Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia, travels through England geographically and through numerous modes of transport. It explores the concept of national identity in an England that is still determining its own. William Hogarth’s rules for determining the beauty of the Serpentine s in The Analysis of Beauty offer a model for the type of natural and beautiful travel around England that Burney attempts to construct, determining the most beautiful moral values of such an identity. Both the social implications and the modes of travel consider how this sense of beauty emerges throughout the novel, as Cecilia’s own subjective growth travels in tandem with her physical motion. Burney offers a model for travel that challenges the masculine Grand Tour, a type of travel that worked to divide that nation. Cecilia’s tour, in contrast, through England serves to promote social inclusivity and cohesion. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / The thesis considers the importance of William Hogarth’s principles in The Analysis of Beauty to Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia, through the perspective of travel.

This thesis examines the role of “the frolic” in Frances Burney’s Camilla. Frolics take the form of light-hearted pranks centered on ritualized public humiliation; they are comically framed and particularly painful, encouraging a discussion about the ethics of laughter and the dynamics of power operating in both Camilla and Burney’s world. The purpose of this study is twofold: firstly, this project seeks to qualify current emphasis on politeness in the eighteenth century by tracing a history of violent comedy, engaging with jestbook humour, print culture, conduct literature and theorists such as Fielding, Hobbes, Smith and Locke. This study suggests that Camilla responds to popular debates about laughter and propriety, pushing the boundaries of comic acceptability with violent pranks and the use of animal and deformity humour. Secondly, this study explores the structure of the frolic itself, its function as a system of domination and control. The prankster, a socially transgressive figure able to displace the rules governing propriety through a prank, is also a social tyrant – seizing complete control over others, causing humiliation and shame. The frolic is based on plotting, secrecy, deception and public exposure, and Burney aligns the prankster with other transgressive figures in the novel, such as guardians and mentors, who exert the same type of power over the vulnerable and the weak. Burney’s pranks bring as much pain as they do laughter, becoming an important satiric device that explores both the politics of laughter and the social forces at work in her novel. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis seeks to portray how an objectifying intra-diegetic gaze influences and constructs the plot devices Frances Burney uses in her four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. Burney creates a literary reality within her four novels’ narratives and breaks that reality down with the influence of the gazes and judgments of her novels’ characters upon each of her heroines. The gaze is an almost microscopic examination that objectifies and depersonalizes all of Burney’s heroines. Burney shows how the gaze shifts perspectives and manipulates that which it objectifies. Burney places her audience and her heroines into unfamiliar situations and then she shows the costs and benefits of reasserting one’s gaze. This thesis will show how Burney portrays the power of objectification in her novels upon her heroines, and the consequences that arise from the tensions of bombarding social gazes in all their duplicitous forms.

The cult of sensibility in the eighteenth century celebrates delicate emotional responses. Such susceptibility to emotion, however, has to rely on somatic representations such as sighs, tears, convulsion, and faints. So, paradoxically, interiority is known to others only by outer bodily signs, signs that could just as easily reflect an affectation of sensibility as sensibility proper. The attempt to control the slippage in the reference between interiority and appearance becomes an anxious cultural feature of eighteenth-century men and, especially, women, of the higher classes. If sensibility requires such careful control and practice, its assumed spontaneity becomes a fiction. The performing body of sensibility turns into a screen that veils one¡¦s true interiority rather than a transparent reflection of it. The performing body is theatricalized¡X placed on the stage as a spectacle, examined by spectators. Sensibility falls prey to insincere, artificial, and affected performances. Emotional representations are constantly facing inroads of theatricality. When emotional expressions are rendered formulaic and reproducible, they lose their naturalness. Moreover, sensibility requires witnesses, spectators who can vouch for its authenticity (but never validate it beyond all doubt). Sensibility cannot proclaim itself because such proclamation would violate sensibility¡¦s principle of sheer sincerity and spontaneity. Theatricality, as an abstracted concept of theater, points both to the formulaic performances and to the model of spectator and spectacle in the theater. Sensibility is closely related to theatricality in these terms. This thesis aims to reveal the dynamics of the interplay between theatricality and sensibility in two eighteenth-century British novels. Both novels present a young heroine making her debut in the world after spending her formative years in seclusion with a male guardian. The Introduction reviews the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. Chapter One discusses the theoretical and contextual relations between theatricality and sensibility. Chapter Two deals with Charlotte Lennox¡¦s novel The Female Quixote (1752), and how the heroine¡¦s sensibility is ridiculed as a form of self-theatricalization. Lennox gives the clash between sensibility and ridicule a generic dimension by blaming romance for the heroine¡¦s delusions. Chapter Three examines Frances Burney¡¦s epistolary novel Evelina (1778) and argues that the heroine¡¦s sensibility is both sealed and revealed in Burney¡¦s epistolary form since it enables Evelina to switch between being both spectator and spectacle. The conclusion briefly sums up the previous chapters and points out how, more generally, interpretations of literature can benefit from a recognition of the dynamics of theatricality and sensibility.

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“Liminal Spaces and The Disabled Body” explores Edmund Burke’s aesthetic paradigms as established in his An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Notions of the Sublime and the Beautiful to recover what disability meant for an eighteenth-century audience. I examine Burney’s Camilla and Eugenia’s disability as well as Dacre’s Zofloya and Victoria’s figurative hermaphroditism in terms of eighteenth-century views of deformity and physiognomy to argue that both Eugenia’s and Victoria’s deformities—Eugenia’s smallpox scars and injured leg and Victoria’s beautiful but too boldly delineated features—challenge the prevailing structures of aesthetics and expectations of feminine beauty. My thesis questions how eighteenth-century aesthetic theory constructs the modern concept of the “disabled” individual to argue that the female body with a disability or deformity surpasses the terms of submission and diminution instated by Burkean aesthetics. In turn, the disabled female gains purchase in literature due to her “liminal, between-categories status” as it strains masculine power structures and aesthetic and gender classification systems.

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Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project traces the connection between verbal constructions of place and issues of identity, national and gender, across the eighteenth century. Looking at what I term “critical food moments” during travel allows us particular insight into how food simultaneously serves a literal (intended for consumption) and a figurative (used as a literary topic and device) function, and how tropes of food—such as digestion—function as lexicons which offer women writers opportunities to better understand and criticize the nation and their own identities within the nation. I argue that food-centered moments allow us to better understand the lived experiences of women traveling in the eighteenth century, to analyze how material and sensory conditions influenced and shaped women’s understandings of themselves and their positions (places) in the world. Taken together, these four women authors represent a wide-range of perspectives from various social and economic backgrounds, and yet, what they have in common is crucial: a connection with the food, communities, and places they travel.

A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explore la naissance et le développement du roman de formation en Europe à l’époque romantique. Celle-ci est le témoin de nombreuses discussions sur les Droits de l’homme et de la montée du nationalisme en Europe. Au même moment, la littérature se transforme pour laisser plus de place à la subjectivité du personnage. Tout cela donne naissance à un nouveau genre littéraire : le Bildungsroman, ou roman de formation et d’éducation. Contrairement à la définition actuelle du genre, le Bildungsroman est transnational, c’est-à-dire qu’il ne provient pas exclusivement d’Allemagne, mais de partout en Europe. A Romantic Bildung se penche donc sur le sujet en analysant de façon thématique la trame narrative de Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), ainsi que d’Ormond, a Tale (1817) et sur leur appartenance au roman de l’époque romantique. En comparant les étapes d’éducation, d’indépendance, et de retour à la société des protagonistes, ces romans font ressortir les similitudes qui caractérisent le Bildungsroman. / A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explores the birth and development of the Bildungsroman during the Romantic period. The latter is characterized by the numerous discourses on the Rights of men as well as the rise of nationalism. At the same time, Romantic writers transform literature by increasing the protagonist’s subjectivity and in turns, create a new genre of narrative: the Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s development and growth is the main focus. Contrary to current definition of the genre, the Bildungsroman—or coming-of-age novel—is a transnational product: it is obviously found in Germany, but also in France, England, Ireland, and Scotland, to name a few, during the Romantic period. Through a thematic analysis of Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), and Ormond, A Tale (1815), A Romantic Bildung traces the narrative structure of the genre and it locates its essence in the Romantic novel. By comparing the narrative’s steps of education, independence, and return to society, the characteristics of the genre are revealed.