MARIA EDGEWORTH: TITLE COMMENTARY

Castle Rackrent

COLIN GRAHAM (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1996)

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Belinda

NICHOLAS MASON (ESSAY DATE 2001)

SOURCE: Mason, Nicholas. "Class, Gender, and Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. "In The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Vol. 1, edited by Susan Spencer, pp. 271-85. New York: AMS Press, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Mason examines Edgeworth's second novel as a work that encourages both males and females of the aristocracy and the middle class to accept the responsibilities associated with their social standing.

In 1847 the publishers Simpkin and Marshall contacted Maria Edgeworth, requesting that she prepare an autobiographical preface for a new edition they were planning of her novels. At the time, Edgeworth was seventy-nine years old and still widely considered one of England's greatest novelists. Comfortable in her status among readers, Edgeworth saw no need for further self-promotion through such a preface and decided to decline the publishers' request. In her Memoirs, she explained, "As a woman, my life, wholly domestic, cannot afford anything interesting to the public.…I have no story to tell."¹

For those familiar with Edgeworth's fiction, this equation of domesticity with dullness should be somewhat surprising, since on several occasions her form of choice was the domestic novel. In fact, one of the most commonly discussed aspects of Edgeworth's work in recent criticism has been its domestic focus. This is particularly true of her second novel, Belinda (1801), a text which, after well over a century of neglect, has once again begun to attract the attention of readers and critics. Much of the commentary on Belinda from the past two decades has focused on the novel's advocacy of a domestic lifestyle for women. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, for instance, has claimed that this novel is complicit in a "new-style patriarchy" that attempts to make domestic life seem the natural choice for women. Anne Mellor has called Belinda a "textbook case of the new feminine Romantic ideology" insofar as it suggests that the ideal domestic woman combines the positive traits of both genders. And Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson have discussed how the character Harriet Freke exemplifies Edgeworth's beliefs that women should worry more about properly fulfilling their duties at home and less about gaining new rights.²

As I hope to make clear in the pages to follow, I appreciate much of what these scholars have done to illuminate the central role domesticity plays in Belinda. Nevertheless, my goal in this essay is to move beyond the somewhat narrow definition of domesticity brought to Belinda in previous essays and to examine the domestic issues in the novel in terms of a broader definition that includes not only gender, but social class as well. In essence, my argument holds that more than a system for proper female behavior, the domesticity Edgeworth advocates is a summons for all members of polite society, whether female or male, to live up to their gender- and class-based responsibilities.

I

It is only fitting that in the midst of Edgeworth's collaborations with her father to reform educational practices in Britain she should write a novel setting out to reform the domestic conduct of her readers. That Edgeworth has didactic aims in Belinda is made clear in the novel's prefatory pages, where she casts what is to follow as a "Moral Tale" rather than a novel, with all of that genre's lurid connotations. This "moral tale" is the story of Belinda Portman and the various characters she encounters upon going up to London to be the protégée of the famed wit Lady Delacour. At the outset of the novel, Belinda supposes that having Lady Delacour as a guide to polite culture will help her acquire the manners and connections needed to make a desirable match. Soon into the story, however, Belinda becomes disillusioned after discovering the profligacy and social irresponsibility that characterize the lives of Lady Delacour and her circle. Belinda's dissatisfaction with high society only deepens when Lady Delacour recounts to her the life of sin and degradation she has led, a lifestyle that is now taking its toll through a serious wound to her breast she received during her escapades. While Belinda laments the Lady's past behavior, she takes hope that Lady Delacour has reached such depths that she may be ripe for a reformation. After a long struggle to help restore Lady Delacour's physical and moral well-being, Belinda at last leads her guardian to accept her responsibilities as a wife, a mother, and an aristocrat. In the end, Lady Delacour demonstrates her new selflessness by orchestrating Belinda's union with Clarence Hervey, another aristocratic character who has come to understand his social obligations during the course of the novel.

From this brief synopsis, readers familiar with Nancy Armstrong's landmark study of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction, might recognize how Edgeworth's plot in many ways conforms to the norms for domestic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Armstrong, the form of fiction which "rose" in the mid-eighteenth century traces its roots to the popular conduct book tradition. So effective was the novel at assimilating the social function of the conduct book, in fact, that from Pamela forward the novel became firmly established as the genre with the greatest power to influence society's perceptions of how women should act. In Armstrong's estimation, "The rise of the novel hinged upon a struggle to say what made a woman desirable."³ Rather than inscribing different codes of behavior for different ranks, as had been done in conduct books of previous centuries, the eighteenth-century novel set out to win all levels of society over to middle-class ideals of domesticity. One of the chief ways this was carried out was through a direct attack on aristocratic manners. The nobleman came to be seen as a spendthrift who, like Richardson's Mr. B, considered women, particularly those of the lower classes, to be his sexual chattel. Even worse in the eyes of writers of conduct books and novels, however, was the aristocratic woman, who had abandoned her motherly duties for a life of self-display at card tables and dancing halls. So powerful was this novelistic juxtaposition of the corrupt aristocratic woman and the loving middle-class mother that by the early nineteenth century the domestic woman had become the prototype for women of all classes. Armstrong concludes that, in very real ways, eighteenth-century novelists paved the way for the cult of domesticity, which, in turn, paved the way for the ascendancy of the middle class.

Although much of what Armstrong states concerning the domestic novel proves useful in studying Belinda, it is her notion of the novel both enacting and facilitating domesticity's conquest over aristocratic corruption that I would like to take up here. As might be expected in an early nineteenth-century novel of manners, most of the characters in Belinda belong to the privileged orders of society. Lady Delacour, for instance, has both wealth and station, having inherited over 100,000 pounds from her father and acquired the rank of viscountess through marriage. Her friend and confidante, Clarence Hervey, comes from a very affluent and highly respected family that has provided him with an Oxford education, a large fortune, a seat in Parliament, and connections in the governments of both the church and the state. Other characters coming from the privileged ranks include the estate-holding Percival family, the baronet Sir Philip Baddely, and the libertine Harriet Freke. Of the novel's major characters, in fact, only Belinda and Dr. X lack rank and wealth, although both come from respectable enough backgrounds to grant them admission to polite society.

One need not read far to see how poorly these upper-class characters are doing in living up to their pedigrees. Most of the minor aristocratic characters are fairly harsh caricatures of England's decadent elite. Sir Philip Baddely, for instance, goes through life depending wholly upon his rank and fortune to gain him access to any polite society, as he otherwise lacks every grace and talent of the proper English gentleman. He drinks heavily, peppers his sentences with "damme's," and, when pressed, can contribute nothing more to polite conversation than questions such as "Don't you think the candles want snuffing famously?" (139).⁴ Among the female characters of the privileged classes, Harriet Freke is set up to be the most contemptible, as with her zeal for hunting, cross-dressing, and Wollstonecraftian feminism, she violates all guidelines for proper feminine behavior.⁵ Several other minor characters, ranging from the swindling Mrs. Luttridge to the rakish Colonel Lawless to the gambling Mr. Vincent, further extend Edgeworth's catalog of upper-class vices.

While the novel's two major aristocratic characters, Lady Delacour and Clarence Hervey, eventually come around to a sense of their domestic responsibilities, in the early stages of the narrative they, too, represent all that is wrong with England's nobility. Of the pair, Lady Delacour is cast as the more degenerate, as her longer life has provided her greater exposure to the corrupting influences of high society. In relating her history to Belinda, she discloses such misdeeds as squandering her entire fortune, bringing about the death of an admirer in a duel, using her wealth to sway an election, and ruining an innocent gardener in an attempt to show up her rival, Mrs. Luttridge.⁶ Even more damning than these public sins of commission, however, are her domestic sins of omission. As a wife, she has alienated her in-laws and driven her husband to gaming and drink; as a mother, her neglect has led to her first child being stillborn, her second child dying as an infant from inadequate nursing, and her third child being sent away to be raised by a wet-nurse and the staff of a boarding school. So overwhelming is the cumulative effect of Lady Delacour's offenses that when she has finished confessing her sordid history, Belinda cannot help but "tremble at the idea of being under the guidance of one, who was so little able to conduct herself" (61).

Lady Delacour, in essence, is the type of decadent aristocratic woman so regularly warned against in the conduct books and domestic fiction of this era. If, as Armstrong suggests, one of the primary social functions of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel was to clear the way for middle-class domesticity by undermining the prestige of the aristocracy, the character of Lady Delacour would seem to be functioning very much as a weapon in this campaign. Several critics, most notably Kowaleski-Wallace, Mellor, and Greenfield, have written insightfully about the ideological function of the Lady Delacour character, with the critical consensus being that, in Kowaleski-Wallace's words, "Lady Delacour's narrative records the process of internalizing a specific image of womanhood."⁷ While I certainly agree that Lady Delacour's story is grounded in gendered discourse, I believe we need to be careful to read this character's narrative in terms of her position not only as a woman, but as an aristocratic woman. In other words, the tale of Lady Delacour's fall and redemption serves as an excellent example of the extent to which class and gender expectations were linked together in the domestic ideal of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

That Lady Delacour's depravity in the first half of the novel is marked by a simultaneous transgression of gender- and class-based expectations is best evidenced in one of the novel's more intriguing episodes, the "dueling-and-ducking" scene of chapter IV. After years of heated competition for supremacy in the cut-throat circles of London's high society, Lady Delacour and Mrs. Luttridge are provoked by a fashionable pamphlet "upon the Propriety and Necessity of Female Duelling" to clothe themselves in men's attire and engage in the traditionally masculine act of dueling. When all the necessary preparations have been made, however, both ladies lose their nerve and agree to fire their pistols into the air and depart in peace. According to Lady Delacour's account,

I had scarcely discharged my pistol, when we heard a loud shout on the other side of the barn, and a crowd of town's people, country people, and hay makers, came pouring down the lane towards us with rakes and pitch forks in their hands. [T]he untutored sense of propriety amongst these rusticks was so shocked at the idea of a duel fought by women in men's clothes, that I verily believed they would have thrown us into the river with all their hearts. Stupid blockheads! I am convinced that they would not have been half so much scandalised if we had boxed in petticoats.

(51-52)

That the mob would react in this way to women dressing in men's clothing and engaging in a duel would certainly have been satisfying to many of Edgeworth's original readers, since a concerted effort was being made in the conduct literature of this period to warn against masculinity in working-class women and effeminacy in working-class men.⁸ At least from Lady Delacour's perspective, the riot was wholly in response to the violation of gender codes that had taken place.

In reexamining the story, however, one has to believe that more than gender violations were involved in this mob action. Simply put, this group of laborers most likely would not have reacted in the same way had these been working-class women, as inherent in almost any form of mob action is an element of class conflict. This was particularly true during the age in which Belinda is set, when mobs increasingly functioned as a medium by which workers could forcefully communicate their grievances to the privileged classes. In the case of Lady Delacour's duel, the protest appears to have been the laborers' way of reminding the indecorous noblewomen of what was socially acceptable, both in terms of gender and class. In this respect, this scene serves as the most fitting image of the degenerate condition Lady Delacour—and, by extension, her entire class—is in at the beginning of the novel. The traditional office of the privileged classes to dictate propriety to their social inferiors has been completely forfeited and assumed by, of all groups, the working poor.

Although the novel's other major upper-class character, Clarence Hervey, certainly has less to repent of than Lady Delacour, he too shows a proclivity toward the aristocratic degeneracy so clearly warned against in conduct literature. Chronologically speaking, Hervey first enters the narrative in the afore-mentioned dueling-and-ducking scene, where his involvement comes by virtue of the fact that it is he who has written the pamphlet on the necessity of female dueling which incites the ladies to take up their pistols. From the two brief discussions of this pamphlet in the novel, it is difficult to tell whether Hervey intends the treatise to be ironic or not. But, even if he does have satiric intentions, he leaves enough room for misinterpretation to convince several educated women, including the quick-witted Lady Delacour, that there is no shame in putting one's life on the line in the defense of honor.

To his credit, after the ladies have actually taken up arms, Hervey tries to make amends for his pamphlet by rescuing the duelists from the ignominy of being "ducked," or dunked, by the mob of laborers. His choice of methods for distracting the crowd, however, only raises further questions about his readiness to uphold his lofty station in society. Just as the mob is about to plunge the ladies into the water, Hervey appears, dressed in formal regimental attire, driving a herd of pigs, and declaring that he has entered into a hundred-guinea wager that his pigs can outrun a Frenchman's turkeys. Lady Delacour reports that "at the news of this wager, and at the sight of the gentleman turned pig-driver, the mob were in raptures" (52). Although Hervey eventually loses the wager, he saves the ladies from further disgrace. The lingering question, however, is whether Hervey might not have chosen a more genteel manner of diverting the mob's attention.

When Hervey next appears in the novel, he once again raises doubts about his sense of propriety. In a scene that contains the novel's second occurrence of cross-dressing and Hervey's second wager, he bets Lady Delacour fifty guineas that he can dress in a hoop and, his beard aside, conduct himself in so feminine a manner that he might deceive the purblind Lady Boucher into taking him for a woman. Hervey is about to complete a successfully feminine performance when he stumbles in an "unladylike" manner while picking up a comb Lady Delacour has purposely dropped. That he could come so close to pulling the caper off would most likely have not endeared Hervey to the majority of Edgeworth's readers, since, as noted above, much of the domestic literature of the age was devoted to training women and men to act in a manner befitting their gender.

If the cross-dressing is not worrisome enough, the haste with which Hervey enters into his second sizable wager of the novel suggests that he lacks the self-control and maturity to manage his wealth. This suspicion is confirmed in the following chapters, where Hervey wagers with Sir Philip Baddely "for ten guineas—for any money you please" that he can beat him in a walking race. When he loses this bet after being forced to dodge an approaching child, he accepts a double-or-nothing challenge to out-swim Baddely in the Serpentine River, even though he has never learned how to swim. As we discover later in the novel when Belinda lists Mr. Vincent's gambling addiction as one of her primary reasons for rejecting him, excessive wagering—with its implications of financial irresponsibility, fast company, and long nights spent outside the home—was for the aristocratic man as much a sign of a lack of domesticity as sending off children to boarding schools and being a regular on the social circuit was for the aristocratic woman. Despite his occasional displays of impressive talents and good manners, then, the Hervey of the first third of the novel appears to be on a course toward full-fledged rakishness.

II

Although the first half of Belinda may suggest otherwise, the novel is ultimately not so much a coronach on the demise of the English aristocracy as a prospectus for its reformation and revival. Admittedly, at the story's end, many of the minor characters, including Sir Phillip Baddely, Harriet Freke, and Mrs. Luttridge, continue to function as reminders of the hollowness of a privileged life misspent. Nevertheless, the characters we are led to care about—Lady Delacour and Clarence Hervey—have had their eyes opened to the gratification to be found in a distinctively aristocratic form of domesticity that includes not only attention to one's spousal and filial obligations within the home, but, on an extended level, one's paternal (or maternal) duties to the community over which one presides. In order for Lady Delacour and Hervey to appreciate their responsibilities both "Abroad and at Home,"⁹ however, they need the guidance of characters who already have an understanding of the joy that can be found in basing one's life on correct principles.

The most central of these exemplary characters is Belinda, who must herself undergo a conversion of sorts before she can begin to bring about the betterment of others. Preconditioned by her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, to believe that fortune and rank are the only paths to happiness, Belinda learns through observing Lady Delacour how miserable someone in so seemingly comfortable an existence can be. Belinda muses, "If Lady Delacour, with all the advantages of wealth, rank, wit and beauty, has not been able to make herself happy in this life of fashionable dissipation, why should I follow the same course, and expect to be more fortunate?" (62). After rejecting Lady Delacour's example, Belinda turns to the Percival family as her model. Patterned after Edgeworth's own family, the Percivals represent all that the privileged classes should be. The parents enjoy a relationship based on love and mutual respect, the children are eagerly immersed in learning, and the family opens its doors to all who wish to share in their happiness. In his relations with others, Mr. Percival acts with dignity and fairness, treating even his tenants respectfully. In one scene that reveals Mr. Percival's understanding of the expanded requirements of domesticity for aristocrats, he visits a couple who for years labored industriously on his estate before being reduced to poverty when old age restricted their ability to work. Rather than turning this couple over to the mercy of the parish, Mr. Percival adheres to the codes of paternalism and provides them with a new home and all the necessities for a comfortable retirement. Mr. Percival's wife, Lady Anne, is even more impressive to Belinda, as she possesses such a degree of inward and outward beauty that others are instantly drawn to her. Belinda observes how Lady Anne combines natural feminine sensibility with a large supply of reason and knowledge, and, as a result, she is "the chosen companion of her husband's understanding" (204).¹⁰ After spending a season with the Percivals, Belinda is converted. She resolves that from here on she will use this family's example to "establish in her own understanding, the exact boundaries between right and wrong" (219).

With the zeal of a convert, Belinda sets out to win Lady Delacour over to the Percivals' mode of living and to induce her to use her rank and wealth to benefit those around her. Key to Belinda's success as a reformer is her loyal friendship and her example as one who refuses to live life according to the dictates of fashionable society. These qualities make Lady Delacour so trusting of her that the viscountess is willing to use her protégée as a confessor of sorts. Being able to share the great secret of her breast "cancer" with Belinda has an immediate, liberating effect on Lady Delacour, as it allows her to once again regain her authority as the lady of the house from Marriott, the servant who has hitherto used her knowledge of the secret to maintain power over her employer. One of the first signs that Belinda's project with Lady Delacour is taking effect comes in the Lady's spirited proclamation, "I will not live a slave" (146). The real epiphany in Lady Delacour's life, however, takes place several months later, when Belinda goes to live with the Percivals to quell suspicions that she seeks to be the next Lady Delacour. In a moment of jealousy mixed with fear of losing her only real friend, Lady Delacour renounces all she has built her former life upon, symbolically smashing her coronet upon a marble hearth and exclaiming, "Vile bauble! Must I lose my only friend for such a thing as you? Oh, Belinda! do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?" (195). Soon after this, Lady Delacour's physical and mental ailments take her to the brink of death, and only when Belinda charitably returns and forgives her does her recovery begin.

In their analyses of the domestic ideology in Belinda, several critics have discussed in detail the changes Lady Delacour undergoes from this point forward. What is missing in most readings of this transformation, however, is an acknowledgment of the social dimension of Lady Delacour's domestic reformation. In addition to accepting her obligations as a wife and a mother, she must also learn to fulfill her duties as an aristocratic woman, which in Edgeworth's system entails not only a return from the whist table to the home, but proper religion, charitable treatment of the worthy poor, and a genuine desire to improve the lives of those with whom one comes in contact. Therefore, equally significant in her reformation as her revitalized relationships with Lord Delacour and her daughter, Helena, is her return from Methodism to orthodox religion, her reparations to the gardener whom she has previously cheated, and her diligent efforts to unite Belinda and Hervey. Only when she has completed all of these tasks can she claim to have fulfilled her commission as an aristocratic woman. That she has accomplished this by the novel's end is made manifest in the closing pages, where she once again has assumed her rightful position as the director of the narrative, pointing the other characters in the paths their lives will take when the novel concludes.

The other major reformation project in the second half of Belinda is that which the sage-like Dr. X undertakes with Hervey. These two characters first meet at the low point of Hervey's immature early years, when Dr. X saves the young man from drowning during his swimming contest with Baddely. Being a man of great accomplishments himself, Dr. X can better appreciate Hervey's prodigious talents than anyone else, which makes him all the more cognizant of the way his friend is wasting his life going from lark to lark. Several weeks after he saved Hervey from drowning, Dr. X feels familiar enough with his young friend to confront him about the way he is using his gifts. Dr. X's rebuke on this occasion serves as the novel's most direct edict on the social dimension of domesticity for the aristocratic male:

What a pity, Mr. Hervey, that a young man of your talents and acquirements, a man who might be any thing, should—pardon the expression—choose to be—nothing—should waste upon petty objects powers suited to the greatest—should lend his soul to every contest for frivolous superiority, when the same energy concentrated might ensure honourable preeminence among the first men in his country.—Shall he, who might not only distinguish himself in any science or situation, who might not only acquire personal fame, but, O, far more noble motive!—who might be permanently useful to his fellow creatures, content himself with being the evanescent amusement of a drawing-room?

(105-06)

Dr. X's blunt reproach produces almost instantaneous effects in Hervey. From this point forward, he forsakes the follies of his youth and begins to assume the until-then vacant role of the hero of the tale. As his first noble act, he decides to assist Belinda in "wean[ing] Lady Delacour, by degrees, from dissipation, by attaching her to her daughter, and to Lady Anne Percival" (113). Beyond this, he proceeds to rescue Mrs. Ormond from penury, to tutor and support the orphaned Virginia St. Pierre, and, in his most selfless act, to prevent his rival, Mr. Vincent, from squandering a fortune and committing suicide. Although in the latter half of the novel Hervey is still far from perfect—as is evidenced in the blunders he commits while attempting to cultivate a Rousseauvian relationship with Virginia—he has taken Dr. X's counsel to heart and devoted his talents to the service of others. In this respect, he has become worthy of both his station in life and the love of Belinda.

III

It should be noted that, as was the case earlier in the novel when the mob acted as enforcers of virtue, once again here the reformation of aristocratic characters has been overseen by individuals of lower social standing. Although her connection to Lady Delacour suggests that Belinda comes from a somewhat respectable family, it is evident at several points in the text that she possesses neither the status nor the fortune to be ranked among the aristocracy. One of the most revealing glimpses into her social position comes when Baddely, who, as a baronet, is himself near the bottom of the upper-class pecking order,¹¹ assumes that "a niece of Mrs. Stanhope's [is his] lawful prize" (132). Consequently, when Belinda eventually rejects his marriage proposal, he is mortified, having never expected to be turned down by one so far below him in rank and fortune. Even further down the social ladder than Belinda is Dr. X, a member of the professional class who lacks the fortune to retire from his practice. Other than the servants, Dr. X is the only significant character who is actually seen at work during the novel. However wise and well-educated the doctor may be, he can never transcend his middle-class roots in the eyes of many aristocrats, including Baddely, who expresses absolute disbelief that Belinda and Hervey would prefer the doctor's company to his own. At one point, Baddely taunts Hervey that he is bound to become a "doctor of physic, or a methodist parson" if he continues to associate with such a decidedly middle-class individual (108).

At first glimpse, then, by positioning the two great reformers of the novel somewhere between the nobility and the working class, Edgeworth might be said to be reflecting—and encouraging—a society much like the one Armstrong describes, in which the middle-class domestic ideals of conduct literature were gaining ascendancy over decaying aristocratic traditions. This is certainly the pattern with Belinda's regeneration of Lady Delacour and Dr. X's tutelage of Hervey. But upon further reflection, it should be sufficiently clear that the middle class does not monopolize the role of exemplar within the narrative. As I noted earlier, the novel's original enforcer of domestic ideals is not a member of the middle ranks, but a "crowd of town's people, country people, and hay makers … with rakes and pitch forks in their hands." Beyond this, the prototype of domesticity within the novel is not the family of a merchant or a banker, but the Percivals, an aristocratic family, complete with their titles, their leisure, and their tenantry. Only after living with the Percivals does Belinda come to a lasting appreciation of domestic roles and the happiness that comes when the mother stays at home with her husband and children. In a reversal of what early nineteenth-century readers would have come to expect, it is the aristocratic Lady Anne who serves as the ultimate model for the middle-class Belinda, not vice versa.

Why Edgeworth should complicate the traditional pattern by refusing to allow domesticity to be solely the domain of the middle or any other class warrants examination. From a biographical angle, unlike many women novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edgeworth did not come from the middle ranks of society. In fact, her family was very much in the tradition of the old British aristocracy, tracing their position as wealthy landowners to the reign of James I, when Frances Edgeworth was awarded six hundred acres in the Irish midlands as part of a movement to establish a Protestant gentry in Ireland.¹² While their Edgeworthstown estate was by no means among the largest in Ireland, it provided the Edgeworths with a sizable enough income from rents that the extremely large family could live comfortably without working—the true litmus test of aristocracy—and could afford such luxuries as regular trips to England and boarding school expenses.¹³ From this position near the top of the social hierarchy, Edgeworth tended to see nothing remiss in society's being divided into classes. On one occasion she remarked that she would leave debates over the class system to the politician and the legislator and go forward with her designs for separate educational curricula for the different classes.¹⁴

Edgeworth was not devoid of opinion, however, on such issues as the distribution of wealth—she did, in fact, write "An enquiry into the causes of poverty in Ireland" while still in her teens—and the ascendancy of the middle class. In fact, if anything, Edgeworth's corpus shows her to be extremely concerned with issues of class. While at various points in her writing Edgeworth levies sharp criticisms at the behavior of every rank of society, including her own, she reserves much of her harshest censure for the middle class, particularly those among it who aspire to possess more power than they are entitled to by birth. During the Defender uprisings of 1798, Edgeworth's father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had objected to attempts by middle-class tradesmen to lead the community's defense efforts, stating that the people would be foolish to follow leaders who lacked "fortune, knowledge, birth, or education."¹⁵ That the daughter shared many similar beliefs is evident in her writing. In her first and most famous novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), the villain is Old Thady's son, Jason, who quickly, shrewdly, and ruthlessly climbs the social ladder, rising from his original position as the Rackrent family's domestic servant, to a position as their agent, before at last being their dispossessor when he accumulates the means to force the ancient family from their estate. In a scene from this novel that anticipates the riotous ducking-and-dueling episode in Belinda, the tenants on the Rackrent estate, upon learning that a member of the aspiring middle class has taken over the castle, "one and all gathered in great anger against … Jason, and terror at the notion of his coming to be landlord over them, and they cried, No Jason! No Jason!—Sir Condy! Sir Condy! Sir Condy Rackrent for ever!" (79).¹⁶

In a later novel, The Absentee (1812), Edgeworth suggests that the entire social order comes under threat when the middle class rises to power. Not only does the tenantry suffer under the hands of a middle-class agent lacking the education or paternalistic instincts needed to preside over society, but the treasured traditions of polite culture become bastardized when the middle class takes on aristocratic airs. One of the more ridiculous scenes in a novel filled with caricatures of social pretentiousness is of a middle-class woman—in this case, the sister of a corrupt Irish agent—attempting to host an aristocratic-style dinner party. Upon first observing the spectacle created by the woman's efforts, one of the visiting lords "was much amused by the mixture, which was now exhibited to him, of taste and incongruity, ingenuity and absurdity, genius and blunder; by the contrast between the finery and vulgarity, the affectation and ignorance of the lady of the villa" (87).¹⁷

Although no scenes such as these, in which the middle class is skewered for their pretensions, are to be found in Belinda, these episodes from other novels suggest that Edgeworth's biases against the middle class might very well have led to her refusal to position domesticity as an exclusively middle-class virtue. Any suggestion that Edgeworth refused to ascribe domesticity to the middle class because of her prejudices against this group, however, raises another, more vexing question: why would a writer so wary of middle-class ascendancy write a novel championing the central virtue of the middle class's emergent ideology? It would seem that Edgeworth would want to do anything but advocate an ideology that threatened to transfer power from her own class to one made up of merchants and tradesmen. If, however, by the end of the eighteenth century domesticity had been so naturalized that it could no longer be identified as a distinctively middle-class ideal, Edgeworth's advocacy of it would not have seemed a conflict of interest. Instead, domesticity might have appeared to her as a universal truth which transcended class and national boundaries.

The idea that domesticity had achieved such prominence by the early nineteenth century is born out in Armstrong's study. Of the progression of this domestic revolution she writes, "Richardson successfully introduced into fiction the highly fictional proposition that a prosperous man desired nothing so much as the woman who embodied domestic virtue. By Austen's time, this proposition had acquired the status of truth."¹⁸ Further evidence for the naturalization of domesticity occurring during this period comes in the now-common recognition among social historians that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a tremendous growth in the social and political influence of the middle class. If one accepts the notion that middle-class culture became dominant in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is not difficult to see how the originally middle-class virtue of domesticity could have been well on its way to being naturalized by the time Edgeworth began writing her novel in 1800.

Viewed as a historical document, Belinda supports the argument that domesticity was beginning to be taken as a universal, timeless truth during this era. While it is true that at the end of the novel segments of the aristocracy remain caught up in the dissolute life of fashion, the examples of the Percivals, Lady Delacour, and Hervey suggest that domesticity was just as expedient for those possessing rank and fortune as it was for those lacking such advantages. In fact, for the aristocracy of Edgeworth's era, domesticity was all the more requisite, since in addition to implying steward-ship over the home, it also carried with it an obligation to fulfill centuries-old paternalistic duties towards one's tenants or subjects. That Lady Delacour and Hervey came to understand this is evidenced in the increased attention they paid to the needs of their families and those of lesser rank following their respective reformations. In the end, the prevailing virtue in the world of Edgeworth's novel is a domesticity that requires behavior befitting both one's gender and one's social class.

Notes

1. This excerpt from Edgeworth's privately printed Memoirs is quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Life, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 9.
2. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, "Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda," The Eighteenth Century 29 (1988), 242-62; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 42-45; Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson, "Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women's Rights," Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 19 (1984): 94-118. See also Susan Greenfield, "'Abroad and at Home': Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's Belinda," PMLA 112 (1997): 214-28.
3. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987),4-5.
4. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Eiléan Ni Chuilleanain, (Rutland, VT: Everyman, 1993). All page references are to this edition.
5. Freke's transgressive masculinity and corrupting influence upon her companions make her a favorite subject of much of the recent criticism on Belinda. See particularly Atkinson and Atkinson, Mellor, and Greenfield.
6. During this period, moralists in Britain became increasingly outraged over the excessive lifestyles of aristocrats like Lady Delacour. Apropos to Belinda, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall recount how "Aristocratic claims for leadership had long been based on lavish display and consumption while the middle class stressed domestic moderation. In particular, aristocratic disdain for sordid money matters, their casual attitude to debt and addiction to gambling which had amounted to a mania in some late eighteenth-century circles, were anathema to the middling ranks whose very existence depended on the establishment of creditworthiness and avoidance of financial embarrassment" (Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987], 21).
7. Kowaleski-Wallace, "Home Economics," 243.
8. See Armstrong, 20; Atkinson and Atkinson, 104.
9. As most analyses of domesticity in Belinda have pointed out, Edgeworth originally gave her novel the title Abroad and at Home to contrast the life spent in high society with the more rewarding life centered around the home.
10. In her delineation of masculine and feminine Romantic ideologies, Mellor shows how the Percivals' marriage is the type of union aspired to by many women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Mellor, 43-44.
11. The title of baronet, contrived and sold as part of a fund-raising ploy by James I, was not part of the traditional English peerage, which was comprised of dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. Baronets did not hold seats in the House of Lords, were addressed as "Sir" rather than "Lord," and generally enjoyed far less prestige than peers. Part of their relative lack of power, no doubt, was due to the simple fact that in England a baronet was much more common than a peer. In 1800, for example, there were only 267 peers in England as opposed to 699 baronets (see John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England, [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991], 32). Lest we think that Baddely and his fellow baronets were completely devoid of distinction, however, it should be pointed out that in all eras of English history prior to the twentieth century, the aristocracy—including peers, baronets, and knights—accounted for less than one percent of the total population. Cannon, in fact, calculates that in 1801 the aristocracy accounted for a minuscule 0.0000857 percent of the total population (33n.).
12. See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity, (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 141.
13. For a detailed description of the Edgeworth family's income and lifestyle during their years at Edgeworthstown House, see Butler, 78-145.
14. My thanks to George Watson for providing this quote from Edgeworth's The Parent's Assistant (1796) in his introduction to Castle Rackrent, Oxford World's Classics edition, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), xxii.
15. This quotation comes from a letter of 30 April 1795 from Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Lord Charlemont. See Butler, 117.
16. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Oxford World's Classics edition, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980).
17. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, Oxford World's Classics edition, eds. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988).
18. Armstrong, 135.