Evelina's Laughter: The Novel's Queerer Theories

Abstract

This article present a "perverse" reading of the laughing body in Evelina that shows how Burney's novel imagines queer modes of embodiment and relation in order to disavow them through the marriage plot. When what James Beattie called "animal laughter" erupts from Evelina in response to Mr. Lovel, epistolary selfhood gives way to what Daniel Cottom describes as the "topology of the orifice." Putting the person of Evelina back into her body in its least dignified moments steals her, momentarily, from the prospect of becoming socially legible through marriage and makes her available instead to forms of queer fellowship that the novel compels her to refute. What if, I ask, Evelina didn't reflexively refuse such relations? What if being both an object and host of queer pleasure and friendship were something she could imagine her own body being for? The novel doesn't endorse any of these possibilities, but it must theorize them because its marriage plot is premised on the threat of what Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman call "the unbearable." Drawing on Adam Phillips, I propose a "tickling" mode of reading novels like Evelina as a non-violent method for thrumming the structures of feeling attached to the novel's latent humors and coaxing out the unsanctioned pleasures and possibilities the novel itself cannot bear.