Pattern Women: False Sensibility, Art Discourse and the Rhetoric of Reputation in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
Abstract
Maria Edgeworth, in her 1801 novel Belinda, employs art discourse and a rhetoric of reputation to de-antagonise the concepts of prudence and art and critique notions of sensibility. By reading the text in this way, it is clear that Edgeworth means to depict agency and reputation not as potential counterparts, but as competitive representations of interior and anterior selves.
Through the tropological dimension of language and certain literary devices, there is an evident textual awareness of social caprice and its capacity to fragment the self. Dependent on art discourse for self-expression, Lady Delacour’s character becomes a performative artwork that provokes credulity from the characters around her and readers alike.
She proves an entity of allurement and detachment; a self-created object which refuses our final judgement. The text achieves this through its rhetorical displacement of stable referents, particularly in its description of Lady Delacour; who, in fact, controls our perception through references that are outside the self; to ones of painting, sculpture, poetry and rhyme.
But this proves tragically detrimental as Lady Delacour becomes a shade of herself, as manifest in her body’s incremental decay; a dispensation of ontological recognition. Edgeworth enacts her critique of sensibility and reputation primarily through Lady Delacour, only to be offset by her prudential prodigy, Belinda Portman, and the chameleon-like male admirer, Clarence Hervey.
It is through their interrelationships that the dichotomy of prudence and art breaks down only to find a more nuanced understanding of the romantic dependency on origination in morality and art and, finally, to divorce the self from gendered notions of virtue and restore Lady Delacour’s sense of a unified self.