Francis Burney as social critique? Negotiations of social order in 'Cecilia' (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: HS: Francis Burney`s Novels, 29 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper analyses social class and society in Francis Burney`s second novel Cecilia (1782). I argue that the novel depicts a social system organised into a class society, and that it takes a stand, being critical of selected aspects. I examine the social system in Cecilia, particularly how it operates on the basis of the figure constellation. Secondly and more specifically, as every text depicting a social system takes a position, I study Burney’s criticism of the social world sketched in Cecilia. What is criticised? How systematic is this criticism?

It was often claimed how realistically Burney wrote and how accurate her description of the society in Cecilia appeared to its readers. Modern historiography, however, describes 18th Century England as a society without class consciousness and thus also without class conflict. Awareness of class and status was, according to this view, very different to that in industrial society, and had a different impact on the members of the earlier society. The middle class, to which the author also belonged, so the historiographical narrative argues, was only then beginning to emerge and assert itself. This is a difference between the discourse in Cecilia and the narrative of how 18th Century society was represented from the second half of the 20th Century onwards. The third aim of this paper will deal with this discrepancy.

In analysing the novel, I base my understanding of a social system as such on the social model offered by Pierre Bourdieu (Is the structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-Analysis?, 1993), which will be described in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, I shall offer a brief survey of English society in the second half of the 18th Century. Following these introductory chapters, the actual analysis of the novel will be presented, first examining the general society picture in the novel (Chapter 4), then selected figures (Chapter 5), and finally a selected scene from the novel (Chapter 6).