Women, Money and Debt in the 18th
Century Novel, Part 8:
Cecilia, Section 2
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 trials…
=> In which we discover that even being very rich is not
a simple way to be secure, for an unmarried woman in this time period: enter
Cecilia, the generous heiress.
Now, let’s see how it all ends up…
***
From the outset of the novel, Cecilia is presented as a
woman of good sense and generosity:
[…] she was not of that
inflammable nature which is always ready to take fire, as her passions wee
under the control [sic] of her reason, and she suffered not her affections to
triumph over her principles. (p.251)
Yet, her going into vast amounts of debt to protect Mrs
Harrel and Mrs Harrel’s brother, Mr Arnott, from the consequences of the Harrel’s
combined acquisitiveness, has already proved that Cecilia’s principles can bend
and break. In the Delviles’ arena,
Cecilia is in even more danger, emotionally and financially, at sea in a world
which “bristles with absolute menace”[1]. It is now that the name clause from her uncle’s
will begins to wreak havoc. The Delviles
are an old family, who as her guardian Briggs points out, are “counting nothing
but uncles and grandfathers, dealing out fine names instead of cash” (p.333);
and they are horrified when the nouveau-riche
Cecilia appears to be their son’s choice.
As Rogers observes:
Because the man Cecilia wants to
marry is the very one for whom sacrificing his surname would be unthinkable,
the apparently insignificant name clause ends up controlling the course of her
life[2].
The Delvile parents begin to exert a telling pressure on
both Mortimer, their son, and Cecilia – and as she is now living in their home,
this places her in a horrible position.
She is caught between her respect for Mrs Delvile – who is a good
friend, brought up to honour and respect her husband even when she feels he is
wrong – and her unwilling love for Mortimer.
She is even more upset when she sees that the pressure on Mortimer is
working. He rails against the clause: “Oh
cruel clause! Barbarous and repulsive
clause! That forbids my aspiring to the
first of women, but by an action that with my own family would degrade me
forever!” (p.512). Cecilia realises that even family pressure cannot thoroughly
explain his rejection of her, noting that “[he is] well enabled to act for
himself by the powerful instigation of hereditary arrogance!” (p.515). She
angrily concludes, “Well, let him keep his name! Since it is so wonderful in its properties, […]
what presumption in me, to suppose myself an equivalent for its loss!” (ibid).
Julia Epstein notes that for a woman to retain her maiden name on
marrying “contained the seeds of social revolution” for an age “entering upon a
period of chaotic transition” as was the late eighteenth century[3].
The name clause threatens what the Delvile’s rely on for
their ‘good name’ (and property rights): patrilineal succession. In a way, what Cecilia’s uncle has done, is
to subvert that for his own ends: he is using Cecilia as “a conduit for
perpetuating himself” and his Beverley
name[4]. Susan Staves elaborates this idea, explaining
how Cecilia has been used by her uncle:
In the property regimes of
patriarchy, descent and inheritance are reckoned in the male line; women
function as procreators and as transmitters of inheritance from male to male[5].
Cecilia’s uncle has tried to side step the more usual way of
‘transmitting inheritance’ by the name clause.
For Cecilia, the consequences of fighting for her name would be
loneliness; but when she eventually accedes to Mortimer’s cowardly wish for a
secret marriage, the consequences are severe:
As long as Cecilia held the
borrowed right to the patrilineal name […], she could properly exercise [the]
right to reason [that associated with the patriarchal]. But when she forfeits her name to oblivion,
by taking that of Delvile, she forfeits that right[6].
If a woman wants to be in the world of men in terms of
having her own money, and exerting an influence over even her own life, let
alone any further – rules must be abided by.
Cecilia was ‘someone’ as long as she had the money to back up her
thoughts, her position. By signing it
away, losing it, and her name…she becomes ‘nobody’, just another woman, used
for the purposes women were used for in the period. This assessment and that above of Cutting-Gray
may sound melodramatic, but Cecilia descends into madness at the cycle of
events that follow her clandestine marriage, which adds weight to Barbara
Zonitch’s pithy comment, that Cecilia is, throughout the novel, “a valuable
token of exchange for men”, a chip in the game of male predominance[7].
Cecilia herself is aware she must lose her money to gain her
happiness: “Now only had she any chance of being happy herself, when upon the
point of relinquishing what all others built their happiness upon obtaining!”
(p.826). Yet during the ceremony, she
feels jittery and nervous (p.831), as if aware this is not going to be the happy
ending that fiction writers of the era that she might have read, would have her
believe. Patricia Meyer Spacks notes
that often, in novels of the time, marriage is posited as a return to the
cossetted, indulged charm of childhood; Rogers goes even further, suggesting that
nothing less than total fulfilment was promised to women, on giving up their
single status[8]. However, Cecilia’s marriage is not to follow
this idealised course.
The first thing she loses is the greater part of her
original fortune: her uncle’s legacy, which she has negated, by marrying
Mortimer, and taking on his name. The
assets of that will, including her house (as she married when no longer under
the control of her guardians, having come of age), default to a distant branch
of her family, and she is suddenly vastly in debt to a grasping and impatient
cousin, Mr Eggleston. This is a
traumatic turn of events for Cecilia.
Simply in marrying, she has contracted another debt: “literalizing the
idea that a woman must pay for marriage […] she must pay without receiving any
emotional return”[9],
that is, without seeing the estate she has tried hard to work with, responsibly
and charitably, disposed of to her satisfaction. She is ordered from her own house by Mr
Eggleston; and the longer she delays her departure, even to pack, the more
money she will owe him – as she is now under her own roof as a sort of
lodger. He is uninterested in charity,
and will bill her for her time there; as (his solicitor explains), the longer
she stays, the longer he has to wait to sell the estate and settle his own
debts (p.857). Again, Cecilia is caught
up in a web of debt and repayment that she is on the wrong end of and which
will cost her dearly. It is the beginning
of a married nightmare:
This unconsciously contracted
debt, this hourly charge on her married life, is owed to a stranger who himself
does not bear the Beverley name and who apparently plans to exploit the estate
to pay off his son’s debts. It is as if
Cecilia suddenly finds herself in debt to a brood of Harrel’s, who are
themselves in debt to god knows who…[10]
It is all downhill for Cecilia from here: Mortimer is
abroad, and as their marriage is still secret, on being thrown out of her own home
(for she dare not stay, with the bill rising, having no longer a fortune to pay
the bill with), she has no one to automatically go to as of right, for
shelter. She cries out, heartfelt and
confused: “An outcast from her own house, yet received in no other! A bride, unclaimed by her husband! An heiress, dispossessed of all wealth!” (p.869).
Burney emphasizes the paradoxical nature of Cecilia’s position: the
words Cecilia cries out highlight “the ephemeral nature of the social role
Cecilia has held, while at the same time measuring the effects of [the] social
and material loss she suffers”[11].
When she mistakenly gets the notion that her friend Belfield
and Mortimer are duelling (Mortimer has already had to leave the country once,
as a result of a jealous duel with Cecilia’s childhood friend, Monckton), the
emotional strain of events overwhelms her, with “her reason suddenly, yet
totally, failing her” (p.896). She
begins to hallucinate, terrified by images of Mortimer killed in her imagined
duel. She begins to rush and scream
through anonymous streets of London, with people trying to stop her, but to no
avail: “she was spoken to repeatedly, she was even caught once or twice by her
riding habit; but she forced herself along by her own vehement rapidity, not
heeding what was said” (p.897). Her ‘madness’
– really simply nervous exhaustion – takes the form of “supernatural speed […]
darting forward where-ever there was most room, and turning back where there
was any obstruction” (ibid.). This
gothic and physical episode is given as an added layer of ironic pathos, by the
fact that the eventually exhausted Cecilia stumbles into a pawnshop and collapses. The owners at first think that she is an
escapee from Bedlam, but in a final echo of Gallagher’s summation that Cecilia “owes
whatever she owns”, Cecilia is now herself held for reward by the shop owners,
when they notice that her clothing, through bedraggled and battered, is
expensively cut. They advertise in the
newspapers, tellingly phrasing their advertisement: “Whosoever she belongs to
is desired to send after her immediately […] N.B. she has no money about her”
(p.901).
Cecilia has fallen as far as she is to go. She has almost total amnesia in this state,
with no memory of her own past, and only a confused memory of who her husband
is, let alone herself. When Mortimer
finds her in this state, he finally understands that his name was not as
important as he previously believed it: “His ancient name [was] now sunken in
his estimation […] he considered himself the destroyer of this unhappy young
creature” (p.912). The insistent
encroachments on her freedom (symbolised both literally and figuratively, by
her wealth), and her emotional equilibrium, have left her bereft of more than
her name: her very identity is compromised.
Castle astutely views this whole episode, and I concur absolutely, as a
sort of purging of Cecilia’s previous identity: “The Heiress […] must die […] a
conventional female destiny overtakes the heroine in a way that is at once
inexorable and gothically alienating.[12]”
Of course, this dramatic state does not last; Cecilia has
not been entirely irretrievably harmed, unless the death of her dreams of
independence can be considered a mortal wound.
But even when Cecilia recovers her senses and is restored to the love of
her new husband, and the care of friends – some gained through her charitable efforts
earlier in the book (like Mrs. Hill, an honest working woman owed debts by
Harrel); there is no doubt that Cecilia is different. Her happiness is quieter, more diluted. She notes that “there are none without misery”
(p.941). Nonetheless, Castle casts her
changed expectations and circumstances strongly, going as far as to say that
Cecilia has had to give up “the dream of being remarkable”.[13] This is the case, as Cecilia’s ability to
back up any of her ideas with cash, and therefore control and choice, influence,
left with her money. However, there is
the small recompense of an aunt of Mortimer’s, who on hearing of her travails,
awards her a modest fortune “in admiration of the extraordinary sacrifice she
had made” (p.939).
This restores a small bit of Cecilia’s ability to engage in
much smaller charitable acts.
Consequently, despite the loss of both fortunes leaving her unable to be
as charitable and world-changing as she would have liked, it is possible to
recast the authorial contrivance of this second much smaller fortune being
awarded by the aunt. This small incident
makes a point about the fact that some, a very few, women have managed to hold
onto their money, and have the power to dispose of it as they wish. In choosing Cecilia, I think the aunt
demonstrates a poetic sort of sisterhood with Cecilia – someone, other than the
author and the readers, someone else within the world of commodification and
monetary corruption, recognises Cecilia’s attempts at help, and rewards her with
the means to do more.
The ending of Cecilia
has been a matter of debate ever since it was penned. Burney herself fought with her relatives
about it: she defended her right to what she felt as her moral obligation to
create a truer “mixed” ending, against stern – notably male – commands to
create a happier one[14]. Critics too, have been undecided about what
was achieved with the somewhat downbeat ending (which would have been perfect
for a gritty 1970s TV movie!), where Cecilia has “dwindled to a wife”[15],
and “bore partial evil with chearfullest [sic] resignation” (p.941).
James Thompson believes that “as a narrative of prey and
debt”, Cecilia reinforces the public
and private sphere divide that so informed Amelia. He notes that by creating “a situation of
female victimization in the public sphere, followed by safe harbour in the
private sphere”, Burney simply reinforced the view that “women are not fully
qualified to participate in the system of needs that constitutes civil society –
they want the protection of a husband”[16].
Kate Chisholm interprets the matter a small bit closer to my own view, saying
that Cecilia “is no mere victim […] although by the end she has suffered too
much to enjoy unalloyed bliss, she at least learns that what matters in life is
not fortune or social position but true understanding between family and
friends.[17]” Nevertheless, I am persuaded that this was
important to Cecilia all along; and Chisholm’s appraisal, by proving her right,
is simply frustrating.
Nearer to the mark I think, is the achievement of not
losing the focus of the novel: Burney makes it clear she will not compromise
the portrayal of her heroine – in leaving
Cecilia compromised, Burney powerfully keeps the reader in mind of all her
travails, even after the book has ended.
If the ending had been a ‘happy ever after’ type, as so many critics and
relatives wanted, the sting in the tale of the novel would have been nullified –
and so would have the truth for women of her era as Burney saw it. So that when Castle refers to the novel as
containing “a plot of retrograde female disenfranchisement”[18],
even bearing in mind the unsubtle addition of the aunt’s legacy (to offset all
the trouble caused by the uncle’s) –
she would be right. I think this is what
Burney intended. By standing up to her
own relatives on the issue of the ending, she made it clear her heroine’s
struggles were to be taken seriously, not forgotten in bliss, not removed or
erased, muffled by a cosy closure. Just
as Roxana ventured too far into the male domain and received retribution, and
Amelia retired willingly back into the private sphere after a small foray out:
Cecilia has too much potential power, and has to be quickly and roughly reinscribed
back to the private sphere.
Frances Burney in her mid 20s
It is as though her character has shrunk without her fortune,
despite its meaninglessness to her except as a way to improve the fates of
others; and this is what Epstein is referring to when she states that in
Cecilia, Burney is “largely focussed on money as a medium of exchange for her
plot, and for her socialist materialist critique”[19]. While it is highly doubtful that the reportedly conservative Burney would have
been championing anything as extreme as a ‘socially materialist critique’,
there’s absolutely no doubt that money and financial affairs completely
dominate the story of Cecilia’s life as we are told it. And by its ending, the pessimistic message of
how dangerous it is for single women out there with money – is undeniable.
***
***
A Conclusion to the
Series
The three novels are intensely occupied with the struggles
of their female heroines to try and command their own destinies; these struggles,
I have shown, are inextricably bound up with the need for personal financial
control. All three of the heroines face
compromises between love and monetary autonomy, compromises caused by the
already ingrained doctrine of the separate spheres. James Thompson expresses it thus:
[The heroines are constrained
by] the whole work of the doctrine of separate spheres, dividing the world in
female and male domains, a masculine public sphere dominated by financial
exchange and a feminine private sphere dominated by emotional exchange[20].
It is not even that all women need be as rebellious and
enterprising as Roxana to feel the harsh rebuke of entering the wrong arena:
even Amelia, who is very happy to stay within her subscribed zone has a very
obvious problem, for the “paradoxical situation of women” of that century, was
that even those “who had no legal access to money were yet held responsible for
domestic expenditure[21]”. On the other hand, her careful frugality and
competent financial management mark her as a success within her sphere. It is the other two females, Roxana and
Cecilia, who suffer most harshly as a result of their attempts to participate in
the male patriarchal monetary zone.
Roxana is a good example of why men worried about females
moving into their sphere: her very success at their own game frightened
them. Ingrid Tague outlines the
situation: “significant transformations in financial practices” that focus on “speculative
investment” created “fears about the stability of the social order”. These fears were gendered because “women were
amongst the most enthusiastic participants in, and the greatest beneficiaries
of, the new investments, and critics of speculation relied heavily on gendered
imagery to attack it”[22]. This is exactly the sort of investment that
Roxana so delighted in – and was so adept at – that she magnificently increased
her fortune under the tutelage of an English banker. This participation in new investments – a participation
represented by Defoe, in Roxana – led to a backlash, trying to reinscribe women
back into the private sphere. This
explains why so many of Cecilia’s guardians (especially the rapacious Harrel)
resent Cecilia having any control over her own money. Cecilia’s childhood friend, Monckton, sees it
as money she could be spending on him, that he in fact should control: every time she attempts to spend some, he feels his
own imagined portion dwindling (pp.297-8, for example). Her guardian Briggs, believes she should keep
all the money for her husband, and refuses to give her any: “keep it for your
husband; get you one soon”, he explains (sounding oddly like Yoda), when she
asks for money to pay a bill (p.180).
They don’t want to risk Cecilia becoming accustomed to her own monetary
control, as this would be bad for future marital prospects:
Since wifely submission was
natural, wifely domination [especially in financial matters] was a form of
usurpation that could only lead to unhappiness. […] Any form of independence in a wife threatened
this natural subordination; hence the frequent attacks on pin-money for
expenses[23].
If pin-money is seen as dangerous, then Roxana’s
accumulation of extensive wealth when untethered by male control, must seem
threatening indeed. Her resistance to
any further formal liaisons (marriage) until her financial future is secured
quite to her liking, is, in view of the chastening account by Tague above, only
sensible.
The pressure on women to remain within their proscribed
zones was not only latently understood, it was actuated by propaganda: the gendered
attack on females attempting to control their money or enter business, is
partly why the conduct book market grew so rapidly in the
eighteenth-century. The perceived threat
to societal order of this rapacious female investor and unwomanly mercenary wife,
had to be replaced by the idealised docile matron “described in every detail,
every aspect”[24]. The similarities between this portrait, and
the angelic behaviour of Amelia at almost every turn, is notable. It cannot be by accident that the one
protagonist in these three novels who adheres to the norms of the period, is
the only one allowed to live happily ever after. The battles for financial control begin to
seem part – a vitally important part – of a wider struggle for women, over
general issues of conformity and independence.
I suspect it would be inferring too much to note that
chronologically, in order of publication, Roxana
(published in 1724) is also, despite having the largest punishment, the most
successful of the three women in the male arena. Likewise, it might be overgeneralising to
suggest that the whole mid-eighteenth-century group mind was running so scared
at this sort of unwomanliness that such a reactionary vision as Amelia (published in 1751) was the
result. However, it is worrying that the
last novel of the period, Cecilia
(published in 1782), shows the female protagonist mired still so deeply in
convention and the control of others that she can only hope for
mediocrity. It reminds us that women were
constrained from several different directions: Roxana is able to be successful
(after a fashion, and not forgetting the incredible cost – the loss of
children) because she has already fallen out of her birth rank, and is then
freed from marital constraints as well – to operate from a position of
outsider, which makes her stronger.
Amelia and Cecilia, on the other hand, are firmly embedded within their
respective lower- and upper-middle class stratas. It leaves the reader with a
confusing dichotomy: to be successful materially, or even to have a trace of
control, a woman must be prepared to step right outside her class and gender
roles: she must be prepared to pay a high price. But conversely, Amelia, such a still and
small person, is the happiest in the
end. I think the novels make clear that
Amelia is the only one allowed to be happy, because she is the one woman
depicted, who does not attempt to be or remain in the public sphere, managing money
or controlling her choices and destiny in any way.
END OF THIS SERIES!
[1]
Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Fanny Burney
and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989), p.155.
[2]
Kay Rogers, ‘Deflation of Male Pretensions in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia’, in Women’s Studies, 15 (1988), pp.87-96,
here p.42.
[3]
Epstein, p.157.
[4]
Betty Rizzo, Revising Women:
Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction and Social Engagement (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p.84.
[5]
Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property
in England, 1660-1883 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),
p.4.
[6]
Joanne Cutting-Gray, Woman as ‘Nobody’
and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainseville: University Press of Florida,
1992), p.41.
[7]
Barbara Zonitch, Familiar Violence:
Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1997), p.70.
[8]
Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination:
A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1976), p.129; and further, Rogers, p.64.
[9]
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820
(Berkley:University of California Press, 1995), p.244.
[10]
Gallagher, p.245.
[11]
Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship
Novel, 1740-1820 (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1991), p.88.
[12]
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation:
The Carnivalesque in Eighteeth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London:
Methuen and Company, 1986), p. 276.
[13]
Castle, p.284.
[14]
Rogers, p.463; also Margaret Anne Doody, Frances
Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Brunswick
University Press, 1988), p.145-6.
[15]
Millamont, quoted in Rogers, p.63.
[16]
James Thompson, Models of Value:
Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1996), pp.158-9.
[17]
Kate Chisholm, Fanny Burney: Her Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), p.101.
[18]
Castle, p.283.
[19]
Epstein, p.158.
[20]
Thompson, p.156.
[21]
Edward Copeland, Women Writing About
Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p.1.
[22]
Ingris H. Tague, ‘Love, Honor and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the
Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth-Century’, in Journal of British Studies, University of Chicago Press, January
2001, Vol. 40, No.1, pp76-106 (p.79).
[23]
Tague, p.86.
[24]
Margeret Somerville, Sex and Subjection:
Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London and New York: St.
Martins Press, 1995), pp.174, 217.
