Evelina , the Rustic Girls of Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation in the 1770s

Abstract

In Evelina Frances Burney represents characters attending a performance of William Congreve's Love for Love at the Drury Lane Theatre, at a time when Frances Abington, one of the company's principal actors, regularly performed the part of Miss Prue in the play. Joseph Roach's concept of "surrogation" facilitates a reading of this episode that demonstrates how selective memory functions in the culture's search for substitutes in the 1770s. Late in a decade of new Congreve revivals and critical conversation about them, Burney offers her novel as a surrogate for Congreve's kind of comedy. While some characters comment on the play's indelicacy, the episode recalls Congreve's characters, notably the vulgar Miss Prue, whom Burney contrasts with Evelina, a more delicate rustic girl. Illustrating the uncanniness of surrogation, the novelist also suppresses references to Abington, so celebrated for this part that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her in it. Burney, who had once followed the actress down a London street, was wary of Abington's theatricality on stage and off and so chose another model of conduct for her protagonist and herself as author. Her approach differs from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's exploitation of Congreve's memory and Abington's celebrity through new revivals before offering his own stand-in for the former's plays, The School for Scandal , in which the latter portrayed Lady Teazle, another young woman from the country. Burney's strategy, when juxtaposed with Sheridan's, shows that surrogation may sometimes be a gendered process.