Women, Money and Debt in the 18th
Century Novel, Part 7:
Cecilia, Section 1
Looking at the
prevailing obsession with money, the getting and managing of it (and what
happens when you can’t pay your debts), in eighteenth century English
literature – with specific reference to female heroines in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782).
So: Amelia triumphed against the seemingly insurmountable
odds, and through a sale, through engaging in trade…But what happens to a
single woman, alone, who has an awful lot of money? Surely life will be better, and far more
insulated for her? Surely she has all
the advantages that a desperate though clever woman (Roxana) lacked? Or that a poor wife dependent on an irresponsible
man (Amelia) had not? No. Cecilia’s trials show that even having money
can be a web so sticky that soon she has no independence at all. Even having money is no defence against the
rules of society at the time. By the end
of Cecilia’s story, you may well end up convinced, as I did, that a woman in
those times needed to be both as clever and ruthless as Roxana; as married as
poor gentle Amelia (just for camouflage), and as rich as Cecilia. No point having the money if you can’t hold
it and use it to shape your life…Here comes the sad economic tale of Cecilia…who
would have done better as a widow, which is a bit sad. (And long live feminism!)
***
And just in case you’re a trifle lost – here are the earlier
posts in this series:
=> that’s the Introduction and Abstract to this mammoth
undertaking!
=> that’s Roxana, Part 1…in a galaxy far far…etc…
=> that’s the last part of Roxana’s story and it’s
analysis.
=> the first part of Amelia’s experiences: her husband is
put in debtor’s prison.
=> how Amelia survives as a married woman but without
protection for herself and her children, in a cruel and corrupt city.
=> and how Amelia finally achieves a happy ending, after
all her trails…
Ok, let’s go!
***
Money is foregrounded absolutely in Cecilia. As Catherine
Gallagher points out, “we do not often fear for Cecilia, but we are kept in a
perpetual state of anxiety about her money”[1]. She begins the novel an heiress (with two
legacies), and the progress of the plot centres on her money and how much
control she has over it. She dreams of
grand schemes for her fortune (much like Dorothea Brooke in the later Middlemarch), wanting to help the poor
and act as a responsible benefactress.
But from the outset she is undermined and hindered by men seeking her
money (for example, her childhood friend Monckton; each of her three guardians;
and sundry fortune-hunting aristocrats, such as Floyer). The insidious cumulative effects of debt also
gradually drain her (how modern that
sounds). The way the novel manages to
convey the confusion in situation between charitable object (be they worthy or
unworthy), creditor and debtor, shows how easily the lines can be blurred, when
it comes to trying to do good with money.
In addition, Burney conveys through Cecilia’s experiences, the
impossibility of a woman with money being valued as anything other than a
commodity to be made use of by men.
These same men also believe she is incapable of managing her own
pin-money, let alone manage her fortune on any real scale (which is what
Cecilia dreamed of: a local net of charitable aid she could control and
distribute).[2]
Cecilia’s real problem – as if those stated already were not
peril enough – proves to be love.
Because of a clause in her uncle’s will (the larger of the two
legacies), Cecilia is required to keep her maiden name on marriage, with her
husband expected to adopt the patronym.
If this condition is not adhered to, she will lose the entire
inheritance. Cecilia manages to fall in
love with a poor aristocrat whose family is not only desperate for money, but
also proud and determined to keep their family name. The action of Cecilia traces the death of Cecilia’s dreams of charity and
independence, caused by her own generosity and the interference of her
guardians. She eventually marries the
poor aristocrat, Mortimer Delvile, with Burney concluding the book with her
heroine battered by circumstance, much poorer, and ethically compromised. I intend to illustrate how monetary obsession
informs every aspect of the plot as it relates to Cecilia’s fate, and most of
the main character’s interactions with her, showing that her good nature
combined with her money, never really had a chance in this rapacious urban
environment.
Cecilia is forced into London from her retirement in the
country, by her uncle’s stipulation that until she reaches her majority, she
must stay with one of three guardians he has appointed her: any use she makes
of her legacy until she is of age, must be approved of by at least one of
them. She is almost immediately placed
in a difficult position, as she cannot have even small amounts of pin-money for
living expenses without resorting to credit, as she has no actual cash. Hence, when she buys herself some books – and
she does not spend much money on herself, preferring to live frugally – she must
ask one of her guardians, the parsimonious Briggs, for the money to pay the
credit bill. His response is typical: “‘Books?’
he cried, ‘what do you want with books?
Do no good; all lost time; words get no cash’” (p.181). When Cecilia tries to explain, her words go
unheard – and her bill unpaid. As
Katherine M. Rogers points out, she can rarely get any of her guardians to
listen to her point of view, until they have finished “expressing their egos”,
even assuming she has a right to a view on how to dispose of her own money,
does not appear to occur to them.[3] Indeed, being an heiress guarantees her neither
autonomy nor self-determination. It
merely
Guarantees others will attempt
to dominate her. […] To clear a space
for self-determination, [she] must reject male consumerism or commodification,
resisting the authoritative infringements of guardians, suitors and society.[4]
Terry Castle records that “Cecilia is the object of a
collective economic fixation” – most of the men in the novel (Monckton, all
three of her guardians, Floyer, Morrice, even her mentor in charity, Albany),
view her in terms of what she can provide for them, and how she can further
their aims.[5] An example illustrating this well, is the
occasion the Harrels decide to throw a masquerade (which Cecilia feels is
another occasion for the Harrels to “wantonly accumulate debts” [p.103]). Monckton, who wishes to marry her, and
Briggs, who believes that anyone other than a husband he chooses for Cecilia
himself is bound to be a villain, express clear opinions about Cecilia’s
presence, her money and whose job it is to spend it. Monckton can only show his sexual and
economic aggression and possessiveness while in disguise at the masquerade, but
his hemming of her in, so she can interact with no one else is a very telling
way of protecting his investment in his future, as he sees her (p.115). Similarly, Briggs’s appearance at the
masquerade shows him more earnest to guard Cecilia’s fortune than her person;
and his direct comments on her freedom and her fortune, give away much as to
Cecilia’s illusory monetary independence:
[Briggs stumbles over Monckton
in disguise and says ‘What’s this black thing?
Don’t like it; looks like the devil.
You shan’t stay with it; carry you away; take care of you myself.
[…] Never set your heart on a fine
outside; nothing within. Bristol stones
won’t buy stock: only wants to chouse [OED: to dupe] you. (p.119).
Judy Simons comments that men frequently misvalue women in
the novel:
Men are seen as dehumanizing
women, reducing them to commodities, objects of pleasure or means of income, and
it is in such a context that Cecilia must struggle to assert her sense of
personal value.[6]
This was “the age of the fortune-hunting husband”, as Kay
Rogers has so plainly put it,[7]
and Cecilia is further hampered from trying to live her life and dispose of her
money as she chooses by the almost constant attention, in the first half of the
novel, of Sir Robert Floyer. He pursues
her with such naked ambition, he seems to believe her already his property:
“[he viewed her with] the scrutinising observation of a man on the point of
making a bargain, who views with fault-seeking eyes the property he means to
cheapen” (p.34). Cecilia detests him,
intensely disliking his “successful brutality” (p.150), but discovers much later
in the narrative, that Harrel, her guardian, actually tried to sell her in
marriage to Floyer – hence Floyer’s behaving with so much more familiarity than
was warranted by her behaviour to him (p.433).
Cecilia’s battle to use her money as she sees fit, without
infringement by her guardians, is fought throughout the novel on the issue of
her charity. She makes clear from early
in the novel, that she feels “her affluence […] as a debt contracted with the
poor, and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with
interest” (p.55). She expresses it thus:
“Who should assist the poor if I do not?
Rich, without connections; powerful, without wants; upon whom have they
any claim if not me?” (p.129). This is
the first blurring of the line between the usual understanding of debt, as
money contractually owed between one lending party, and another receiving
party; and Cecilia’s rather older and feudal understanding of it.[8] She wants to do good with her wealth, and
frequently fantasizes about it. Her
schemes are quite elaborate, but somehow vague: “In her sleep she bestowed
riches, and poured plenty on the land; she humbled her oppressor, she exalted
the oppressed; slaves were raised to dignities…” (p.711). Gallagher notes that
this vagueness is possibly due to the fact that by this point in the novel
Cecilia is starting to see the futility of her attempts to control her fate by
her fortune: it is symbolic that in her dream she can only stand back and watch herself act, she is not simply being the figure she sees. Somehow, inside herself, she knows this
large-scale dream is not to be, that it can only ever be playacting.[9] Earlier in the novel, Cecilia felt free to
dream far more coherently: proposing to herself an entire scheme of living that
would be graceful, educational and filled only with people who share her
charitable aspirations (pp.102-3); and based solidly on her own right to her
property (p.55). She is forced rather
quickly to compromise this dream, as it leaves her lonely and unsatisfied:
Finding the error into which her
ardour of reformation had hurried her, and that a rigid seclusion from company
was productive of a lassitude as little favourable to active virtue as
dissipation itself, she resolved to soften her plan […] by mingling amusement
with benevolence. (p.131)
However, amusement in the city is very different to
Cecilia’s modest country pastimes. From
very early in the book, amusements are shown to be monetarily based, involving
general avariciousness, or else acquisition at someone else’s expense. Two early examples are indicative of the
environment of rapaciousness that Cecilia inhabits. The sort of people Cecilia has to interact
with in the city, are the like of the grasping Miss Larolles, in whose company,
even shopping for a necessary hat becomes a lesson in excess:
[in the house of the milliner]
the raptures of Miss Larolles were again excited: she viewed the finery
displayed with delight inexpressible [and] sighed with all the bitterness of
mortification that she was unable to order home
almost everything she looked at. (p.29)
Barely a day later, the same voluble Miss Larolles is trying
to get Cecilia to accompany her for a sale of a bankrupt’s house contents. This is quite normal entertainment for her
set, and a cause for crowds to flock, gawping and buying bargains:
O but do go, for I assure you it
will be the best sale we shall have this season. […] I hear the creditors have seized everything
[…] they have taken those beautiful buckles out of her shoes! […] It is quite shocking, upon my word. I wonder who’ll buy them. […] But come, if we don’t go directly, there will
be no getting in. (pp.31-2)
A scene of dissipation, similar to what Cecilia increasingly finds at the Harrels, before their bankruptcy and his suicide. This, the famous: The Tête-à -Tête, from Marriage à -la-mode, William Hogarth
The very normality of this event foreshadows what is to
come, as ironically, in due course, the contents of Cecilia’s guardian Harrel’s
house are also auctioned to pay his debts – with Miss Larolles and various
other society figures in attendance.
Cecilia misses the whole incident, which lasts several days, and is only
apprised of it later (pp.444-5, 600-1).
Simons perspicaciously observes that this initial incident of casual
opportunism at the house sale establishes “the climate” of the novel, “pointing
[to] the fragility of economic survival”, with the “heroine’s story […] set
against the background of a society dominated by economic issues.”[10]
Cecilia soon has far more experience of the sort of frenzied
acquisition based on credit than she wishes, for when she makes the decision to
live with her guardian Mr Harrel, as she used to be childhood friends with his
wife, she finds herself plunged into a world run on a “haemorrhage of expense”.[11] She soon realises that not everyone views
luxury with as disinterested an eye as she does, being brought up to “regard
continual dissipation as an introduction to vice, and unbounded extravagance as
the harbinger of injustice” (p.32). She
begins to worry for Mrs Harrel, whom she can see is
Dazzled by the brilliance of her
situation; greedily, therefore, she had soon no pleasure but to vie with some
rival in elegance, and no ambition but to exceed some superior in expence
[sic]. (p.33)
Of course, no income can keep pace with a couple set on
keeping up with everyone else, and
soon Cecilia finds out matters are far worse than she feared. Harrel is in debt for the building of an
extra home, Violet-Bank (p.104), and when Cecilia tries to remonstrate with Mrs
Harrel over the endless extras the couple plan for it, the logic of “an addict
of credit”[12]
is Mrs Harrel’s defence:
I don’t know how it is, one’s
bills mount up before one is aware…I hardly know what I have had [from this
tradesman], and yet he has run me up a bill of between three and four hundred
pound. (p.174)
Cecilia is horrified, and fears Mr Arnott, her new friend
(Mrs Harrel’s brother), will end up in debt too. Thus, now blurring the line between trying to
ease the situation of her childhood friend and her new friend by a charitable
favour, and ending up a debtor herself – she proposes to pay the bill. However, none of her guardians (other than
Harrel, who is of course, only too willing) will allow her to be advanced such
a large sum of money. It is by this
means that a moneylender is suggested, and Cecilia becomes embroiled in
increasing debt. She is reluctant,
feeling “that horror natural to all unpractised minds at the first idea of
contracting a voluntary debt” (p.189). But she is overcome by her own good
nature and desire to help a friend. The
financial situation worsens very quickly, with Harrel soon beside himself. Creditors begin to invade the house (“– Did
you not see them? – Do they not line the hall? –“, Harrel cries [p.265]),
demanding “some thousand pounds perhaps” (ibid.). Again to save her friend Mr Arnott further
personal debt, she engages with the moneylender herself. In this way, her paternal fortune is
completely wiped out, single-handedly, by Harrel, her supposed guardian – she
pays a total of £10,000 eventually (p.766).
Cecilia tries to be philosophical about the loss of the money: “nothing,
therefore remains, but that I try to forget I was ever richer!” (p.297)
There are two important issues raised here. Firstly, it has increasingly come to be
recognized by critics that Burney was not merely dramatizing a credit and debt
problem affecting a small and reckless part of the population, but that this
was a far more widespread problem and phenomenon. Randall McGowen summarizes the new literary
historical research findings thus: “[most modern critics] accept the arguments
that the new credit arrangements profoundly transformed society […] its culture
and psychology”.[13] Catherine Ingrassia elaborates, less
neutrally, that “the growth of speculative investment” and household credit, is
symptomatic of a wider social problem”.[14] As shown in the Amelia analysis, credit affected vast swathes of the population,
both urban and rural, and of all classes.
Craig Muldrew has established beyond doubt the far-reaching importance
of credit since 1690:
From the late sixteenth century,
England was very active as a market culture in which profit, price, credit and
bargains were a constant concern for most households on a weekly, if not daily,
basis.[15]
Cecilia is swimming against the tide of credit that is
carrying her in its wake, against her better judgement. As Markman Ellis has noted, “it is often the
mutability of money and paper credit that has led to the misfortunes of the
characters [in Cecilia] in the first
place”. The sympathy of this statement
is difficult to apply to the limp-willed Harrels, who were unwilling “to separate
their private lives from their public desires”[16],
that is, their strong wishes for social status.
Yet Ellis’s “mutability of credit” affects Cecilia hugely; her own
charitable dreams have been somehow funnelled awry: in desiring to save a
friend from the reckless behaviour of another, she has lost an entire fortune.
This leads us to the second point. Cecilia is not a controlling pragmatist like
Roxana, or Miss Mathews. On the other
hand, she is not as meek as Amelia: nevertheless, somehow her modest dreams
were rebuffed constantly. There is an
underlying theme in Cecilia, which
explains the consistent frustration of her desires. Gallagher refers to it as “the ceaseless
circulation and unpayable debt” that runs through the life of Cecilia: that “she
owes whatever she owns”.[17] Castle characterises it as the largest theme
in the novel, “the profound psychological theme of repayment”.[18] Though so far, Cecilia has only lost money,
which to her “has long appeared worthless and valueless” (p.706), when the
Harrels affairs come to their almost operatically manic conclusion, with his
public suicide (his suicide note proclaiming that all debts are “To be paid
tonight with a BULLET” [p.430]), Cecilia is also made homeless. When she goes to stay with one of her other
guardians, Delvile, her troubles only increase.
For this is the proud father of the penniless aristocrat that Cecilia
has reluctantly fallen in love with. It
is now that Cecilia “will pay, with her [remaining] fortune, for the dubious
pleasure of enacting a merely conventional plot of heterosexual romance”.[19]
Portrait of Fanny Burney by Edward Francis Burney (c. 1784-85)
***
And that’s where we’ll leave her today. Poorer, but not as poor as she’s going to
be. The next instalment of Women and Debt in the Novels of the
Eighteenth Century is the last (*sniffle*), so I hope you’ll tune in to be
perplexed at how badly it goes for her, and mutter about how it’s not much
different now, and how we should all have access to credit unions as they are
far more ethical than our corrupt banks, and what a good thing there’s more
feminism about now, etc etc etc. See you
next time!
[1]
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), p.238.
[2]
Frances Burney, Cecilia (Oxford:
Oxford University press, this edn 1999), pp.55,711. [All further references to
this edition are placed within the main text in parentheses.]
[3]
Katherine M. Rogers, Frances Burney: The
World of ‘Female Difficulties’ (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1990), p.45.
[4]
Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship
Novel, 1740-1820 (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p.81.
[5]
Terry Castle, The Masquerade and
Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century English Culture and
Fiction (London: Methuen and Company, 1986), p.275.
[6]
Judy Simons, Fanny Burney (Hampshire
and London: Macmillan, 1987), p.66.
[7]
Kay Rogers, ‘Deflation of Male Pretentions in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia’, in Women’s Studies, 15 (1988), pp.87-96 (p.92).
[8]
Catherine Keohane, ‘ “Too Neat for a Beggar”: Charity and Debt in Burney’s Cecilia, in Studies in the Novel, pp.379-401 (p.379).
[9]
Gallagher, p.235.
[10]
Simons, pp.66.65.
[11]
Gallagher, p.247.
[12]
Grant D. Campbell, ‘Fashionable Suicide: Conspicuous Consumption and the Collapse
of Credit in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia’,
in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,
20 (1990), pp.131-45 (p.140).
[13]
Randall McGowen, ‘Credit and Culture in Early Modern England’, in Journal of British Studies, University
of Chicago Press (Jan 2002), Vol 41, No.1, pp.120-131 (p.121).
[14]
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce
and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.1.
[15]
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation:
The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London:
Macmillan Press, 1998), p.59.
[16]
Markman Ellis, The Politics of
Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.134-5.
[17]
Gallagher, pp.205, 208.
[18]
Castle, p.277.
[19]
Ibid.
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