Gaining Gentility

Frances Burney(1752-1840),also known as Fanny Burney and,after her marriage,as Madame d’Arblay,is a seminal female novelist in late eighteenth-century Britain.Her works have been the subject of extensive literary study abroad,but have received little scholarly attention in China.Evelina;or,A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World(1778),Burney’s representative novel,depicts the protagonist Evelina’s travel experiences in cities and depicts her transformation from a social nobody to a genteel lady.The thesis,with the tourist gaze as its theoretical approach,attempts to interpret the protagonist’s identity construction in relation to the gazing activity in leisure consumption.The tourist gaze theory provides a sociological perspective to study tourism and can be used to analyse tourist experiences,tourists’ visual activities that are discursively determined and socially constructed,and power relations in tourism.Gentility not only denotes the gentry but also refers to a set of cultural forms that proclaim the membership of the elite group,such as social manners,aesthetic taste,and lifestyles.It is an ideological discourse dominating the leisure consumption of eighteenth-century Britain.The first chapter of the thesis focuses on how the heroine establishes cultural identification through gazing at the gentility of London.London’s gentility is represented in the spectacle of fashionable sociability in the season and the polite cityscape after the modernization of the metropolis.The former promotes a genteel cultural image of the upper-class society through commercial advertisements while the latter circulates the superiority of urban elite culture through travel literature,and both are cultural productions of discursive construction.In gazing at the gentility of London,Evelina unknowingly identifies with the culture of the gentry.Chapter Two involves how the protagonist displays subjectivity with her resistant gaze at the gentility of London,and how the conflict between subjectivity and social identity leads to an identity crisis.The resistant gaze includes the second gaze and the gaze of the flaneuse.In the second gaze,Evelina sees through the construction of the spectacle of fashionable sociability with its underlying conspicuous consumption and retains a semi-detached relationship with the upper-class society as an ingenue.In the gaze of the flaneuse,Evelina observes the urban space and the mental space in deviation from the discursive construction of politeness.The transgressive activity risks her social existence.Through resistance against the tourist gaze,Evelina shows her subjectivity,but her departure from gentility leads to the dislocation of her cultural and social identity.The third chapter draws on how the female lead under the gaze of power is disciplined by the culture of the gentry and constructs her gentility.The gaze of power involves gazing at the other and the gaze of the other.By gazing at the ungenteel other,Evelina distinguishes herself from her middling fellows so as to assert her gentility.Under the gaze of the fashionable society,Evelina as a social nobody from the middling sort becomes the ungenteel other.In order to protect her gentility,the heroine eventually resorts to marriage to gain social recognition.The thesis argues that the novel Evelina represents the possibility and limitation of women’s pursuit of gentility and self-fashioning through leisure consumption in Britain in the late eighteenth century.Evelina’s conformance and resistance to the codes of conduct in leisure consumption display a dynamic interaction between individualism and the homogeneous identity of the gentry.Even though gazing activities in leisure consumption enable women to obtain gentility and the power of self-formation to some degree,the construction of female identity still submits to the existent social customs and structures,as well as the regulations of the patriarchal system.