Belinda

Although often described as a groundbreaking, even radical feminist novel for its portrayal of a spirited, independent-minded young woman who determines the direction her life will take, Belinda is hardly radical in its thematic depiction of the ideal woman. The novel brings together three characteristics of the ideal woman: strength of will, gentleness of heart, and rightness of action.

The character of Rachel Hartley would be familiar to Edgeworth’s readers. Rachel is offered as the typical addled-minded heroine of countless sentimental novels about love and marriage, frothy romances that Edgeworth regarded as simplistic and even dangerous. Beautiful, yes, innocent, certainly, but Rachel lacks the real-world depth that, for Edgeworth, is critical in defining the ideal woman. Rachel, kept apart from social interaction in the fairy tale-like atmosphere of the cottage in the remote woods, has stuffed her head with the silly clichés of romance novels and is ill-equipped to handle the responsibilities of real-time relationships. Her willingness to marry a man she barely knows indicates how at risk she is. Lady Delacour, for her part, is offered as a template for the woman who abdicates her heart in favor of convention, the pressures of class, and the expectations of privilege. Her marriage is calculated and even logical and, without the investment of her heart, quickly devolves into a loveless competition in which she ends up alone, frustrated, and empty. Anne Percival, on the other hand, is offered as a model of domestic happiness. She is at once gentle, loving, and welcoming.

So, the ideal woman would bring together elements of each: the beguiling beauty and moral innocence of Rachel; the indominable fortitude and social savvy of Lady Delacour; and the gentle heart and maternal sweetness of Anne Percival. That image of the ideal woman is embodied in the moral and emotional character of Belinda herself. If she begins the novel uncertain of her own character and unwilling to entirely trust her judgment, her exposure to London’s social circles teaches her to trust her heart, to act with moral rectitude, to be open to forgiving the faults and flaws of others, and to offer her love without condition or reservation.

As a novel that uses its characters less to explore individual psychologies and more to examine types and to critique society at large, Belinda explores the relationship between the monied class and morality.

Late 18th-century England was essentially a plutocracy, a society governed by the privileged few whose vast wealth theoretically ensured they were the best and brightest within that society. All the characters in Belinda are rich or scheme to be rich. Indeed, the entire premise of the novel is Mrs. Stanhope’s desire for her beautiful niece to marry well—that is, to find her way to the security and stability of marrying wealth. The people Belinda encounters in London enjoy the best education, live in the swankiest homes, eat the finest foods, are waited on hand and foot. They unabashedly flaunt their wealth. They marry for status. They use their wealth to embarrass, humiliate, and even destroy their friends. They casually use their friends to move up within social circles. Initially, Belinda is deeply impressed by the Delacours’ glittery world and all its lavish appointments, but she quickly learns that the wealthy do not abide by even the most basic guidelines of moral behavior. Wealth, she learns, corrupts. The rich parade their wealth. They are at once pretentious and shallow, petty and judgmental. They invest extraordinary concern in the opinions of others while at the same time unironically dealing in vicious rumormongering. They are thin-skinned and absolutely convinced of their own importance. They are singularly unimpressed by the value of self-awareness.

Without Belinda’s moral and ethical presence, the novel would succeed largely as a pointed and often wicked satire of the foibles of the wealthy. They are a silly and shallow lot: Lady Delacour dresses up like a man to engage clumsily in a pointless duel with another woman over a trivial slight involving a minor political campaign. She then spends months wallowing in self-pity and preparing to die, certain that a glancing gunshot wound could somehow turn into breast cancer. All of Hervey’s friends, stupidly drunk, callously leave him to drown in the Serpentine River. Lord Delacour, a fop, drinks and gambles his way through his wife’s fortune. Hervey for his part squirrels away a young woman to transform her into a perfect wife. Augustus Vincent is driven to near-suicide after losing a fortune at an obviously rigged roulette wheel.

But Belinda brings to such antics a level of complexity and moral richness. She believes that no person is beyond moral redemption. Her steady and reassuring grasp of fundamental morality exposes the wealthy as morally bankrupt, yes, but her heroic efforts on their behalf (specifically her redemption of Lady Delacour and her engagement to Hervey) also provides depth to Edgeworth’s satire: Money does not corrupt people, Belinda wisely learns, people corrupt money.

Belinda is a novel about marriage, specifically the conditions that make marriage logical and the decisions that make marriage rewarding. At age 17, Belinda is already in danger of being labeled a spinster. Edgeworth uses the templates of the Delacours, the Percivals, and Hervey’s curious relationship with Rachel Hartley to examine different perspectives on what makes marriage succeed. The premise of Edgeworth’s novel would have been clear and familiar to readers of her day. Belinda is dispatched by her meddling aunt to go to London to make an agreeable match. Despite that, Belinda ends the novel engaged to the man she loves. In that way, the elaborate social protocols that Belinda undertakes can seem dated. A contemporary reader of a narrative in which a beautiful young girl ends up, after significant trials, marrying the handsome man she first fell in love with might assume that Belinda is a simple, fairy-tale-like love story, yet another two-dimensional popular romance like the ones that Rachel Hartley consumes in her cottage-refuge in the woods.

Belinda, however, is hardly such a simplistic romance. Nor is Belinda some idealistic and unrealistic fairy tale of love and marriage. In examining the social conditions under which marriages were arranged within the wealthy class of late 18th-century England, Edgeworth offers what for her time was a singular definition of the relationship between love and marriage. That definition seems to a contemporary audience like simple common sense, even a cliché: People who commit to a long-term marriage must be compatible. Marriage cannot be sustained by the inelegant urgencies of lust, by the faux-epiphanies of love-at-first-sight infatuation, or by childish unrealistic expectations about perfect harmony and bliss. Nor can marriage succeed when that union is driven by social expectations, by a misplaced sense of duty or obligation, by the pressures of conventional thinking, or by pressure from family. Using the dysfunctional relationship between Lord and Lady Delacour, the novel examines the consequences of marriage defined by and then sustained by social convention and expectation.

Belinda’s evolving relationship with Hervey emerges as Edgeworth’s template for a successful marriage: a dynamic defined by passion but sustained by reason, and a relationship based equally on mutual respect, openness and honesty, and communication.