What would you have liked to say about Evelina in class on Thursday but didn't have a chance to?
What thoughts have occurred to you since you sat in the fishbowl?
What further thoughts have you had about how Evelina fits into the changing genre of the novel?
Post them here.
Deadline: Saturday midnight (since we need to be moving on to Tristram Shandy.
From our fishbowl discussion, I wish I had been able to discuss more about female sexuality or the lack of female sexuality that we have been seeing more and more of. While this was mentioned, I find it so incredibly interesting watching the novel turn from Fantomina to Evelina. Evelina is asexual and I think we can see the changing expectations of women during the 18th Century. Female sexuality is slowly being repressed and unwanted. While 18th century social expectations changed, the novel changed with it. Women are obviously represented differently as time went on in the novel.
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting that Evelina has a female protagonist, and there is a lack of sexuality in the novel. The novels before this tend to relate some form of sex to women, and the fact that Evelina is free from that sexual realm means to me that the novel is developing along with society. It is possible that women were beginning to hold a more respectable role in society and Evelina reflects that. No more are women simply looked at as sexual objects, but it is actually possible for them to have other roles. Of course, some men in the novel still do look at her sexually. However, I think the fact that she does not choose to respond to the sexual advances really says something about the development of women in a novel.
ReplyDeleteI would have liked to talk more about class distinctions of the eighteenth century. There seemed to be an argument surfacing about the unrepresented or "unclassified" sector of people that fall below the upper class. Although we can identify this through our observation, why is it significant and what does it mean? I would like to know Burney's purpose of presenting classes the way she does. I would also liked to have talked a little bit more about the two women in the race. We talked about how it was bizarre to the 21st century reader, and how Burney seemed to be criticizing the group of people at the race, with the exception of Orville and Evelina. What was the purpose of using two old women? We didn't really touch on the gender aspect because of time!
ReplyDeleteI also would have liked to discuss class more. We have focused a lot on gender because our last few protagonists have been women, most of them of distinction (with the exception of Pamela, who we never actually see living in a state of poverty and who later achieves distinction anyway). It seems like most protagonists of the 18th century were of the upper class. Is this because literacy was less prominent in the lower classes? Even so, you would think there would be books about the lower classes to show upper class readers "how the other half lives" so to speak. I'm just curious as to why all of the protagonists are either of the upper class or achieve upper class status by the end of the novel. It seems like novels perhaps don't take up this perspective until later on with books like Oliver Twist and that sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteEvelina's "rustic" upbringing sets her at a significant social disadvantage despite her having an upper class boarding school education, despite the fact that her most formative years would have been spent in the company of girls from other upper class families and that no small part of that level of education at the time was "finishing."
ReplyDeleteThis fact bothered be to no end, for the simple reason that much of what she should know about the social expectations of the upper class would have been taught at such schools, rather than solely in urban aristocratic households. For instance, her fears of dancing poorly are borne not of true ignorance of how to dance any upper class dances, but of having never before danced with a male partner, as all of her dance training and experience was with other female students while at school. The takeaway here is that she DID, in fact, know full well how to dance in spite of her "rustic" upbringing!
To my limited knowledge of boarding schools of the time, the kind of education which afforded dancing and the like was of sufficient quality and expense that the other girls being educated would have been at least upper middle class if not lower-upper class (the distinction being somewhat blurry at that time), meaning in turn that she should have had training in other areas of social etiquette and protocol expected of higher class females. Her own anxiety at her supposed lack of such education makes no sense to me. Please someone find an error in my reasoning, because I really feel like I'm missing something important that explains this disconnect between her upbringing and education.
I think that it is interesting that we get almost no description of Maria Mirvan in the novel. Maria is the reason that the events in the novel were able to take place-- Evelina goes to London as a guest of her friend Maria. All of the other young women that we encounter in the novel (the young Branghtons and Lady Louisa) are very silly and shallow and only concerned with men. Why does Maria play such a minor role in the novel? Also, like others suggested I would have like to explore the lack of sexuality in the novel compared to the others that we have been reading in class. The only type of sexuality that is presented is the prostitutes that Evelina sees while in London. Perhaps this is Burney making a statement about the amount of sex in other novels in the time?
ReplyDeleteI agree and definitely think that it would have been nice to discuss further about eh different class levels during the eighteenth century. I think that by exploring more about the distinctions in class, what classified each class and what the norms were for each of the classes would give us more perspective on why throughout the novel there is so much exposure to different classes and why it was done that way. Also, it is interesting to see how Evelina I believe interacted with different classes and eventually moved into the upper class.
ReplyDeleteWhat stuck with me most since the fish bowl discussion was our dissection of the foot race scene. It's particularly interesting to me because earlier this semester we read Evelina in my 461 class as well, and I distinctly remember when the foot race was brought up in class, it was quickly glossed over with a "Yeah, that sure was weird...well, moving on" kind of sense. And in reading the novel fully the first time, as well as revisiting selected parts the second time, that's how I (and I think most) read the scene itself. You get to it, it happens, your reaction is something along the lines of "Wow, that was really strange" but then the story moves on and so you do, and the plot never really hearkens back to it any point and so when it's brought up again by anyone your (or my) initial reaction yet again was/is "Yeah, that was really weird, and it's even weirder how it doesn't really ever seem to get addressed."
ReplyDeleteSo in that sense, I'm glad that we were able to examine it further, because as I mentioned in a previous response it led me to actually take some time and Google the background of the whole thing, which in the end re-affirmed my belief that the scene's foremost, if not sole purpose, was to further establish the righteousness of Orville's character, being that he isn't as easily amused by the events as are his drunken cohorts.
I also was struck at the footrace scene, the disregard for the elderly was astonishing to me. The entire time that I was reading that scene I was thinking that could be someones grandmother or something, granted these old women are fictional but as we discussed in class this novel is supposed to have been praised because it gave such an accurate accounting of the aristocratic lifestyle. I mean if that is true what does that say about the 18c aristocracy?
ReplyDeleteI wasn't able to attend class on Thursday, but I agree with a lot of the comments above. Particularly, Cara and Nathan's comments about female sexuality caught my interest. At the beginning of this course, the thought of the 18th century as a place where sex was taboo - especially for females. After reading Fantomina and Pamela, my thoughts immediately changed. Sex became the primary focus of many of the novels, and the lack of sexuality in Evelina was rather surprising. Tracking the views of female sexuality in the 18th century is almost equivalent to tracking the female existence in the 18th century. In the first two stories I mentioned above, we see the growth of women in society, which equated to the growth in their sexuality and openness with it. Now (after reading Evelina), my idea of female social roles in the 18th century is regressing toward my original thoughts - primarily because Evelina was referred to as a predecessor to Jane Austen in class. Jane Austen is the most recognizable 18th century work to me, and associating it with Evelina makes me start to associate the qualities of Evelina with the 18th century again.
ReplyDeleteI liked how our fishbowl discussion was structured around the idea of how Evelina may or may not be considered a progressive novel, and many of my notes from the fishbowl were concentrated on this topic. In one way, Evelina is not particularly progressive in terms of women: it reinforces many patriarchal norms in society and suggests that legitimacy is founded in male agency. The only way Evelina can fully assimilate into high society is through the claim of her birth father or by marriage, both of which are dictated by men. We also see several occasions where she puts the burgeoning relationship with Lord Orville before perhaps more genuine and altruistic interactions with MaCartney, suggesting a prioritization of the female subjection to men. On the other hand, Evelina IS a very proactive and dynamic part of her world. We see her become more and more comfortable with social interaction, and even make choices that would threaten her social or moral standing, such as helping MaCartney financially or expressing distaste for the footraces. We also see her tell Rev. Villars that she no longer discloses all of her thoughts or actions to him, suggesting a new maturity (or conversely the commodification of women... passed from Villars to Orville - even their names are kind of opposite syllable arrangements). The way I view the novel, many of Evelina's actions and opportunities for female agency are fueled by an obligation to satisfy male characters, but I guess they are steps for women nonetheless. The book I used for my final project is ALL about female compliance, so I'm poised think about all of our books in this manner, but I am welcome to any other interpretations!
ReplyDeleteI think it's important to note that this novel is still somewhat of a conduct manual. The novel isn't really allowed to be progressive. The way Evelina is considered the "ideal woman", and the way in which Lord Oreville is more of an example of the type of man that woman should look for.
ReplyDeleteI see the restoration of her place as her father's daughter, is a way to show that woman must go through the proper channels in order to get married. In short, the father and Oreville serve as examples of masculinity in Evelina's life. No matter how estranged she is from her father, she still needs him in order for the marriage to happen. In order to move up, she must marry in.