Frances Burney Research Paper

Frances Burney is, only now, being viewed as a feminist, albeit a covert feminist (McMASTER). She publicly suggested that she was apolitical(DAVIDSON), 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 (CUTTING). She writes and differentiates her feminist agenda through her novels’ characterizations and depictions of strong, thoughtful, and intelligent heroines (CUTTING) who are all vulnerable to forces beyond their control (WALLACE). “Her heroines face life alone and settle their fortunes with a ruthless individuality that defies eighteenth-century notions of the female condition” (HAGGERTY). 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 (McMASTER). In a quote from her diaries, published posthumously, Burney describes how she secretly admires the braver women who refuse to subscribe to the …show more content…
“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” (HAGGERTY). 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 (HAGGERTY). 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