ABSTRACT
Fanny Burney's first novel, Evelina (1968 [1778]), narrates a young woman's search for identity amidst a subtly dangerous cultural landscape. Burney's placement of her protagonist in the public locales of eighteenth-century Britain reveals strategies by which the design of public places enacts rhetorical mechanisms of power. Most intriguingly, the unschooled Evelina's visits to various pleasure gardens around London illustrate the sophisticated control of the artless impulse – the supposed innocence of women in a world of men – within a garden of hidden mechanisms and concealed delights, places of institutional power and spaces of potential resistance. For a growing merchant class, pleasure gardens provided a glimpse of aristocracy, while eschewing the formalism of landscape design. For Evelina, however, the social miscues and dangerous liaisons found within the pleasure gardens’ dark walks metaphorically state the problematic placement of the feminine within the modern metropolis. Her surrogate father warns: ‘the artlessness of your nature … unfit you for the thorny paths of the great and busy world’ (122), while her female guardian later responds to a nobleman's improper attempts to determine the location of Evelina's home: ‘Young ladies, my Lord … are no where’ (275, emphasis in original). More than a mere setting within a typical eighteenth-century epistolary novel, the pleasure garden and its utopian successors illustrate the deceptive ‘artlessness’ of contemporary strategies through which the feminine is constructed and disciplined.
