User:MissFannyB/sandbox

Reception History of Frances Burney
During her time period, Frances Burney was regarded as a decent, unaffected, modest, sweet and pleasing woman who maintained her professional and feminine personas in both her private and public life. This professional and personal maintenance was necessary for Burney as a woman and an author because “the equivocal social position of her family meant that Burney’s own social status was absolutely dependent on performing just such a bourgeois, gendered identity, in which the female body is visible in the right way”. Female authors, like Burney, who published their writings were considered to be scandalous women and often were likened to prostitutes. Despite this unladylike association, critics of Burney cast her as a conservative who expresses extreme devotion to decorum. Even her elite associates of the day, Samuel Crisp and Hester Thrale, claim that she is ‘prudish’ and ‘over-delicate’. Despite, and perhaps because of, her propensity for propriety, her novels were generally well-liked and well-respected by the English intellectual society. Now, Frances Burney, in addition to being a novelist and playwright, is, also, viewed as a proto-feminist and a skilled satirist.

Frances Burney is, only now, being viewed as a proto-feminist, albeit a covert feminist. She publicly suggested that she was apolitical, but throughout her writings she developed a balance between the growing rebellion against the restrictions and the limitations levied against womankind and her need to maintain societal appropriateness. She writes and differentiates her feminist agenda through her novels’ characterizations and depictions of strong, thoughtful, and intelligent heroines who are all vulnerable to forces beyond their control. “Her heroines face life alone and settle their fortunes with a ruthless individuality that defies eighteenth-century notions of the female condition”. However, despite her leading ladies being given emotional endurance, she does not write her characters as feminists; instead, she gives the heroines a unique awareness that the limitations and subordinate positions imposed upon them are unfair without providing the characters the means to overcome. In a quote from her diaries, published posthumously, Burney describes how she secretly admires the brave women who refuse to subscribe to the traditional approaches:

O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves! …Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility—breach of manners—love of originality—and…what not. But, nevertheless…they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honour—if that will be any service to them!

A critique of Burney as a feminist is that she discusses the problems of subservience without providing solutions, and, even, removing potential solutions from the equation, such as the concept of female solidarity or community. “Burney's brand of feminism, moreover demands that her heroines sacrifice their hope for the potential ideal relations that community represents if they are going to survive”. Some of this can be chalked up to cynicism and some of it is because, for Fanny Burney, community removed the ability for an autonomous and self-sufficient female to exist. Burney’s continual reiterations of the wrongs of woman makes feminism seem both urgent and palatable to a patriarchal regime plagued by its own sense of futility.

Lastly, Frances Burney is a skilled satirist. Her writings do not contain the dripping satire of Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift, but they do have satirical elements that are skillfully infused into the various pieces. In her works, satire is employed not to reprimand the wicked but to warn her readers about social dangers and to express pessimism about the possibility that her society can be reformed. Because satire is so various...satire [is considered] not only the parts of Burney’s work that employ humour or ridicule but also those which evoke negative attitudes towards her targets in other ways." Burney reveals her lively wit in her satirical comedy The Witlings, which further exemplified her ability to make people expose themselves through dialogue and develop out comic, witty interplay between characters that succeeded in creatively ridiculing certain targets. "Burney was acclaimed as a satirist in her lifetime, but modern critics have come nowhere near full appreciation of the degree to which the fundamental thrust of her novels and plays is founded in satire or how pessimistic that satire is. We have failed to ask what sorts of satire she employs, or to enquire how recognizing the satire should change the ways in which we read her works."