Cropped Out of History: At the Margins of Culture

Currently the Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit called, “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.” The idea for the exhibit started when curators at the gallery began examining William Hogarth’s 1735 painting, “A Family Portrait,” and they noticed a black hand creeping into the portrait of an otherwise lily-white family of middle-class eighteenth-century Brits.

 

Middle left: I've circled the servant's hand in red.

Upon further examination and x-rays of the painting, the researchers discovered that the black servant figure included in the original painting had been later cropped out of it—about 100 years after it was painted.

The metaphorical meaning of this act is impossible to ignore, as slavery, the slave trade, slave histories and narratives, and even the visual representations of slavery and non-whites have been routinely “cropped out” of dominant histories. It matters little whether we speak of history generally, or if we focus on literary history, art history, musical history, or any other discipline. These stories are often at the margins of where we are looking, not to mention that these discussions are still marginalized in the classroom.

What intrigues me, however, is how often the stories of slaves or Africans or persons of African descent, enslaved or not, appear in the background of other narratives or images. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, originally published in 1801, contains a black character: Juba, the servant. In the original version of the novel, Juba marries the (white) daughter of an English farmer—but this element of the plot was cut out in subsequent editions. Again, the story, the character was “cropped out.”

In Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, racial masquerade begins the novel. The main character, the “Incognita,” escapes Revolutionary France in borrowed clothing with darkened features. She has darkened her skin to hide who she really is, and the characters she meets in England initially believe that she really is what she appears to be—a person of African descent.

In the novel, one of the characters asks the “stranger,” “What part of the world might you come from? The settlements of the West Indies? Or somewhere off the coast of Africa?...” Her arms and hands are described as “of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black than brown…”

Of course, quite soon we learn that the main character is not black at all—she is French, and the darkening of her skin was one of many ways she attempted to conceal her identity. While Burney may initially be asking us to sympathize with an “apparently black” heroine, she does not require this of her readers for very long.

The idea of “blackening” one’s skin or hiding behind a mask of darker skin color is apparent in John Raphael Smith’s pastel portrait “A Lady Holding a Negro Mask.” Historian Kathleen Wilson recently wrote about this image in the ASECS Fall 2014 newsletter. As she points out, there are many ways of interpreting the image. One thing that seems apparent to me in all of these examples is how integral blacks were to British life throughout the eighteenth century. While they may often only appear in the margins of literature or art, the consistent repetition of these images and references suggest that we are only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

 

Is she going to a masquerade? Is she happy about it?
Is the painting about race? gender? beauty? identity? all those things?

One interesting project that is working to change how we think of literary history in an American context is the “Just Teach One” project. Initially it began as a project that would aid instructors of Early American literature in teaching less-taught texts—texts that are out of print, difficult to find, or simply unknown. A parallel project has grown out of that first one, focusing on prints and literature of African Americans.

The name of the projects asks us to consider what happens when we make a concerted effort to teach at least one lesser-taught text, or at least one text by an African American who is, presumably, not Frederick Douglass (mostly because his canonicity has become [mostly] established). Their website caters specifically to instructors and aims to provide easily accessible versions of various lesser-known texts.

Many projects concerned with diversity and inclusivity have taken up the idea of moving things, people, and historical moments from the margins and putting them at the center of the conversation. We can only hope that this conversations keep happening and that more and more projects, exhibits, and syllabuses are put in the service of bringing hidden histories to light, of moving issues from the margins to the center. In the end, perhaps we may also find ways to move the conversation away from the binary of center and margin to other intertextual, multivocal, and less hierarchical modes of thinking and teaching.

Johann Zoffany's Family of Sir William Young, 1770.
The detail of this painting containing the African servant/slave is on my edition of Belinda, by Oxford World's Classics.
Interestingly, the redesign of the cover scrapped this image and chose one of a corset.

Small Pockets, Big Problems

It is a fact universally acknowledged that contemporary women’s clothes do not have pockets. Or, if they do, they are non-functional. This has been an issue for me for a while, now, brought to light in those moments when I find a fancy dress that actually has functional pockets. Recently, women have become even more vocal than usual about this sartorial prejudice due to the change in size of the iPhone 6, of all things.

Jezebel.com writer Tracy Moore, in her piece “Pocket Equality,” sums up the problem succinctly: “No pockets = sexism.” She goes on to explain that lack of functioning pockets in women’s clothing is “a longstanding problem” for all women, a “silent epidemic that has infantilized us all.”

Atlantic Monthly contributor Tanya Basu agrees with these claims in her article “The Gender Politics of Pockets,” explaining,

“A man can simply swipe up his keys and iPhone on the way to a rendezvous with co-workers and slip them into his pocket. A woman on the way to that same meeting has to either carry those items in her hand, or bring a whole purse with her--a definitive, silent sign that she is a woman.”

This debate, and my own consternation at how small my pockets are and how big my purses are getting, has led me to wonder a bit as to how this all happened. Did women’s clothing have pockets in the past? When the pockets disappear? Was there always pocket disparity?

A little bit of online research and some Twitter querying resulted in some interesting information. In the eighteenth century, women almost always had a pair of pockets on their persons--but these were not sewn into the gown she wore. Since women’s clothes of the time period often consisted of petticoats (skirts) with an under-petticoat and a shift underneath, the solution, instead, was to have women tie their pockets around their waists between the under petticoat and the petticoat.

A pair of 18th-century tie-on pockets.

Some of these pockets could be quite beautiful, despite being wholly hidden under the main skirt of the gown. The pockets were then accessible through slits in the petticoat.

All of this was still practical and fashionable for women of the time because of the fashion for large, voluminous skirts. During the Regency period, when nightgown-like dresses were all the rage, pockets disappeared, only to reappear during the nineteenth century, which took hooped skirts to whole new levels. In the nineteenth century, some women’s pockets were sewn in, while others were still tied on.

The final demise of the women’s pocket, it would seem, happened during the 20th century, specifically in the 1920s, when the flat, boyish figure for women came into fashion. Any lumps, bumps or voluminous skirts were unfashionable, making pockets a fashion no-no.

Men’s pockets, according to the V&A website at least, were always sewn into the lining of their waistcoats, breeches and/or jackets. The sewing in of pockets into such garments might, in fact, have been a result of the tightness of breeches and waistcoats in the eighteenth-century--there would be nowhere to hide a tied-on pocket in such an ensemble. Additionally, the required male dress consisted always of a coat out-of-doors, and eighteenth-century jackets were long and large--almost like a skirt. Presumably a gentleman only had a few of these, so perhaps it was all right to have the pockets sewn in.

Whatever the reason for the difference in men’s and women’s pockets in the past, the similarity between those tie-on pockets and modern purses is striking. Likewise, the few times that I have located articles of clothing for myself that had nice, big pockets, they were usually dresses with big, full skirts, so that the pockets and their contents are hidden. When fashion dictated a less bulky silhouette, such as during the Regency period, pockets were out of fashion as well, and women began using small bags or “reticules” to carry their most essential objects around with them.

Since then, we have managed to get rid of many socially-dictated requirements for women’s clothing. We don’t have to wear dresses and skirts or corsets or girdles, though we are all probably aware of a thousand other ways that the consumer clothing industry is against us. As Tanya Basu points out, “mid-range fashion is a male dominated business, driven not by form and function, but by design and how fabric best drapes the body.” There might be hope on the horizon, as some companies work on new and innovative ways to make pockets both functional and stylish but for now, I suppose I’ll have to continue to rely on my reticule.

18thC Pedagogy: Surveying the Survey Course

This semester I have my first ever chance to teach an American literature survey course, beginnings to 1865. While I have read a fair amount of these texts in the past, many of them are new to me. Prior to the course, which is a sophomore-level survey, I had never read any of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. I ended up enjoying both of them, as well as the beautiful poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the haughty rants of Cotton Mather, the polite and loving letters of the Adamses, as well as the irony and wit of Benjamin Franklin.

 The transatlantic approach to literature is a growing trend in literary studies, especially in eighteenth-century studies. Looking at traditional literary anthologies, however, you’d rarely know it. When I taught eighteenth-century women poets, Roger Lonsdale’s anthology did not contain Phillis Wheatley. Conversely, there is no mention of Aphra Behn in American lit anthologies. Yet really, these should be rather obvious inclusions.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is possibly one of the few works featured in both British and American literature anthologies. Otherwise, these different literatures are quite compartmentalized.

Also of note is how easily the Norton anthology (which I have to use for the American Literature survey) includes texts that were originally written in Spanish until it is no longer useful or “necessary” to do so. The anthology introduction explains that there were many languages spoken in the early American colonies—yet the anthology itself contains few other translated texts once the English show up.

These issues are miniscule when we consider that global literary and transnational approaches to literature and culture rarely make it into the undergraduate classroom. A colleague of mine who teaches African and Asian history as well as courses on Islamic Civilization has pointed out how consistently “World Literature” or “World History” are ghettoized in college curricula. Students in the US rarely have to consider other (Other?) civilizations and world developmental narratives outside the Western one, to our detriment.

On a smaller scale, I always noted, as the daughter of Polish immigrants, that Eastern European history rarely made an appearance in my high school European history classes. It was as if Poland never existed, despite that nation’s dominance on the continent during the 17^th century. Omissions such as these are merely symptoms of larger issues relating to colonial histories that are often at the forefront of our class discussions in the American literature survey.

While preparing lessons for the course has been, in many ways, challenging because it is not “my” area of study, I not only enjoy this opportunity, but I welcome the challenges it brings with it. If nothing else, it has made me more aware of the missing pieces of the puzzle when we teach “British” literature courses.

In English departments, we often consider “survey” courses to be the steady foundation of further literary study. At many universities, students must take a certain amount of sophomore level surveys to get their BA in English or before they can take upper-level courses in literature. I wonder, however, how useful the traditional survey is. Perhaps it would be better to come up with sophomore surveys dedicated to the idea of “surveying” the many different literatures of a smaller time period or, rather than sticking to time period, surveying the development of a literary theme across time and space? Such flexible approaches to foundational literary study may actually encourage greater critical thinking skills in our students while engaging them in ways that the usual chronological approach may not.

Queer Vision(s)

This year, I’ve proposed a roundtable for ASECS 2015 on “Queer Vision(s)”:

Eighteenth-century plays, novels, memoirs and even art and poetry are often concerned with what we know and how we know it. Vision plays a key role in defining and understanding knowledge in this period, especially with regard to knowledge of the gender and sexuality of eighteenth-century persons and characters. Consider the moment in which Fanny Hill looks through the peep hole and watches two young men engaging in a homosexual act only to fall over and faint before she can report them, or how actresses in breeches roles were admired and desired by both men and women for the spectacle they provided on stage. This roundtable solicits papers that will examine the various ways in which vision is queered in the eighteenth-century as well as how vision and the ability to see “queerly” affects who or what is understood to be “queer.”

In the spirit of shameless plugging, I’ve decided to dedicate a whole blog post to the topic in the hopes of promoting the roundtable. I’m hoping to get a really great discussion going at ASECS on the intersections of desire, perception and sexuality. These issues are, after all, deeply tied together.

My own research on female cross-dressers led me to the idea of “queer vision.” So often, the bodies of these women would give them away. A flash of boob, for example, and the jig was up—or was it? In Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband, Mary Hamilton’s breasts are exposed at a town dance—yet she retains her male disguise. According to Fielding’s narrator, the Doctor (Hamilton) enters into a dispute with a man at a local dance where she has been wooing her newest conquest, Mary Price. During the scuffle, the man “tore open her [Hamilton’s] wastecoat, and rent her shirt, so that all her breast was discovered, which, tho’ beyond expression beautiful in a woman, were of so different a kind from the bosom of a man, that the married women there set up a great titter” (46-47).

How Hamilton hides her superlatively perfect breasts in the guise of a man is left to the imagination of the reader. According to our narrator, “it did not bring the Doctor’s sex into an absolute suspicion, yet caused some whispers, which might have spoiled the match with a less innocent and less enamoured virgin” (47). It seems that Mary can only see what she wants to see; Fielding, by contrast, is coy as to what exactly he wants his readers to see: do we see Hamilton as a villain? a rake? a misguided criminal weirdo? a beautiful and attractive female husband?

The issue of perception and desire, however, is not limited to issues of cross-dressing or same-sex desires. These same issues play out in various ways on the eighteenth-century stage and in novels where concerns about disguise, class fluidity, “passing,” and masquerade show up again and again. For example, how could Clarissa not “see” Lovelace for what he was? Or could see it, but still desire him despite it?

It seems, perhaps, that despite innovations in visual technology, such as the microscope and the telescope, eighteenth-century writers were still quite concerned with how to see others, and how these various queer visions affect how others see us and whom we desire. The purpose of this roundtable will be to take a look at these issues from a variety of perspectives and through a variety of texts and artefacts. Artists as well as writers explored the notion of vision and desire in visual media such as paintings and cartoons. Other studies in material culture, such as costume studies, might also make some interesting interventions into this discussion.

For more info on submitting a proposal, go to the CFP. Paper proposals are due by Sept. 15, 2014.

For more on boobs, see my article on Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. 

Lovely Oddities: Lesser Known Novels of the 18C

As it often happens, I stumble upon many great links while on Twitter (@KleinUla) relating to my research as well as the greater topics that interest me: the eighteenth-century, clothing, material histories, medical anomalies, gender, sex, etc.

The most recent link which I simply had to share with my readers was from The Toast (the-toast.net):

What were 18th-century folk
reading when they weren't reading
Defoe, Burney or Richardson?

100 Actual Titles of Real Eighteenth-Century Novels

The website lists some of the more ludicrous, eyebrow-raising, confusing, and/or tantalizing lesser-known
(mostly unheard of!?)  eighteenth-century novels.

Since I'm always on the lookout for new texts to incorporate into my research, this list (and the sources of these titles, included at the bottom of the website) will undoubtedly lead me down many a blind alley--but hopefully also down some happy trails.

Atrocities of a Convent and The Nunnery for Coquettes sound like fun reading....but might also be worthwhile to read in conjunction with Diderot's more well-known convent expose, The Nun.

I will definitely have to check out The Polish Bandit; Or, Who is my bride? just to see if it really is about a Polish bandit. There needs to be more Polish in my research!

The Laughable Adventures of Charles and Lisette; or, The Beards piques my interest in, of course, beards--how could it not? I've posted here about beards not once, but twice!

Similarly, The Adventures of an Irish Smock, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches is must for me, given my interest in breeches and eighteenth-century clothing more generally. So too The Charms of Dandyism; Or, Living in Style. By Olivia Moreland, Chief of the Female Dandies has caught my attention for its intimation of female cross-dressing.

I'll let my lovely readers peruse the list at length, and I invite any and all of you to let me know if you've read any of these works or others like them (i.e. unknown but fascinating). Let me know if they're worth a look, where to find them, and what you thought of them.

Of course, lists like these beg the question: What did eighteenth-century readers read, when they weren't reading what we read from the eighteenth-century canon. Publication histories can be difficult to trace in this time period, as the marketplace was glutted with anonymous pamphlets or pamphlets or novels published under nom de plumes. The Victorian period suffers from the same problem; the amount of novels published in that time period far exceeds today's book publications, which means that there are far more novels to be read than those written by Dickens, the Brontes, Gaskell and other syllabus "stand-bys."

It stands to reason, then, that there might be excellent works of fiction out there, largely unread and waiting to be rediscovered, anthologized and popularized. While I doubt that The Freebooter of the Alps is one of them--who knows? Maybe it is. In any case, it might just be worth checking it out.

50 Shades of a Woman of Pleasure

I know it’s not fair to compare 50 Shades of Grey to John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman or Pleasure; or, Fanny Hill. After all, in many ways, they are completely different; yet, as we shall see, there are some compelling reasons to consider them together.

50 Shades of Grey tells the story of a young woman finishing college who is first seduced by a sexy billionaire, only to turn the tables and become the one in charge. While the media made much of the novel’s S&M plot twists, in the end, it is really a novel about how the woman in the relationship, Anastasia Steele, “fixes” her gentle brute, Christian Grey, changing his sexual tastes from BDSM to “vanilla sex.” (That’s what the book calls it—I kid you not.) Additionally, the book initially began as a Twilight fan fic, was written by a woman for other women, and, of course, is a product of 21^st-century America.

Fanny Hill, by contrast, tells the story of a young woman who falls in with the wrong crowd but eventually comes into her own (pun intended). Initially, she is picked up by a madam in the hopes that her virginity will fetch the right price; while Fanny is shocked at this idea at first, she comes around (again, pun intended) and learns to love and enjoy sex with men (sex with women being a far inferior proposition—of course, 50 Shades of Grey never even glances in that direction…). Fanny has many different partners over the course of the novel, has sex for money, engages in orgies, and has no career ambitions aside from being the loving and repentant wife of her first sexual partner, Charles, from whom she is parted for most of the novel. The novel was written by a man for other men, in the middle of the eighteenth century, in England.

What with the film version of 50 Shades coming out just in time for next Valentine’s Day and the official trailer finally out, however, I couldn’t help comparing them. Both novels are by far the most influential erotic tales of their own time, and both are written in the voice of a young woman who is entering the adult world for the first time. No matter that Fanny is a teenager while Anastasia is about to finish college; the difference in age is a minor fact. Additionally of note is the tone that the two works use: both works insist on a fairly romantic view of sex and sexual encounters, eschewing words like “penis” or “fucking.” While E.L. James resorts to a kind of bodily synecdoche to describe sex, as in “he entered me,” Cleland makes use of a variety of colorful metaphors for the male member, including but not limited to “weapon of pleasure,” “the engine of love-assaults,” “truncheon,”, “may-pole,” “pick-lock,” “delicious stretcher,” “superb piece of furniture,” and “pleasure-pivot.”

Both authors are also quite adamant that S&M is a lesser pleasure compared to conventional sex between a male and female partner. When asked to flagellate a man who gets off that way, Fanny acquiesces but is puzzled by the pleasure the man gets from this act. While BDSM plays a much larger role in 50 Shades, the novel’s protagonist Anastasia has a similar aversion to such activities.

 

Fanny and the flagellant, Mr. Barville.

Lastly, both novels ultimately champion a single bond between two (heterosexual) people who marry, in the end, and live a rather conventional lifestyle—an interesting ending for works so committed to titillating their audiences. In many ways, however, as a reader, I find Fanny Hill a more stimulating, entertaining, and interesting read than 50 Shades.

Much has been written already about the many different ways we can read Fanny Hill. Fanny enjoys the attentions of Phoebe Ayres, even as she rejects them for not being “substantial” enough. At the same time, she outright rejects sex between two men as immoral. She has no problem, though, participating in orgies and watching others participate in them. She is both a participant and a voyeur, and the voyeuristic qualities of the novel’s heroine, as well as her evident pleasure in recounting her past escapades (which she is meant to be confessing to an unnamed woman….yet another literary question mark) suggest that there are many pleasures to be found in the novel. Even though the novel ultimately resolves Fanny’s problems through conventional means—marriage to the man she first had sex with—there are plenty of different ways to read and interpret Cleland’s pornotopia.

50 Shades of Grey is not exactly simplistic, by comparison, but its single-minded focus on “fixing” Christian Grey and Anastasia’s reluctant dabbling in his BDSM fantasies are both grating and, frankly, not very pleasurable. The novel takes the point of view that Christian wants to dominate his female “subs” only because he was physically abused as a child. Such a point of view is, of course, incorrect. Many mentally- and emotionally-healthy people engage in various types of BDSM-play in their sexual lives, and there is nothing inherently unhealthy about such fantasy play. Of course, the fact that Anastasia cannot “escape” her attraction to Christian and Christian’s attraction to her is yet another problematic aspect of the novel lifted directly from the Twilight series: the male must protect his female object of desire through what basically amounts to stalking even though it is precisely their relationship that puts the woman in danger in the first place.

This online cartoon pokes holes
in the Edward-Bella romance.

It seems almost as if modern women’s sexual and romantic fantasies are predicated on this trope of danger and protection 50 Shades and Twilight and heaven knows how many other romance novels propagate. While Fanny Hill is light-years away from being a feminist erotic novel, its heroine is able to survive because of her quick learning abilities. Fanny learns from Phoebe and the madams how to survive on the streets of London with nothing but her brains and her body to see her through. Like Moll Flanders and Roxana, Fanny is able to squirrel away money for later use. Like Pamela, an unlikely but obvious prototype for Cleland’s heroine, Fanny finally gets what she wants—stability, money and marriage for love—while having a whole hell of a lot more fun than Samuel Richardson’s too-good-to-be-true protagonist.

This is not to say that the eighteenth-century didn’t have its share of dangerous but seductive rakes—cue Richardson’s Lovelace. Or Jane Austen’s George Wickham. The difference is that in the end, Clarissa would rather die than be with Lovelace and Lizzy Bennet lets her dumb sister Lydia fall for the rake.  She doesn’t try to “fix” him; she throws him over and marries the more sensible (and moneyed) option, Mr. Darcy. Our 20^th and 21^st century fantasy, according to money-makers like Pretty Woman and 50 Shades of Grey, is a Byronic hero with money to burn who just needs a woman’s touch to be the ideal Prince Charming. Oddly enough, though Fanny loves her Charles, he isn’t Prince Charming—he’s hardly in the book at all. Instead, Fanny holds first place in her story as the main actor who controls her destiny.

Am I too biased, being an eighteenth-centuryist? Perhaps. But since there’s still another month of summer left, I suggest you read these books and decide for yourself. After all, they are practically the definition of summer reading.

Beach reading!
...though then again, you might not want to read these books in public...

Cross-Dressing Ladies: Maria Edgeworth’s Harriet Freke

Frontispiece to a 19th century
edition of Belinda.

Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is by far one of my favorite eighteenth-century novels—though, admittedly, it is technically not an eighteenth-century novel at all. The first publishing was in 1801, and subsequent edits and publication dates lead Belinda even further into the early decades of the nineteenth century. It is undeniable, however, that Belinda, in topic, approach and tone is very much an eighteenth-century novel.

 Belinda is a complex work that starts out, seemingly, quite conventionally. The novel purports to tell the story of Belinda, a young lady searching for a suitable suitor. Her aunt has attached her to the fashionable Lady Delacour in London, in the hopes that through this connection, Belinda will meet the perfect suitor. Very quickly, however, the reader cannot but admit that Lady Delacour is, in many ways, much more interesting than the eponymous heroine of the novel. Lady Delacour is magnetic, beautiful and witty—and she has a fascinating back story about how she received a mysterious wound on her breast. It happened, in fact, when she was out in men’s clothes, about to duel with another woman with pistols. For more on Lady Delacour’s breast and her bosom friendships, look here.

The brains behind this whole ordeal turns out to be none other than Lady Delacour’s former bosom friend Harriet Freke, who regularly cross-dresses and enjoys playing tricks on just about everyone. Mrs. Freke, whose own name pronounces her strange proclivities, has “bold masculine arms” with “no conscience, so she was always at ease; and never more so than in male attire, which she had been told became her particularly. She supported the character of a young rake with such spirit and truth, that … no common conjurer could have discovered anything feminine about her.”

At one point in Lady Delacour’s reminiscences, she recounts how a young man jumped into a  coach with her. After the initial shock, she recognizes the young man’s laughter and realizes that this “young man” is in fact her friend Mrs. Freke. Mrs. Freke then recounts merrily of the day’s adventures: “‘Where do you think I’ve been?’ said Harriet, ‘in the gallery of the House of Commons; almost squeezed to death these four hours; but I swore I’d hear Sheridan’s speech to night, and I did…Fun and Freke for ever, huzza!”’

Lady Delacour’s eventual betrayal at the hands of her “bosom friend” Mrs. Freke, as well as the latter’s joy in causing her—and nearly everyone else—pain, casts her as the main antagonist in the novel. She plays tricks on Juba, the black servant of Mr. Vincent (one of Belinda’s suitors), as well as on Lady Delacour, leading the latter to believe that she is haunted. Additionally, Mrs. Freke attempts to turn Belinda against her friend; when this fails, she turns her attention to another young lady, a Miss Moreton, whose reputation is spoiled simply by keeping company with Mrs. Freke.

Towards the end of the novel, Mrs. Freke, in attempting to spy on Lady Delacour, is caught in a bear trap while “frolicking” in men’s clothing: “Mrs. Freke’s leg was much cut and bruised; and now that she was no longer supported by the hopes of revenge, she began to lament loudly and incessantly the injury that she had sustained. She impatiently inquired how long it was probably, that she should be confined by this accident; and she grew quite outrageous when it was hinted, that the beauty of her legs would be spoiled, and that she would never more be able to appear to advantage in man’s apparel.”

Maria Edgeworth

Harriet Freke is conventionally read as the antagonist who gets what she deserves, while Lady Delacour eventually repents of her worldly ways, reunites with her daughter and husband, and even manages to find a good husband for Belinda. Meanwhile, Mrs. Freke must give up her cross-dressing ways and find new ways of playing tricks on people. I’ve always found this reading of Belinda a bit reductive, however. Though Mrs. Freke is certainly not a positive character by any means, even Lady Delacour manages to feel pity for her when she is injured. Further, it is only the doctor’s opinion that Harriet Freke will not “appear to advantage” in men’s clothes after her injury.

The doctor’s opinion also glosses over the fact that cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke much more than simply the option of “looking good” and exposing her legs. (For more on sexy lady legs, see my previous post on the topic.) Cross-dressing gives Mrs. Freke freedom, especially freedom of movement. Like Hannah Snell and other female soldiers, female pirates, and female husbands, cross-dressing allows Mrs. Freke to go where women usually dared not.

By making Mrs. Freke a cross-dresser, Edgeworth has complicated rather than condemned her character. After all, Lady Delacour cross-dresses in the novel as well—and so does Belinda’s lover, Clarence Hervey. Additionally, the novel is full of masquerades and even some mistaken identities. The marriage between Juba and the English farmer’s daughter (a subplot that was cut in subsequent printings) further suggests that the world is not just “black and white”; there are many shades of gray in between, not all of which are wholly evil or wholly good.