ABSTRACT
The works and career of Frances Burney exemplify a late eighteenth-century conundrum-as authors were called upon to deny the staged elements of expression, in their lives and in their writing, the very act of denial produced the staged qualities it was meant to negate. For Burney’s heroines, expression evolves from the very opposite characteristics of silence and repression, as they communicate their feelings through a symbol associated at once with emotional excess and excessive restraint: the swoon. The scenes and vocabulary of unconsciousness that proliferate in Burney’s work navigate the late-eighteenth-century ambivalence toward theatricality. They answer contemporary anxieties about conscious display (because one is literally insensible to any resulting spectacle), artifi ce or deception (because one is genuinely unconscious), and repetition (because in most cases the swoon is either so extreme as to be fatal, or so climactic as to end the book or play). But the recurrence of these moments, and their acknowledged effectiveness throughout Burney’s work, hint at a paradoxically conscious deployment of unconsciousness. As Burney explores how prohibitions on feeling lead inevitably to an involuntary emotional breakdown, her work also exposes the fact that this repression, if itself controlled, can be used to coordinate when and how the emotional breakdown occurs.
