Privacy, Dissimulation, and Propriety: Frances Burney and Jane Austen
Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia
Volume 12, no. 4, July 2000
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ABSTRACT
Good manners constitute a tax paid by individuals to society, a widely condoned form of hypocrisy. Late in Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, a male character articulates this view by means of examples morally disturbing in their very familiarity: “are we not kept silent when we wish to reprove by the fear of offending? and made speak where we wish to be silent by the desire of obliging? do we not bow to the scoundrel as low as to the man of honour? are we not by mere forms kept standing when tired? made give place to those we despise? and smiles to those we hate? or if we refuse these attentions, are we not regarded as savages, and shut out of society?” Appropriate manners, by this interpretation, entail elisions of individual judgment and feeling. Socially conforming behaviour depends on suppressed utterance. … The so-called novel of manners, however, in its late-eighteenth-century refinement, explored personal uses of social convention that hint at a further meaning for conformity.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Privacy” include:
Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century
by ARIANE FENNETAUX (ECF 20.3, Spring 2008)
Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters
by THOMAS O. BEEBEE (ECF 20.1, Fall 2007)
Forging a Romantic Identity: Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness and W.H. Ireland’s Shakespeare MS
by ROBERT MILES (ECF 17.4, July 2005)
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