SOURCE: "Lady Delacour's Library: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Fashionable Reading," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 4, March, 1994, pp. 423-39.

In the following discussion of Belinda, MacFadyen examines Edgeworth's depiction of the disruptive potential of adherence to fashion to a well-regulated domestic life.

In recent years literary scholars such as Mary Poovey and Nancy Armstrong have outlined the doctrines of feminine propriety and have highlighted the cultural importance of a domestic definition of femininity. The proper lady and the domestic woman are marked by their ability to regulate their own desires and the desires of other members of their circles. Such women privilege self-control over self-indulgence, the contained over the unbounded, order over chaos. Poovey and Armstrong, however, have also noted that this idealized notion of feminine goodness is persistently confronted with alternate interpretations of feminine identity. While sexual desire is the most common source of uneasiness, women's failure to...