Taylor, David F. (2014) Edgeworth's Belinda and the gendering of caricature. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 26 (Number 4). pp. 593-624. doi:10.1353/ecf.2014.0026

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Abstract

Vital parts of the narrative of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) hinge on the disastrous personal consequences that attend one woman’s caricaturing of another. Critics, however, have yet to pay attention to graphic satire in their readings of this novel. In this article, I offer a close reading of the key episode in Belinda in which Lady Delacour caricatures Mrs Luttridge, a satirical act that leads to a duel and, subsequently, to Lady Delacour sustaining a seemingly cancerous wound to her breast. I apply critical pressure to the representation of graphic satire as a gendered cultural practice, a “masculine” discourse that offers another means by which Lady Delacour transgresses the mores of polite womanhood. In particular, I consider the specific significance of introducing caricature—a form that deals in a grammar of physiognomic distortion and disfigurement, and in which bodies, not least women’s bodies, are invested with complex moral and political symbolism—into a scene that culminates in the infliction of injury and into a novel that is centrally concerned with the vexed relations between a woman and her body.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies
Journal or Publication Title:	Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Journals Division
ISSN:	0840-6286
Official Date:	2014
Dates:	Date Event 2014 Published
Volume:	Volume 26
Number:	Number 4
Page Range:	pp. 593-624
DOI:	10.1353/ecf.2014.0026
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Related URLs:	Other Repository

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