Cynthia Klekar

Virtual Museums: British Literature Works in Historical and Cultural Contexts: Moll’s World

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:48:20 PDT

Fictions of the Gift: Generosity and Obligation in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:46:09 PDT

"Her Gift was Compelled": Gender and the Failure of the "Gift" in "Cecilia”

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:40:38 PDT

“Prisoners In Silken Bonds": Obligation, Trade, and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:38:30 PDT

The Obligations of Form: Social Practice in Charlotte Smith’s "Emmeline"

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:36:26 PDT

Reconstructing History: Literature, History, and Anthropology in the Pacific

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:34:56 PDT

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:32:15 PDT

Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Gift of Deed in Congreve’s "The Way of the World"

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:27:48 PDT

“Sweetness and Courtesie": Benevolence, Civility, and China in the Making of European Modernity

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:24:22 PDT

'Her Gift Was Compelled': Gender and the Failure of the 'Gift' in Cecilia

Cynthia Klekar — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:20:48 PDT

Throughout the first half of Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), the heroine engages in what she believes are disinterested acts of generosity. Orphaned, single, and heiress to a large estate, Cecilia adopts a sense of fiscal and moral agency as she awaits her twenty-first birthday. Although legally under the authority of three guardians, she considers her money hers to spend and regards herself as “an agent of Charity, and already in idea anticipated the rewards of a good and faithful delegate.” Cecilia’s scheme for happiness through philanthropy arises from her almost immediate dissatisfaction with her life in London and in the Harrel household. Unable to find, in the world of fashion, the human intimacy that she had cherished when in the care of an “aged and maternal counsellor” (6), she commits herself to acts of charity, convinced that they promise social and moral authority. As Kristina Straub points out, Cecilia views giving as a way to “enable herself to act and initiate rather than being acted upon”; she truly believes she will succeed in making “worthy use of the affluence, freedom and power” she possesses (55). At the same time, Cecilia considers her fortune “a debt contracted with the poor, and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest” (55; emphasis added); or, as Catherine Gallagher states, she believes that “she owes whatever she owns.”