SOURCE: “The Name of the Daughter: Identity and Incest in Evelina,” in Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, pp. 78-107.

In the following essay, Fizer investigates Burney's scrutiny of paternity in Evelina, maintaining that the novel presents a crisis of the father figure because of the numerous paternal models it portrays.

I

“I hardly know myself to whom I most belong” confesses the young heroine, Evelina Anville, at a moment of crisis, uncertain as to which of her three putative fathers she should defer.¹ In Frances Burney's Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) paternity is radically decentered. The father who should occupy the center of authority, Sir John Belmont, is not only absent but a notorious libertine. By taking up the rake father, Burney exposes the most disturbing contradiction...