Money or Mind?: Cecilia , the Novel, and the Real Madness of Selfhood

Abstract

Money or Mind? Cecilia, the Novel, and the Real Madness of Selfhood SUSAN C. GREENFIELD Aman, apparently depressed by his economically constrained and repetitive life, compulsively reads romances. He then dons his forefathers' rusty armor, devises a helmet out of cardboard, changes his own name and status (as well as that of his horse), and sets off on an adventure about the problem of material reality. Designated mad because he sees windmills as giants, sheep as soldiers, and prostitutes as ladies, Don Quixote is famous because he fathoms absent bodies in mundane objects—because the presence of romances makes him long for the nonexistent. If, as many have argued, Cervantes's work influenced eighteenth-century English writers and helped inaugurate the modern realist novel, then perhaps this is partly because the narrative exposes the very problem of reality. What is realistic about Don Quixote is the painful inadequacy of a world that cannot begin to accommodate the mind. Psychological survival ironically depends on the mad act of imagining the missing. Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) makes several references to Don Quixote, and among the knight errant's many descendants, I would count the eponymous heroine who is briefly but decidedly insane toward the novel's end.1 Though Cecilia's madness marks her involuntary reaction to social victimization whereas Quixote thinks it "beaut[iful]" to go mad 49 50 / GREENFIELD "without a cause,"2 they share the calamity of absence and the fantasies it provokes. Don Quixote performs feats for his imagined lady Dulcinea, and Cecilia heroically raves to her missing husband: "Oh beloved of my heart! ... I will snatch thee from destruction!" (899). In both cases, madness signals the mind's detachment from the real world and the centrality of fantasy on the spectrum of thought. This essay considers the historical and psychoanalytic value of understanding the early modern English novel in general, and Frances Burney's Cecilia in particular, in terms of this paradigm. I am interested in how the novel problematizes the relationship between reality and the mind. And I am interested in how what is unreal or immaterial (like Don Quixote's giants or Cecilia's "beloved" husband) shapes the delusions that define the novel's thinking self. "Reality" is, of course, notoriously difficult to define. I use it only in the restricted sense as that which "actually exist[s]" and which is in "implicit or explicit contrast with [the] imaginary" or fictitious.3 To the countless debates about the novel's "formal realism" I would add that novels are themselves often concerned with what is not real or not materially certain. Even a text steeped in such physical detail as Robinson Crusoe devotes far more space to Crusoe's fear of the cannibals he does not see for fifteen years than it does to their eventual appearance; the seemingly endless pages of Clarissa consist of letters between distant people about characters who rarely meet and a rape that defies physical description; and Tristram Shandy spends a good third of his "autobiography" discussing the years before his existence and the birth that nearly killed him. As I will suggest more specifically about Cecilia, in each of these novels, thought exists in tension with material reality and is often enriched by what is missing. At the essay's end, I speculate about how modern theories of psychological subjectivity are premised on a distinction between the mind and reality and on the roles literal loss and existential absence play in selfdevelopment . In The Ego and the Id, for instance, Freud aligns the difference between "what is real and what is psychical" with that "between the external . . . and the internal world."4 Stressing the dominance of fantasy, distorted memories and unrealizable desires, psychoanalysis implies that thought passes in a mind organized around the missing. Even the fetishism of an object marks the displacement or absence of the "normal sexual" one in Freud's early work and the substitute for the lost maternal phallus (that never really existed) in his essay on the subject.5 My purpose below is to sketch the early modern history of such unreality and the role the novel may have played in defining it as...