is central to Edgeworths aims, as it is through this character that she deconstructs and then reconstructs her readers understanding of gender. By splitting the gure into two charactersinto Harriet Freke, the false female philosopher, and Belinda, the trueEdgeworth dismantles her societys understanding of gender, divorcing characteristics commonly taken to be masculine or feminine from the realm of the natural.
8 Edgeworths early philosophical engagement owes a great deal to her intellectual formation in the 1780s and 1790s when to be a philosopher was, as Barbara Taylor explains, to be perceived as part of a broad intellectual movement toward a more humane, thoughtful, and culturally open society. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2728. Johnson notes that the ctional female philosopher disappears from English ction around 1815 (21). Johnson, 21. Other scholars who see Belindas caricatured female philosopher as a decoy who allows Edgeworth a more free exploration of topics of female rationality and independence are Ian Topliss, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworths Modern Ladies, tudes Irlandaises 6 (1981); Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 17601830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Kirkpatrick, introduction to Belinda by Maria Edgeworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Taylor.

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Through the attitudes, comments, and comportment of her two female philosophers, Edgeworth effectively formulates a new theory of gender in which masculine and feminine qualities are created almost entirely by social forces. For Edgeworth, the female philosopher was the ideal tool through which to discredit one of the periods most deeply held beliefs about the differences between men and womenthat men by nature had a superior intellect.11 Indeed, a masculine understanding was one of the hallmarks of the caricatured female philosopher in anti-Jacobin literature, as it was clear to many British readers that Wollstonecraft had violated what they understood as feminine nature by taking up a male discourse in her two Vindications. At rst it seems as if Edgeworth wants to encourage her readers identication of the gure of the female philosopher with a masculine understanding. She does this by making Freke appear to be a caricatured version of Wollstonecraft, considered by her contemporaries as the most masculine of female thinkers.12 Edgeworth entitles the chapter in which Belinda and Freke rst meet Rights of Woman, and she gives Freke an approach to change that is decidedly revolutionary. Frekes language in this chapter is full of allusions to Wollstonecrafts most famous work: she rails about false delicacy and false shame, refers to women as slaves, and shrieks about female cunningall easily identiable, if supercial, distillations of Wollstonecrafts critiques of women. However, just as Edgeworth invokes Wollstonecraft through Freke, she distances her character from both Wollstonecraft and any idea that a strong faculty of understanding could be a masculine characteristic. Freke may remind readers of Wollstonecraft, but the intellectual distance between the two is enormous. Even the most
11 Women celebrated for their intellectual achievements in the eighteenth century were viewed as rare exceptions to the general rule. For a history of female intellectualism in the period and its connection to patriotism, see Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women , Learning, Patriotism , 17501810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Some scholars have interpreted Freke as a straightforward condemnation of Wollstonecraft. Among these are Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson, Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Womens Rights, ire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 19, no. 4 (1984): 94118; Douthwaite, Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau; Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere (New York: St Martins Press, 1999); and G.J. Barker-Beneld. Another line of thought on Freke is that she represents a repressed feminine challenge to patriarchy and heterosexuality. See also Kowaleski-Wallace; Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); and Eleanor Ty, Freke in Mens Clothes: Transgression and the Carnivalesque in Edgeworths Belinda, in The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 15776.

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cursory reading of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman leaves one with an acute awareness of Wollstonecrafts intellectual powers, as well as an understanding of the centrality of rational argument to her philosophy of female reform. Freke, in contrast, is quite irrational, and when pressed beyond mere slogans, shows herself to have an intellect that is entirely undistinguished. Thus, Edgeworth has created a false female philosopher who appears to be a caricature of a caricaturethat is, Edgeworth uses Freke not to assail Wollstonecraft and to condemn her ideas, but rather to lampoon the idea of Wollstonecraft that circulated in the culture. The false female philosophers intellectual shortcomings are nowhere more glaring than when she accosts Belinda and argues with Mr Percival, Belindas rationalist mentor, in the Rights of Woman chapter. As Freke says to Belinda, who is quietly reading works of moral philosophy: You read I see! I did not know you were a reading girl. So did I once! But I never read now. Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who cant think for themselvesbut when one has made up ones opinion, there is no use in reading.13 As with most of Frekes declarations, her outbursts here give evidence of the weakness of her ideas and the general impoverishment of her mind. To the novels original audience, who lived in a society that believed reading laid the groundwork for moral development, it would have been obvious that Freke fails to grasp what Belinda easily comprehendsthat reading enriches the intellect and gives it the raw materials upon which to make moral decisions and form good judgments. Moreover, Frekes argument with Belinda and Percival in this chapter is evidence of her inability to make logical arguments, the foundation of the philosophical process. When Freke declares Your most delicate women are always the greatest hypocrites and in my opinion, no hypocrite can or ought to be happy, Belinda challenges her claims, noting, But, you have not proved the hypocrisy (229). In contrast to Belinda, who uses logic to make her arguments in keeping with the philosophical method, Freke operates by means of one bold, unsubstantiated assertion after another. Edgeworths highlighting of Frekes intellectual failures throws into question the entire concept of a masculine understanding. Early in the novel, as Lady Delacour relates her life history to Belinda,
13 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 227. References are to this edition.

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she describes her attraction to Freke, who has led her into a series of increasingly distressing social and personal difculties: I had a prodigious deference for the masculine superiority, as I thought it, of Harriets understanding ... She was a philosopher (54). This observation effectively denes Freke and the female philosopher according to the periods conviction that having a superior, analytical mind was a masculine characteristic. But this observation is made in the context of a narrative that exposes how fundamentally wrong Lady Delacour was about Frekes character, intentions, and virtues. It is in the course of this narrative, after all, that Lady Delacour explains to Belinda how Freke led her to torment her husband by encouraging a suitor and how Freke goaded her into a duel with her social rival Mrs Luttridge. This duel disgured Lady Delacours breast and led her to desperate acts based on her belief that she had an incurable disease. When Lady Delacour refers to Frekes masculine understanding she is, in effect, confusing manners with morals. Frekes masculinity, as Edgeworth represents it, does not stem from what the period understood as masculine moralsmanly traits such as honour, forbearance, and loyalty, that had their foundation in a superior understanding of virtue. Rather, Edgeworth locates Frekes masculinity in male mannerisms, in behaviours that had no connection to moral thought. Wollstonecraft warns against this confusion between masculine manners and morals in the introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman , and, like Edgeworth, seeks to overturn the male monopoly on the virtues that she and her contemporaries believed stemmed from an enlightened mind:
I am aware of an obvious inference:from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.14

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Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 110.

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Freke, who hunts, shoots, and gambles, is clearly the embodiment of the rst kind of masculine woman, one who has taken on the external traits of male behaviourthe kind of woman Wollstonecraft understands her opponents to fear. And Freke is just as clearly the antithesis of the second kind of masculine woman, the one whose character is marked by the incorporation of virtues Wollstonecraft believes should be the moral goal of all people, of women as well as men. Thus, as Kirkpatrick has noted, Edgeworth uses Freke to negate the threat of the masculine woman.15 At the same time, and more importantly, Edgeworth uses the false female philosopher to separate manners from morals, external characteristics from internal principles. Using Wollstonecrafts own denitionwhich Edgeworth invites her readers to do through her description of Frekes leisure activities we can see that Freke is far from exhibiting the inherent intellectual traits the culture frequently termed masculine. Rather, beneath the window dressing of her clothes and manners, her understanding is, in period terms, entirely feminine.16 She is illogical and irrational, capricious and emotional, vain and vainglorious. And yet, contemporary readers would have had difculty thinking of Freke as a woman, so thoroughly does Edgeworth clothe her with masculine mannerisms, and so completely does she inhabit the character of a young rake.17 In contrast, Belinda, with her principled mind and rational self-control, clearly exhibits the virtues that the culture
15 16 Kirkpatrick, introduction to Belinda, xxi. Ty discusses Frekes cross-dressing, which she nds signicant as a moment of deviance that reveals the ways in which Edgeworth attempted to work out the contradictions inherent in the ideological construction of gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (165). I think Ty is right here in seeing the characters transgressive costumes as central to Edgeworths interests in this novel. Indeed, Ty notes in passing that incidents of cross-dressing [bring] out the fact that gender identity is socially and culturally constructed. But rather than stop to explore what such a conclusion might mean in the context of late-Enlightenment culture, she moves on quickly to argue that Frekes rather rash acts of cross-dressing and transgression are her attempts to appropriate power and control in a predominantly masculine world (169). Thus, according to Ty, Freke becomes the heroine of the story through her resistance to conventional femininity. Frekes masculine manners and her evident desire for Lady Delacour make her a tempting character to focus on for a homoerotic reading of the novel. Moore does just this, arguing that Edgeworth is a conservative woman novelist (101) who uses Freke to represent a lesbian threat to heterosexuality that she feels needs to be contained (see Moore, 90107). In response, I would be cautious about basing an assessment of Edgeworth as conservative on her support for heterosexual marriage. Frekes apparent desire for Lady Delacour must be understood relative to a political environment in which terms such as conservative mean something entirely different from what they do today.

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believed stemmed from a masculine understanding. However, there is nothing masculine about her appearance, sensibility, or behaviour. Ultimately, what Edgeworth accomplishes by making the masculinized female philosopher epitomize feminine intellectual traits and the feminized female philosopher masculine ones is to scramble the very differences that formed the foundation of her contemporaries understanding of sexually based characteristics. She effectively dismantles the connections between concepts of femininity and concepts of the mind, separating intellect and the moral virtues gained through the understanding from any association with sexual difference. The traits, then, commonly ascribed to men, and those seen as natural to women, are set loose to oat freely in the social sphere, attaching themselves to any individual, regardless of his or her sex. The conceptual change that Edgeworth tries to set in motion through the characteristics of these two female philosophers amounts to an attempted reform of the prevailing understanding of differences between men and women. In effect, what she proposesthough the period did not possess this terminologyis a theory of culturally determined gender distinction to replace the idea that male and female characteristics were based on natural sexual difference. In this sense, Edgeworth is very close to Wollstonecraft, who discussed gender characteristics in terms of sexual virtues. As Wollstonecraft remarks in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty.18 Wollstonecrafts insistence on dening modesty in cultural terms was particularly shocking to her contemporaries, as modesty was understood in the late eighteenth century as an essential feminine characteristic that heightened womens sexual appeal to men through making them self-conscious of their desirability yet somehow unaware of their own desire. In terms of natural differences between men and women, Wollstonecraft was willing to accept only physical strength. All the other differences she ascribed to educationto what we understand today as environmental or social inuences. Edgeworth largely agreed with Wollstonecraft on the idea that male and female traits were not characteristics at all, but were rather manners; that
18 Wollstonecraft, 165.

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is, that female attitudes and behaviours were not natural parts of female character, and hence characteristics, but were rather learned through living in society, and were therefore mannerismsor, to use the second gentlemans formulation, a bundle of habits. While Edgeworth agreed with Wollstonecrafts position that feminine behaviours were culturally derived mannerisms and not naturally occurring characteristics, she diverged from Wollstonecraft in her assessment of the value of some feminine practices. Whereas Wollstonecraft urged her readers to cast off what in her mind were unnatural female manners, Edgeworth was willing to consider the utility of many feminine behaviours. Edgeworth takes up the topic of the usefulness of feminine mannerisms in the Rights of Woman chapter, where Percival and Freke argue about delicacy, by which they mean an attitude of extreme distaste for sexually inected subject matter and for expressions of sexual desire. Edgeworth frames this discussion by placing it within the context of a preexisting debate between Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke about the manners of European society, which was itself part of a larger late-Enlightenment dispute over the role of custom in social life and the advisability of revolutionary change. In his Reections on the Revolution in France , Burke had accused the French revolutionaries, and their British supporters (which Wollstonecraft was, of course), of promoting a new conquering empire of light and reason, a system through which all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.19 Through the metaphor of drapery, Burke refers to the European manners that he believes originated as the social and political effects of chivalry. According to Burke, the very nature of European character is dependent upon the customs and manners that have grown and developed organically, in connection with the religion, the landscape, the laws, and the economic system of the region. These customs, he admits, act as a mirage, but they are essential in that, like Adams loincloth, they cover a defective human nature. Although Burke acknowledges that these customs are not natural to humanity, he sees them as a set of practices responsible for the superiority of Europeanparticularly Britishculture. According to Burke, these practices are so deeply rooted that they can be seen as naturalor at least nativeto European society.
19 Edmund Burke, Reections on the Revolution in France (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 67.

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Thus, despite his characterization of European manners as a kind of drapery, Burkes understanding of culture is deeply conservative in that he considers these customs a permanent dress necessary for the continuation of civilization. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, believed that nothing was sacrosanct about European manners, and insisted in both her Vindications that these customssocial, legal, economic, politicalneeded to be transformed, and that all of Europe would be the better for it. And she expressed a particular vehemence against Burkes revered tradition of European chivalry, which she believed made women into sexual objects rather than moral agents. In relation to Wollstonecraft, whose scathing opinion of female manners was nothing if not immediately clear, Edgeworths ideological position is deceptive if not read carefully in the context of the larger theoretical and political debates of the day. At the beginning of the Rights of Woman chapter, she appears to cast Percival in the role of Burke and to make Freke the spokeswoman for Wollstonecraft. As the discussion expands, however, so does the complexity of Edgeworths own position on the question of customs. In response to Frekes assertion that the present system of society is radically wrong, Percival responds:
Should we nd things much improved by tearing away what has been called the decent drapery of life? Drapery, if you ask me my opinion, cried Mrs. Freke, whether wet or dry, is the most confoundedly indecent thing in the world. That depends on public opinion, I allow, said Mr. Percival. The Lacedaemonian ladies, who were veiled only by public opinion, were better covered from profane eyes than some English ladies are in wet drapery. (23031)

In railing against drapery, Freke is expressing the Wollstonecraftian opinion that behaviours such as female delicacy are not rooted in nature and should therefore be eliminated. Percival, on the other hand, argues that overturning conventions will not increase happiness. Because he counters her radical argument, Freke believes Percival to be articulating a deeply conservative position. But his disapproval of radical change does not indicate a Burkelike veneration for the social and political structures of the past. Unlike Burke, he does not see the nakedness of human nature as something that must necessarily be covered; and, importantly, he

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believes sexual decency to be in the eyes of the collective beholders. Through this reference to public opinion and the practices of the Lacedaemonian ladies, who, he says, were modestly dressed despite their nakedness, Percival makes several important points: rst, that culture, not nature, determines feminine practices; second, that these customs do change over time; and third, that social customs are useful in promoting individual happiness. In the rst he agrees with both Burke and Wollstonecraft; in the second he agrees with Wollstonecraft alone; and in the third he agrees only with Burke. If we see Percival here as Edgeworths proxy rather than Burkes, we can see that she uses this discussion to moderate between Burke and Wollstonecraft. Thus, she creates a pragmatic middle ground between Burkes reverence for all social custom and Wollstonecrafts desire to entirely eliminate behaviours that trade on sexual distinctions. That Edgeworth seeks a middle ground, however, does not diminish the radicalism of her thought, and her moderation is not a tepid concession to both sides. Rather, she seeks an overhaul of custom based on a pragmatic application of theory. The point Edgeworth makes through Percival herethat feminine behaviours are not natural characteristics, but rather mannerisms is one that ran counter to the deeply held beliefs of most of her contemporaries. Virtues were commonly characterized as either masculine or feminine in the period; and from the middle of the eighteenth century on, women were being told more frequently and more emphatically that the appropriately feminine reactions to sexual desiremodesty, delicacy, and passivitywere natural traits. The experience of women during the process of courtship, they were told, was fundamentally different from the male experience. Rousseau, for example, portrayed the development of sexual attachment in book 5 of mile as an elaborate battle plan in which the man advanced while the woman retreated.20 Less philosophical, but substantially in line with Rousseau, the inuential Dr John Gregory laid out a complete methodology of love for the legions
20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, of course, one of the periods most inuential advocates of a naturalized theory of sexual difference. Through his descriptions of Sophie, created to be miles perfect mate, he embodies his idea that the sexual differences between men and women created distinctions of character that were natural, desirable, and insurmountable: A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks, and perfection is not susceptible of more or less. Rousseau, mile, or on Education (1762), trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 358.

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of young female readers of his conduct books, a methodology that was based on assumptions about natural female sexual reticence: Some agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good liking and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he contracts an attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your gratitude; this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difculties ... If attachment was not excited in your sex in this manner, there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of love. 21 Gregorys theory of the progress of love is painstakingly awkward, and his use of the concept of the natural is inconsistent; but he does codify the periods conviction that a woman cannot be sexually interested in a man without rst passing through an elaborate period of retreat. A man may attach himself quickly with no risk and may be motivated by an erotically based attraction; but a woman must go through a lengthy and slow process in which she moves from being grateful to the man for taking notice of her to nally arriving at a tepid feeling of love. According to Gregorys theory, it is so difcult for women to arrive at a sexual love that they must be constantly thwarted in order to produce the delay that will eventually result in the desire sufcient for a formal engagement. This model of female love, so essential to the periods understanding of sexual character, is another feature of womens experience that Edgeworth represents as originating from social, rather than natural, causes. So important is this topic for her challenge to essentialist concepts of gender, such as those articulated by Rousseau and Gregory, that she makes it the subject of an extended conversation between Lady Delacour and Belinda. Late in the novel, a reformed and healed Lady Delacour interrogates Belinda about her feelings for Mr Vincent, the young West Indian landowner Belinda has agreed to marry because she believes Clarence Hervey, the man she really loves, is engaged to another woman. In the conversation, Belinda begins by repeating lessons she has learned from Anne Percival, lessons that are reminiscent of Dr Gregorys pronouncements on natural female sexual behaviour: We
21 John Gregory, A Fathers Legacy to His Daughters (1774), in Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 50.

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gradually acquire a knowledge of the good qualities of those who endeavour to please us; and if they are really amiable, their persons become agreeable to us by degrees, we become accustomed to their addresses, and time (339). After Lady Delacour breaks in, laughing at the idea of becoming accustomed to a lover, Edgeworth turns the conversation into a philosophic dialogue and uses the characters to explore the question of which aspects of womens approach to love are determined by natural, and which by social, causes. The two begin by asking each other to rene, or dene their terms:
Faites-moi le plaisir, ma chre, dorienter votre royaume dhabitude, said Lady Delacour. Do me the favour, previously, to dene the boundaries of the realm of Novelty; you must allow, that Novelty has precedence; therefore, shew me all her titles rst. I acknowledge, said Lady Delacour, that Novelty and Custom divide the world of fancy. The young are subjects to the one, the old to the other ... If Novelty must at last abandon her conquests, it is surely prudent, said Belinda, to attach ourselves to the permanent victor. My dear Belinda, there can be no custom without previous novelty; you therefore begin at the wrong end. (340)

At this point, the issue is no longer whether or not Belinda is in love with Vincent; the topic of the conversation is the exact role of attraction in the development of female love. As an advocate for novelty, Lady Delacour promotes the idea that love originates in an initial, pre-rational attraction, which is to say that she believes love emanates from the realm of the natural. Belinda does not dispute the claim that novelty, or attraction, precedes custom; but she points out that the love that arises from the impulse of attraction must give way to the dictates of custom. When Belinda shifts the discussion from French to English she is redirecting the term custom from its French equivalent of habitude , or a set of supercial mannerisms that are done without thinking, to its meaning as a form of deeply ingrained behavioural control. What Belinda pinpoints through this discussion of custom is that, in contrast to dominant beliefs of the late eighteenth century, female behaviour in love is not based on a natural difference between men and women. Rather, what distinguishes women from men in courtship is custom

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social practices that dictate how men and women should behave. As Belinda says, Now, seriously I think, that beside religion, morality, honour, prudence, and all the satellites which guard the virtue of our sex; the force of custom is not to be disregarded; I do not mean, merely the customs of the world, but those which prevent us from suddenly thinking of any person as a lover (340). The condition of being a woman in this culture, Belinda explains, is to live in a state in which customssocial ruleshave been internalized to the extent that they function as interior controls of behaviour. According to the terms of this discussion, women are prevented from thinking of men sexually not because the nature of their desire is any different from mens but because they have internalized social controls to the extent that they deny sexual feeling automatically. This denial, then, is not a function of nature, but of second natureof cultural conditioning or, to use the periods terms, of education. And while the denial of desire and instant attraction is not natural, it is, according to Belinda, nonetheless necessary to womens happiness. The virtues and practices, thensuch as reason and moral fortitude for men and emotionality and sexual difdence for womenunderstood by Edgeworths contemporaries as part of sexual identity become in Belinda something akin to drapery. That is, what were generally seen as natural characteristics of one sex or the other become part of the bundle of behaviours and attitudes that men and women learn to dress themselves with as they grow up in their culture. That Edgeworth portrays these virtues, attitudes, and behaviours as secondary acquisitionsas characteristics acquired through education in a cultureis not to say, however, that she eschewed the concept of the natural entirely in regard to sexual identity. Beneath the drapery, beneath the manners and customs, Edgeworth sees one difference between men and women that she believes is not acquired through experiencethat men desire women and women desire men. After all, Belinda does not dispute Lady Delacours pronouncements about the power of novelty; she only argues for the necessity of custom to curb novel erotic impulses for the good of individual women. This suggestion that the only natural distinction between men and women lies in the realm of heterosexual desire emerges early in the novel, in the scene in which Hervey impersonates the ctitious Mme de Pomenars. Having bet Lady Delacour that he could manage a hoop skirt so well that

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he could convince the partially blind Lady Boucher that he was a woman, Hervey boasts, I will bet fty guineas, that I come into a room in a hoop, and that she does not nd me out by my airthat I do not betray myself, in short, by my masculine awkwardness (74). Hervey is almost triumphant, moving, talking, and giving off the air of a woman until Lady Delacour tricks him into revealing himself by letting loose the cascade of Belindas hair. As both Lady Delacour and the reader know, Hervey feels a strong attraction to Belinda; but because he suspects her of conniving for his fortune, he suppresses this attraction for most of the novels early chapters. But the cascade of haira highly eroticized female attribute in the periodexposes his masculinity: As she spoke, Lady Delacour, before Belinda was aware of her intentions, dexterously let down her beautiful tresses and the countess de Pomenars [Hervey] was so much struck at the sight, that she was incapable of paying the necessary compliments. Nay, touch it, said Lady Delacour, it is so ne and soft. At this dangerous moment her ladyship artfully let drop the comb; Clarence Hervey suddenly stooped to pick it up, totally forgetting his hoop and his character (76). On the one hand, it seems as if Hervey, in stooping to pick up Belindas comb, is betraying himself from a natural masculine characteristic, that of the courtesy of a gentleman. But such courtesy, so deeply ingrained in a gentleman that it acts at the level of automatic response, is triggered by the distraction of sexual desire, by the erotic cascade of Belindas owing hair. The primary cause of Herveys forgetting his feigned feminine mannershis ladys draperyis his desire for Belinda. In this way, Edgeworth suggests that distinctive masculine manners such as courtesy are secondary to heterosexual desire. Indeed, Herveys convincing impersonation of the Countess de Pomenars prior to his erotic self-betrayal encourages readers to see gender as a uid concept. Behaviours such as manner, movement, and general air are interchangeable between men and women, as are virtues such as honesty, loyalty, and courage. What is not interchangeable, what exists separately from custom, is the heterosexual desire Edgeworth puts forth as the only natural distinction between men and women. Hervey shows that he is a man because he desires a woman, and desires her so intensely that, though he is socially gifted, he is in this instant struck speechless and easily tricked into self-exposure. Thus, while Hervey may successfully engage in a gender masquerade, he cannot escape his own sexuality, as manifested through his desire for Belinda.

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In her own extended involvement with cross-dressing, Harriet Freke serves much the same purpose, which is to establish sexual desire, not intellect or virtue, as the key distinguishing factor between men and women. As I have suggested, intellectually and morally, Freke has no traits that would coincide with the cultures concept of a masculine understanding, and her male attire and masculine air come in part from an extended masquerade, from a life lived in deance of female manners and mannerisms. But Freke possesses a quality that, beneath the drapery, Edgeworth portrays as fundamentally maleher desire for Lady Delacour. As Lady Delacour narrates her history to Belinda early in the novel, she describes an incident in which Freke, dressed as a man, attempts to force herself into the carriage ahead of Lady Delacour and her would-be lover, Colonel Lawless: We left Mrs. Luttridges together early; about half past one. As the colonel was going to hand me to my carriage, a smart-looking young man, as I thought, came up close to the coach door, and stared me full in the face: I was not a woman to be disconcerted at such a thing as this, but I really was startled when the young fellow jumped into the carriage after me (45). Here, Frekes inhabiting of a male persona extends beyond the drapery of dress or characteristics of custom. Her impudent look is the stare of desire, a stare so intense and so masculine in its motives to Lady Delacour that she is unable to recognize the face of a good female friend, though that face is undisguised. To Lady Delacour, the face of this desire is profoundly threatening: she takes Frekes intrusion into a carriage, ahead of her escort, as an imminent sexual attack. Freke does launch a sexual attack on Lady Delacour, but as she is physically a woman, she uses a proxy to accomplish her desires. The irtation between Lady Delacour and Colonel Lawless, which ultimately drives Lord Delacour to kill Lawless in a duel, is promoted by Freke, who does her best to push the two from irtation to adultery. Frekes ambition is to manoeuvre Lady Delacour into an affair with Lawless, her proxy, by manipulating her into a situation from which she cannot escape. As the three leave the house of a fortune teller late one night, after Freke has audaciously pushed the topic of a sexual relationship between Lady Delacour and Lawless into the open, she whispers, Bless me, my dear lady Delacour ... what can make you in such a desperate hurry to get home ... ? I verily believe you are afraid to trust yourself with us. Which of us are you afraid of; Lawless, or

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me, or yourself ? (48). Is Lady Delacour afraid of Lawlesss desire for her or of Frekes? Or is Lady Delacour afraid of her own desire for either one? This is Freke at her most sinister, and here she is most threatening, not just to Lady Delacour, but to the entire social order of the novels original audience. By insinuating that desire itself may be free-oating, that there may not be, after all, a natural, sexually based difference between men and women, Freke shows herself to be the unnatural creature that anti-Jacobin critics had accused Wollstonecraft of being all alongan unsexd female. Unlike Wollstonecraft, for whom accusations of being unsexd were based on her masculine understanding and disdain for feminine mannerisms, in Freke male and female elements have been thoroughly mixed at the most basic level. As Lady Delacour describes Freke to Belinda, She supported the character of a young rake with such spirit and truth , that I am sure no common conjurer could have discovered any thing feminine about her, and later adds, though she had laid aside the modesty of her own sex, she had not acquired the decency of the other (4748). Freke has, then, succeeded in creating a disruption in sexual identity, and beneath the drapery, does exist as an unsexd character. But the elements of her unsexd nature do not lie in her masculine habits, in her supposedly masculine understanding, or in her philosophies of female independence. Rather, according to the ideological framework that Edgeworth has established, she is unsexdthat is, both male and femalebecause she has an ungovernable desire for another woman. With the character of Freke, Edgeworth presents the reader with a version of what an unsexd individual might be like, if one existed. But just as she employs Freke to arrive at the precise point of distinction between men and women, she also uses her to dispel the myth, popularized by the anti-Jacobin satirist Richard Polwhele, that the female philosopher was by denition an unsexd gure.22 In this post-Wollstonecraft period, the female philosopher was supposed to be unsexdto be a dangerous, sexually aggressive individual actively engaged in a militant program to defeminize
22 Richard Polwhele, The Unsexd Females: A Poem (1798; New York: Garland Publishing, 1974). This mock-heroic poem casts Wollstonecraft in the title role as the unsexd Amazonian female philosopher, leading a tribe of women writers who have abandoned their feminine interests for a militant philosophy of sexual and social reform.

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women. But through the character of Freke, Edgeworth separates the idea of being unsexd from the kind of intellectual questions both she and Wollstonecraft were pursuing. Edgeworths next step, after dismantling the connection between the idea of the unsexd female and the gure of the female philosopher, is to relegate the unsexd female herself to mythical status. Once Freke discovers that she can no longer inuence Lady Delacour, and that she cannot manipulate Belinda into the role once occupied by her aristocratic friend, her threat to the characters in the novel moves into the realm of the fantasticalshe attempts to terrorize Mr Vincents West Indian servant and Lady Delacour by impersonating supernatural beings. But this threat of the false female philosopher is easily dispelled by the character who replaces her as the true female philosopherby Belinda, who, using the scientic method of observation and analysis, discovers Freke beneath her nal masquerade. Once discovered, Freke literally disappears from the narrative. Thus, Edgeworth suggests that the idea of the unsexd female philosopher can only exist where it can feed on irrationality and fears of violent revolution. When the mind is cultivated, when the society understands that the female philosopher does not violate nature, the fear of Wollstonecraft that haunts the culture vanishes. As Edgeworth makes clear, the cultures fear of the unsexd female philosopher was based on an anxiety about gender reversal, on the near-hysterical concern that a challenge to essentialized concepts of male and female identity would undermine British society completely. What Edgeworth attempts in this novel is to redene gender by replacing the female philosopher who appeared to violate nature with a female philosopher who understands and accepts custom. In this way, Edgeworth succeeds in redening gender by creating a feminine heroine whose character is, according to the periods understanding, almost entirely masculine. Dened against a society that believed in the existence of sexual character, that insisted on fundamental, natural differences between men and women, Belinda is in every signicant way the superior of average men and the equal of extraordinary ones. She is a woman of principle whose honour is determined not by the standard feminine concepts of virginity and chastity, but by traditionally masculine onesher adherence to her word and the reliability of her friendship. Her virtues, which are plentiful, are not characteristically feminine ones

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she is not emotional, and she does not display a rened feminine sensibility. She is neither meek nor obedient. Nor is she innocent, in the sense of not understanding sexual desire. Rather, her virtues are those that the culture took for granted as being primarily within the domain of men. Belinda thinks independently, reacts according to judgment rather than emotion; and she is generous, courageous, and capable of extraordinary acts of self-control. She is a woman who, acting according to principles she has developed through introspection, refuses to participate in the sexual protocols that form the lifeblood of her cultures social structure. This revised female philosopher Edgeworth has created is, despite her extraordinary ability to live life according to her own moral principles, in many ways un-extraordinary. At the beginning of the novel, there is no hint that Belinda will distinguish herself intellectually, much less that she will mature into a powerful advocate for women. She arrives at Lady Delacours house as the novel opens, a far from exemplary character: Her taste for literature declined in proportion to her intercourse with the fashionable world, as she did not in this society, perceive the least use in the knowledge that she had acquired. Her mind had never been roused to much reection; she had in general acted but as a puppet in the hands of others (10). The only unusual characteristic of Belinda at this point, Edgeworth indicates, is a now extinguished interest in books and a lack of vanity and affectation. Otherwise, she is indistinguishable from any young lady brought to the country to nd a husband. She has no signicant intellectual abilities, no unusual educational background, and certainly no inclination to rebellion. Although she emerges as the novels true female philosopher, Belinda is, at the beginning, a kind of everywomanor at least a gure who could be any woman of her age and class. But through the process of reection, through thinking thoroughly about the lives she witnesses, and through carefully analysing her own reactions and responsibilities, she educates herself and develops her understanding. She soon learns that the knowledge acquired from literature is essential to the development of the principles required to be able to navigate successfully in a complex social world. And so, through the development of her mind, through making herself into a woman of principle, Belinda is able to use moral philosophy to heal the most divided of households. At the end of the novel, Lady Delacour, the primary beneciary of Belindas principled mind, challenges the readers to nd a moral to the story: Our tale contains a moral , and, no doubt, You all have

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wit enough to nd it out (478). Although some modern readers have tended to interpret this challenge as a didactic assertion of the superiority of bourgeois domesticity, Edgeworth means to do something altogether different through Lady Delacours remark. Even after her reformation, Lady Delacour is far from a moralistic character, and her words remind readers that Edgeworth in her Advertisement gives notice that Belinda is not a novel, but a Moral Tale. In using the term moral, Edgeworth does not mean to describe a simple, binary set of rights and wrongs, but rather to invoke the complexity of human behaviour and the difculty of determining right actionissues central to the eighteenth-century pursuit of moral philosophy. When Lady Delacour teases her readers to nd the moral, she is, characteristically, laughing at the kind of world view that allows determinations of human virtue to be summed up in a maxim. What she wants to do, or rather, what Edgeworth wants to do through her, is to point out that the meaning of the story will emerge through the kind of careful analysis, use of good judgment, and intelligent consideration that Belinda has developed and demonstrated over three volumes and thirty-one chapters. The meaning, then, if not the moral, is that, through the disciplined cultivation of the understanding, the readers themselves can become female philosophers. In short, what Edgeworth offers in Belinda is a vision of society in which every woman might increase her own happiness and that of her family and friends by applying her understanding to her own experience. In such a society, the female philosopher would no longer be viewed as an unnatural gure, waging masculine wars over abstractions and threatening to overturn the customs that hold the culture together. Rather, in such a society, every woman would be a female philosopher. And in this environment, where the understanding of gender had been radically transformed from within, without violence and commotion, what had been extraordinary would slowly become ordinary. This, in the end, is what marks Edgeworth as an Enlightenment thinkerthat she imagines a conceptual change for women so comprehensive as to transform exceptional beings into ordinary ones.23 The University of Alabama
23 I would like to thank James K. Chandler, Sandra Macpherson, and Fred Whiting for their insightful suggestions and indispensable advice.

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