Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) demands to be read through the dual meanings of “character”—the literary persona and the moral sense. Through performances of literary character that work to reveal moral character, Edgeworth generates a theory of novelistic character that is shaped by impersonation and interiority. Often considered an unfortunate episode in an otherwise sophisticated novel, Edgeworth’s incorporation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) in Belinda is in fact central to the novel’s consideration of character. Edgeworth’s meditation on character illuminates a number of issues: first, relationships between the genre of the novel and subject-formation; second, fictional representations of surface legibility and psychological interiority; third, the ideological function of the marriage plot. In her consideration of imaginative identification, psychological interiority, and subject-formation through Belinda’s recasting of Bernardin’s novel, Edgeworth presents her theorization of character, which postulates that the moral sense—what we might call a living person’s “character”—depends on an engagement with literary character.
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March 2013
Research Article|
March 01 2013
Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda
Jeanne M. Britton
Jeanne M. Britton
Columbia, South Carolina
Jeanne M. Britton is the author of “Translating Sympathy by the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith,” which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction in 2009, and “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” which appeard in Studies in Romanticism in 2009. She is currently completing a manuscript on sympathy and forms of the novel and planning a project on character and the countenance in poetry and prose of the Romantic period.
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Nineteenth-Century Literature (2013) 67 (4): 433–456.
Citation
Jeanne M. Britton; Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2013; 67 (4): 433–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2013.67.4.433
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