Questions of Appearances

In a review of Jennie Batchelor's Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and Juliet McMaster's Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Tita Chico reminds us that:
as readers of eighteenth-century British novels well know, characters often come to understand and assess each other […] through the languages of appearance. An individual's clothing and body not only reflect rank, community, and nation, but they also increasingly serve as an index –even if unevenly or misleadingly– to that person's moral, emotional, and psychological character. The period's growing preoccupation with personal appearance takes on a special resonance in the genre of fiction, for here writers frequently spin narrative from the resulting opportunities for self-fashioning, performance, and misreading. (Chico 266)

A curious reminder, of what we are supposed to know well. However, Chico is right. A quick survey of some criticism seems to reveal a general acknowledgment of the importance of appearances in most eighteenth-century novels. To mention just a few: For Heather Zias, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48) is '[…] a novel where one of the chief concerns of the characters is judging appearances […]' (Zias 101). In Hal Gladfelder's words, the plot of Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) '[…] is, if anything, a representation of unreason in human affairs –our inescapable vulnerability to unrecognised biases, unacknowledged desires, and the duplicity of outward appearances'' (Gladfelder 204). Quoting Eugene White, Waldo S. Glock reminds us that in Evelina (1778) '[…] [Frances] Burney is concerned with the most important theme of literature, that of the contrast between appearance and reality […]' (Glock 130). Peter Brooks highlighted the role of appearances in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), stating that:
Lewis carefully and progressively makes his world receptive to the solicitations of the supernatural; the first half of the novel moves toward creation of an imaginative framework within which these forces can have a real existence. This movement is evident from the start, in the play of false appearances and dark realities, in the use of dreams as premonitions and, more, as discoveries about the true nature of things. (Brooks 253)

Clearly, no every critic has written about the role of appearances in eighteenth-century novels, but none seems to have denied their importance. In the case of Daniel Defoe's Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (1724), Marilyn Westfall has pointed out that Roxana is 'no longer concerned with preserving appearances, [since] she calls herself "Queen of Whores" (p. 82), a "Carcass" (p. 74), and even a swine […]' (Westfall 485), but that applies to the time when Roxana seems to be writing her confession, since throughout most of her life appearances were one of her main concerns.
Even in novels that do not seem concerned with appearances, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), even in such novels some questions of appearance emerge, of no little consequence for their general meaning. In Robinson Crusoe, there is, for example, the appearance of a footprint in the sand, to which Jacques Derrida dedicated an analysis in one of his seminars (Derrida La Bête Et Le Souverain).1 In Humphry Clinker, Jenkins seems to resume the 'philosophy' of appearances behind the novel, by stating that '[…] a scalded cat may prove a good mouser, and a hound be staunch, thof he has got narro hare on his buttocks […]' (Smollett 139); in other words, that things can (or 'may') be deceitful, for good or bad.2 With that saying in mind, it might not be surprising to find in H. George Hahn and Carl Behm III's The Eighteenth-Century British Novel and Its Background: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Topics (Hahn and Behm) that Humphry Clinker seems to have generated more articles on the topic of appearances than on any other eighteenth century novel.3

However, despite such general recognition of the importance of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, a full-length analysis of it, as topic, problem, or question (as I prefer to call it), is far from having been pursued or developed. That is, despite that a few articles have been written on one or two questions of appearance, clearly pointing towards the importance of thinking the topic in the eighteenth century. However, quite often the emphasis is in what is thought to be opposed to appearance, such as a classic (pre-Kantian, pseudo-Platonic) idea of reality. In part, such a critical omission can be due to what we believe to know too well since, most of the time, we do not consider worth thinking what seems only too evident. Against that current I will be following Jacques Derrida's call for a '[...] decisive return to the meditation on what one could term the simplest statements ("Being is," "Beings is not"), [and] on words as apparently clear as "word," "appearance," "clarity" […]' (Derrida "Language (Le Monde on the Telephone)" 177)

What does the term 'appearance' entails? What are the representations associated with such a term? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'appearance' comes from late Middle English, from Old French aparance, aparence, from late Latin apparentia, from Latin apparere; 'appear' comes from Middle English, from Old French apareir, from Latin apparere, from ad- 'toward' + parere 'come into view'; 'apparent' comes from late Middle English, from Old French aparant, from Latin apparent-'appearing,' from the verb apparere; and 'apparition' comes from appareo, Latin for 'to appear,' what gives raise to 'apparitional,' as in the sense of (the action of) 'appearing,' also from late Middle English, from Latin apparitio(n-), 'attendance,' from the verb apparere.

By the eighteenth century, and since then, these words have 'gained' —or, been charged with— a multiplicity meanings, by derivation, association, connotation, etc. Here, I will present their most characteristic traits as they appear in eighteenth century novels. It is not a question of surveying every possible meaning, in context, or of interpreting their ambiguity. Certainly, as William Empson clearly argued in the 1930s, there is a degree of ambiguity in almost every word, and the ones that refer to appearances are far from being an exception. However, despite that I will start by focusing on the occurrence of certain words, such as 'appearance', 'apparition', 'apparent', 'appear', what I will call questions of appearance at issue, signalled or indexed by them, are not limited to their occurrence.