Clandestine Schemes: Burney's Cecilia and the Marriage Act

In Book VII of Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Frances Burney's heroine receives an unexpected visit from her admirer, Mortimer Delvile. Mortimer rushes from Bath to Suffolk in order to speak to Miss Beverley one last time before going abroad. He plans to leave England because of a "cruel clause" in her uncle's will, making her inheritance conditional upon her husband's adoption of her surname.1 Mortimer knows that his proud parents will never permit him to marry her and give up the family's ancient moniker; hence, he prepares to flee her society in a desperate effort to repress his love for her. When he overhears her expressing concern and affection for him, though, he forms a new plan. The next morning, when she receives him again, Mortimer nervously tells her that "all his hopes of being ever united to her, [rest] upon obtaining her consent to an immediate and secret marriage" (555). It proves difficult for him to gain her assent to such a union, however. Although her twenty-first birthday is just three days away and Mortimer is already of age, his parents' approval, in her mind, is crucial to the match.In the heated discussions that ensue, Burney reprises many of the arguments concerning clandestine unions that appeared in speeches, essays, and treatises leading up to and following the passage of Hardwicke's 1753 Marriage Act. Revising the canon law's approach to marriage, the Act required couples to solemnize their unions in formal, public ceremonies and required minors to obtain their fathers' assent before they could receive licenses to wed. The law deemed invalid all unions that failed to comply with these rules.2 Not everyone approved of the Act's stringent requirements. While M.P.s like Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan supported the measure, those like Henry Fox and Charles Townshend vociferously opposed it.3 In their view, the law wrongly privileged social and familial stability over individual freedom and desire, while undermining women's agency. Fox and other critics attempted to repeal or modify the Act on numerous occasions, nearly succeeding in 1765 and 1781.4 Clerics, jurists, and moralists meanwhile expressed concerns about the law in a stream of books and pamphlets.5 Published in the midst of-and shaped by-these controversies, Cecilia enters into important debates about the contractual nature of the nuptial tie.Most critics read the novel as endorsing the conception of marriage inscribed in Hardwicke's Act. Linking Burney's anxieties about conjugal relations to her concerns about commercial culture, Miranda J. Burgess contends that Burney criticizes the free circulation of women much as she opposes the free circulation of capital.6 In Burgess's view, Burney "conceives her ideal society... as a return to a world in which... marriage is a private agreement between a woman's father and the suitor he approves."7 "This is the world," she claims, "of Hardwicke's Marriage Act, respected and rigorously enforced."8 James Thompson likewise suggests that the novel imagines marriage as an exchange between men. In his view, Burney imagines "only males... as owning subjects"; Cecilia functions "as a conduit through which property is passed-through but not to her."9 For Cynthia Klekar, too, the novel shows the failure of Cecilia's independent agency and the necessity of her position as a "dependent wife."10 Although Terry Castle acknowledges Burney's ambivalence about women's subjugation, she insists that Burney's "ideological retreat from her initial vision of female authority... is total-and mortifying."11 In Castle's reading, Cecilia's "mock death [is] indistinguishable from her marriage," as Burney finally reveals herself to be an "apologist for the ancien regime."12Burney's portrait of conjugal relations, however, is more complicated than these critics suggest. In this essay, I read the novel's nuptial negotiations in the context of the debates surrounding Hardwicke's Act, showing how Cecilia responds to and participates in one of the most divisive public controversies of the Enlightenment. …