Edgeworth’s Belinda and the Gendering of Caricature

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 atten tion to graphic satire in their readings of this novel. In this article, I offer a close reading of the key epi sode in Belinda in which Lady Delacour caricatures Mrs Luttridge, a satirical act that leads to a duel and, sub se quently, to Lady Delacour sus taining a seem ing ly cancerous wound to her breast. I apply crit ical pres sure to the representation of graphic satire as a gen dered cul tural practice, a "masculine" dis course that offers another means by which Lady Delacour trans gresses the mores of polite woman hood. In particular, I consider the specific sig nifi cance of intro duc ing caricature-a form that deals in a gram mar of physiognomic dis tor tion and disfigure ment, and in which bodies, not least women's bodies, are invested with complex moral and political symbolism-into a scene that cul minates in the infliction of injury and into a novel that is centrally con cerned with the vexed relations between a woman and her body.

The practice of caricature in 18th‐century Britain

“…Cindy McCreery's The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Eighteenth‐Century England () reminds us not only that women across the social spectrum were subject to caricature in the period but also that a number of upper‐class women are known to have practiced it, at least in the privacy of their own homes. Through of reading of Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel Belinda , the plot of which in part hinges on the fallout of one woman's caricaturing of another, David Francis Taylor () has considered the gendering of caricature as a masculine discourse and practice, one that in the 18th‐century made use of the female body as an index of national or constitutional well‐being.…”