3. Musical Accomplishment in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer

Also, perhaps, even with the question of marriage left aside, an accomplished reputation might serve as compensation for disappearing beauty in a society which places heavy emphasis on the physical appearance of women. Giles Arbe, the text’s mouthpiece for social justice, states regarding young, pretty ladies: ‘“I always pity them, the moment I see them, those pretty creatures in their prime. I always think what they have got to go through. After seeing every body admire them, to see nobody look at them!”’ (Burney 1988, 261). Through Giles, the text acknowledges the difficulty of ageing for women in a society obsessed with women’s youth and beauty. Indeed, the horribly ageist and misogynistic reviews of The Wanderer by Croker and Hazlitt validate, with pointed irony, Burney’s stance, revealing as they do the vulnerability of the female author writing in old age. See Croker (1814) and Hazlitt (1815).

The Wanderer makes this dynamic explicit (although with a change in gender) when Mrs Maple, guardian of the young Selina, employs Juliet as a music teacher for Selina in order to make her more attractive to her fiancé, Ireton. Whether Selina actually wants to learn music or not is a question left more or less aside.

Croker (1814) and Hazlitt (1815) produced damning reviews full of scathing misogyny. Claudia Johnson sees the text’s social project as profoundly contradictory. Janet Todd (1980) laments Burney’s decision not to develop the friendship between Juliet and the Jacobin Elinor, seeing it as a missed opportunity to present female autonomy. Gillan D’Arcy Wood (2010) views the text’s pompous narrative style as a reflection of stifled authorial creativity, caused by paternal authority.

Notes from the Records of the Assembly Rooms of Edinburgh (1842).

The effects of the sentimental narrative on female subjectivity and female personal relationships is explored in depth in Chap. 5 on Smith’s novel Ethelinde. Where Burney employs sentimentality conventionally, Smith rather imagines how it could be exploited by women to create agency, as well as bias personal relationships in favour of women. Whenever Smith presents domestic activity in the novels examined in this book, it is always subversive of patriarchal power.

See also Hannah Arendt (1999). See also Villa (2000).

For a detailed discussion of the historical and philosophical implications of this mode of characterisation, see Thompson (2001).