Part 3 - The Orificial

Summary

Frances Burney’s Evelina conjures silly, embarrassing, ludicrous, and morally sunk social pitfalls that its young heroine must studiously avoid in her progress toward social legibility, political safety, and material stability. Prompted by Daniel Cottom’s “the topology of the orifice,” this book shows that an orifical reading of Evelina coaxes open what the marriage plot aims to shut down, making the novel available to unpredictable genealogical connections. This. book traces one such line of descent to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and a performance by Bob the Drag Queen from the reality show We’re Here. Contextualizing Evelina in this way exposes the eighteenth-century marriage plot’s promotion of whiteness – specifically, whiteness as a sign of the social and sexual self-discipline that promises, in advocation against collectivity and queer intimacy, to keep us “safe” from one another as we attend to individuated prospects of “well-being.”