Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

ABSTRACT

The emphasis on the unique self in the Romantic period resulted in representations of romantic love as an aspect of psychological depth. However, in Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Belinda (1901), love is represented as a function of visceral sensation and at best as automatic rather than reflective psychological processes. To some degree, Edgeworth was influenced by the scientific culture of her time in viewing love as a product of the external, observable world rather than of the interior mind. More surprisingly, perhaps, Edgeworth considers love as a function of high society, thus breaking down symptomatic associations of love and domesticity. In Belinda, love is a product of both the logical scientific method and the questionable morality characteristic of fashionable sociability. Standing partially outside the Romantic emphasis on psychological depth and the empirical insistence on rationality, Edgeworth theorises a love that questions the foundational concepts of subject/object and feeling/reason through which love has been understood from the Romantic era to the present day.

KEYWORDS:

• Maria Edgeworth
• Romantic
• nineteenth-century literature
• Belinda
• love

Notes

1. Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 54–55, 56.

2. For an account of Edgeworth and education, see Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography.

3. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 238–41.

4. Ibid., 60, 192, 60.

5. MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 191. In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, Stone argues that sentiment rather mercenary concerns defined eighteenth-century marriages. In The Gentleman’s Daughter Vickery takes issue with this view, pointing out that wealth and status had romantic as well as mercenary appeal, and questions whether the emphasis on sentiment was as pronounced as Stone suggests. Overall, it seems safe to assume that contemporaries considered erotic and romantic desire to be important, even if not to the exclusion of all else.

6. Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 207.

7. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 242.

8. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 73–81.

9. Eustace, “Cornerstone of a Copious Work,” 520.

10. In the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries, love has been alternatively theorised in terms of neurochemical processes: see Ben-Ze’ev, Subtleties of Emotion, 423; as a function of personality types: Hendrick and Hendrick, Romantic Love; and as an expression of unique identity similar to that of the Romantics: Arendt, The Human Condition. It is my contention that the Edgeworthian theory of love differs significantly from these positions.

11. Siskin, Historicity of Romantic Discourse, 3. See also Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 19.

12. Siskin, Historicity of Romantic Discourse, 15, 12.

13. Richetti, English Novel in History, 1.

14. Eustace, “Cornerstone of a Copious Work,” 539.

15. Hendrick and Hendrick, Romantic Love, 15–17.

16. Chandler, “Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment,” 102.

17. Austen, Emma, 308.

18. Edgeworth, Belinda, 149. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

19. Siskin, Historicity of Romantic Discourse, 24–25. In “Lady Delacour’s Library,” MacFadyen argues that the act of reading in Belinda is an act of the body rather than the mind, drawing on the negative cultural image of the gluttonous female reader. Edgeworth’s representations of visceral love also emphasise the body, but there is no negative connotation attached to this in the novel.

20. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 68–69, 127–130.

21. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 52. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

22. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 44.

23. Rosenberg, “Bosom of the Bourgeoisie,” 583; Britton, “Theorizing Character,” 444.

24. For discussion of how the intimacy between Belinda and Lady Delacour diverges from the conventions of sentimentality, see Rosenberg, “Bosom of the Bourgeoisie.” For a more sustained account of sentiment and individuality, see Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.

25. Chandler, “Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment,” 88–89.

26. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 43.

27. Porter, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction, 169–200.

28. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 48 (my italics).

29. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 55.

30. Michals, “Commerce and Character,” 16.

31. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 192–93.

32. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 44; and Eustace, “Cornerstone of a Copious Work,” 522. Modern discussions of love also emphasise both friendship and mercenary concerns. In Romantic Love, Hendrick and Hendrick theorise “Storge” lovers, who fall in love because of trust and shared values rather than passion. Others are “Pragma” lovers, who fall in love when the love-object meets certain mandatory criteria (65–66).

33. Butler, Maria Edgeworth; Chandler, “Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment,” 100.

34. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 31–32, 31–34.

35. Ibid., 32. “Mimesis” denotes a narrative style which “shows” the action as opposed to a “diegetic” style which “tells” the reader what happens. For a full explanation, see Genette, Narrative Discourse.

36. Porter, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction, 197.

37. In “Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment,” Chandler theorises Clarence’s status as a “genius” (99–100).

38. In “Cornerstone of a Copious Work,” Eustace argues that men in the long eighteenth century performed passionate love as a way of blaming failures in courtship on women’s lack of virtue (518, 533). This seems to align with Clarence’s performance of sensibility. This moment is conspicuous because it is one of very few examples where passionate love is narrated mimetically. Tellingly, it is only ever Clarence or Vincent who perform passionate love, suggesting love in Belinda may be gendered as Eustace suggests.

39. Den Uyl and Griswold Jr., “Adam Smith on Friendship and Love,” 629.

40. Tadmor, Family and Friends; Eustace, “Cornerstone of a Copious Work.”

41. Eustace, “Cornerstone of a Copious Work,” 518; Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 56.

42. For discussion of Edgeworth and domesticity, see Nash, Servants and Paternalism.

43. Butler, Maria Edgeworth; Chandler, “Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment,” 95.

44. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 45.

45. In Their Fathers’ Daughters, Kowaleski-Wallace theorises the ambivalence with which Edgeworth understands the maternal, domestic ideal (109–37). I think my own argument registers the same ambivalence, but in relation to love.

46. Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity,” 42.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Morrissey

Joseph Morrissey is lecturer in English and a research associate in the Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities at Coventry University, UK. His research focuses on the Romantic-period novel, with particular emphasis on women’s writing. His publications include Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and “Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde” (Women’s Writing 26, no. 3 (2019): 342–57).