ABSTRACT
Early in Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth’s naïve heroine is invited into the dressing closet of her guardian, Lady Delacour, a rakish woman who guards her social position through flamboyant displays of her own vanity. Lady Delacour, as if to show young Belinda Portman what an education really means—outside the drawing room and beneath the face paint—leads her into a shadowy room, more carnival freak show than Lady’s closet, where she reveals “a confusion of linen rags,” vials that cast “a strong smell of medicines,” and her own “deathlike countenance” as she wipes the paint away (31). These, we soon learn, are the outward signs of a breast cancer slowly killing Lady Delacour. Belinda has been granted a viewing of what no one else has seen, save quack doctors and a maidservant. The remainder of the novel is a race, between Belinda’s education and Lady Delacour’s cancer. If the former can catch the latter, readers are led to feel, the cancer will be healed and Belinda will find the social niche a young woman with her sense deserves. One of the central questions of the novel is whether Lady Delacour should endure a mastectomy or not, and Edgeworth binds this question to one more familiar in novels of sensibility: what proportions of sensibility and reason make for good character? Edgeworth synthesizes medical debates about cancer raging in professional journals—What causes it? How should it be treated? What relations between mind and body does it imply? But she also demonstrates connections between these local questions and more general Enlightenment debates that troubled the culture at large—What is the role of the nerves in health and disease, on the one hand, and good character on the other? What is the ideal education for a woman? Is a person’s class position inherited or earned? The closet is an inspired choice on Edgeworth’s part. She invites readers to follow her heroine into a woman’s most private milieu, and in the process we become privy to a view of the mysterious underbelly of a life, a view generally reserved for doctors and clergy.
