Belinda

“Clarence Hervey might have been more than a pleasant young man, if he had not been smitten with the desire of being thought superior in every thing, and of being the most admired person in all companies.”

Early on, Hervey is dismissed as another superficial popinjay. In a narrative that tracks the moral redemption of several key players, no redemption is more impressive or more complicated than Hervey’s growth from an annoying and superficial dandy to a man worthy of Belinda’s affection.

“Do you think that I don’t see plainly as any of you that Belinda Portman’s a composition of art and affectation.” 

At the grand masquerade ball, Hervey reveals his basest character flaw: his need to judge others by criteria that is skewed by his need for external validation. His inability to appreciate Belinda at this point measures how far he has to grow.

“A fool, of all animals in the creation, is the most difficult to govern.” 

Lady Delacour describes her dysfunctional marriage to Lord Delacour, a union based on her ill-founded judgment that Lord Delacour, alone of her suitors, would be easiest to control because he was the dimmest. After years of watching her husband dissipate into a life of careless immorality, she offers this counsel to Belinda to inform Belinda’s emerging moral code.

“Life is a tragicomedy! Though the critics will allow of no such thing in their books, it is a true representation of what passes in the world; and of all the lives mine has been the most grotesque mixture, or alternation […] of tragedy and comedy

As a novel, Belinda sets itself against the popular novels of the time in which simple characters went through simple actions and arrived at simple endings, either happy or sad. Edgeworth, using Lady Delacour’s own wisdom, suggests this novel seeks to portray a far more realistic sense of the real world.

“I am convinced that, though she is a niece of Mrs. Stanhope’s, she has dignity of mind and simplicity of character.” 

Here begins Hervey’s moral reclamation, his first acknowledgement that Belinda is different from the other young girls in his social class and, as an important indication of his growth, that he was mistaken, wrong in his initial rash judgment.

“Whether she were handsome by the rules of art, he knew not; but he felt that she had the essential charm of beauty, the power of prepossessing the heart immediately in her favour.”

In assessing his first impressions of Lady Percival, offered by Edgeworth as a moral exemplum of right living, Hervey acknowledges that her charm and beauty do not come from social conventions or popular assumptions, both of which are essentially male-driven. Rather, she has a beauty of her own.

“[S]he was proud of her own judgment, in having discerned his merit, and for a moment she permitted herself to feel unreproved pleasure in his company.” 

Belinda begins to emerge as her own woman. Here she sorts through her own heart’s desires and begins to understand that her attraction to Hervey cannot be based on his social position, his confident mannerisms, or even his wavy hair.

“[E]very jealous man starts at the sound of the word jealousy—a certain symptom this of the disease.” 

Dr. X. is right, sound in his judgment and clever in his speech. Doctor X. emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. Educated, even-tempered, gracious, and (as this clever and carefully sculpted aphorism indicates) articulate and sagacious, he is instrumental to Lady Delacour’s recovery.

“Matches of interest, convenience, and vanity, she was convinced, diminished instead of increasing happiness.” 

Offered by Edgeworth as the novel’s voiceover moral authority, this observation is the crux of Edgeworth’s moral tale. Even if Belinda cannot define exactly what traits contribute to her happy union with Hervey, there is no doubt about what motives would guarantee an unhappy union: materialism, ego, and easy opportunity.

“Actions we see, but their causes we seldom see—an aphorism worthy of Confucius himself.” 

Lady Delacour’s insight is both true and cleverly stated. Clever, pithy, witty sayings that summarize complex emotional and psychological truths in tidy bumper-sticker bromides are at the heart of the Neoclassical sensibility.

“New plans, new hopes of happiness, have opened my imagination, and, with my hopes of being happy, my courage rises.” 

Lady Delacour’s recovery from her cancer scare and her decision to reunite with her estranged daughter and her reprobate husband represents, along with Hervey’s move to honest emotion, the novel’s critical redemption narratives. She is, Lady Delacour trumpets repeatedly, reformed.

“Such beauty, if it were in nature, would certainly fix the most inconstant man upon earth.”

Not really, as it turns out. Beauty is revealed to be a glittery trap. If the novel centers on the strategy and protocols for right marriage, the subplot of Rachel Hartley examines how beauty, especially physical beauty, is not enough. Rachel’s beauty attracts Hervey initially but dooms the girl to a life of charming imprisonment that stunts her emotional and psychological development. Her curse is her beauty.

“She found herself in the midst of a large and cheerful family, with whose domestic happiness she could not forebear to sympathize. There was an affectionate confidence, an unconstrained gaiety in this house, which forcibly struck her, from its contrast with what she had seen at Lady Delacour’s. She perceived that between Mr. Percival and Lady Anne there was a union of interests, occupations, taste, and affection.” 

How, Edgeworth asks, can two women, both from privilege, both marrying to their social advantage, end up so completely different? Belinda moves from the Delacours’ toxic environment to Lady Anne’s happy home and decides that this home’s happiness comes not from social status or glittery appointments but from a union of interests, which a modern reader would call compatibility.

“Miss Portman was not one of those young ladies who fancy that every gentleman who converses freely with them will inevitably fall a victim to the power of their charms, and will see in every man a lover, or nothing.” 

Edgeworth uses Belinda’s moral growth to suggest that a woman can be complex, contradictory, and subtle, and hence more than fetching marriage bait. Not every woman enters the social environment on the hunt for a marriage and then uses their wiles to trap an unsuspecting prospect.

“As we cannot alter the common law of custom, and as we cannot render the world less gossiping, or less censorious, we must not always expect to avoid censure; all we can do is, never deserve it.” 

Lady Anne delivers in this pithy and clever aphorism, which serves as Edgeworth’s moral advice to her reader: The world will gossip and construe according to its wits, so live in a way that gives the world nothing to gossip about.

“The struggle between duty and passion may be the charm of romances, but must be the misery of real life.” 

In this witty turn of phrase, Lord Percival introduces a critical theme. Surveying the frothy romances geared toward women readers that flooded the market, Edgeworth cautions that the artificial world portrayed in those romances bears little relevance to the far more complicated realities readers must face. As such, these novels are simple escapes and thin entertainments.

“You will possess talents, beauty, fortune; you will be admired, followed, and flattered, as I have been; but do not throw away your life as I have thrown away mine—to win the praise of fools.”

Her moral redemption now complete, Lady Delacour offers this advice to Belinda. It is hard to believe that Lady Delacour, with her world-weary tone and this melodramatic sense of her own wasted life, is only in her mid-30s.

“And those who build their castles of happiness in the air […] are they more secure, wiser, or happier?” 

Belinda, wise and tempered, cautions against following the heart’s curiously illogical logic. Do not seek happiness, do not chase beauty—those satisfactions, she understands, are shams, distractions, the temporary illusions of the uninformed heart.

“Her indifference to objects of show and ornament appeared to him an indisputable proof of her magnanimity, and of the superiority of her unprejudiced mind. What a difference, thought he, between this child of nature and the frivolous, sophisticated slaves of art.” 

Nothing better measures Hervey’s maturation than his realization of the magnitude of his mistake in thinking he could mold an innocent young girl into a perfect wife by squirreling Rachel away from the world and teaching her how to be an ideal woman. When he tests the girl by dangling diamonds in front of her and she rejects them outright, he believes he has found the ideal woman.

“I don’t want to be admired […] and I want to be loved by those only whom I love.”

Rachel Hartley emerges late in the narrative as the anti-Belinda. Her childish and naïve wish expressed here juxtaposes with Belinda’s far more mature search for a compatible husband, a friend of heart and mind with whom she might share interests, conversation, and culture.

“The hope of enjoying domestic happiness with a person whose manners, temper, and tastes suited my own, inclined me to listen to your addresses. But this happiness I could never enjoy with one who has the propensity to the love of play.” 

In breaking off the socially condoned match with the wealthy Augustus Vincent, Belinda asserts her independent judgment and follows the counsel of her own conscience. Her rejection of Vincent is not delivered in emotional drivel or hyper-dramatic rhetoric. Rather, it is articulate and reasoned, careful and sagacious.

“Can you love a man whom you do not know?” 

As Hervey struggles to understand the implications of Rachel’s infatuation with a man she barely met in the woods years ago but for whom she has been pining, the question here epitomizes the danger Edgeworth saw in romance novels that encouraged an entire generation of female readers to fall in love with unreal expectations and romantic illusions.

“A declaration of love, you know, is only the beginning of things; there may be blushes, and sighs, and doubts, and fears. And misunderstandings, and jealousies without end or common sense.” 

In this observation Lady Delacour delivers one final deconstruction of the happy ending convention popular in novels of the day. Even as each character finds their way to a happy ending, Edgeworth uses Lady Delacour to caution that these conclusions are merely moments in much longer and more complex life narratives.