ABSTRACT
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that the strategy for female writers who wish to criticize a burdensome patriarchy is to feign submission, to hide harsh judgments against its oppression within a bland, pleasing, and "decorous" narrative. Detecting counterfeit charm in Belinda explains Edgeworth's clever incorporation of Ithuriel's spear into the narrative, as well as her own consistent allusions to Satan's own charm in Paradise Lost. Pearson and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace's iterations of Gilbert's and Gubar's version of Milton's influence thus produce an almost unrecognizable Maria Edgeworth, one that has little to do with the themes of restoration or reclamation or with her important literary debts to Milton. When Maria Edgeworth casts Ithuriel's spear into the narrative matrix of Belinda, a novel about the chicanery of men and the vulnerability of women, therefore, it is no casual allusion. Clarence Hervey, as Edgeworth drolly notes, "was charmed with her".
