Chapter 5 - Relational Deformity in Frances Burney’s Camilla

Summary

Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), a novel in which a major character, Eugenia Tyrold, is not told that her physical appearance is perceived socially as deformity, considers the possibility that deformity is separable from its conventional social meanings. Camilla criticizes the inflated social currency of physical beauty and promotes moral beauty as deserving of higher value, while demonstrating that concepts of impairment, whether aesthetic or functional, shift in different contexts. The sophisticated deformity aesthetics in Burney’s novel anticipates the theoretical work concerning the relational aspects of disability that occurs in disability theory in the twentieth century (the disability/impairment distinction). Burney explores the ways in which deformities are aesthetic in certain social contexts and are functional in others. Her work demonstrates the importance of understanding how the other attributes of a person, for example, their gender and social class, affect whether bodily particularities are perceived as aesthetic or functional. Beauty, rather than normalcy, creates the problem of the deformed body; but neither beauty nor deformity are fixed ideas.