The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties (1814), Frances Burney's last novel, opens with the flight of a nameless heroine in search of her 'loved, long lost, and fearfully recovered native land'. [1] Born in Wales and raised in France, the Wanderer flees to England in the aftermath of the French Revolution, attempting to find a safe haven in a location she has been made to think of as her home only to discover that she is marked as 'a poor destitute Wanderer' (p. 49), considered foreign by the insular Englishmen she encounters. Homelessness and the longing for home are central themes in the novel, tying in with the potentials and pitfalls of a rising Romantic nationalism. In juxtaposing prejudices based on 'memories' of a national past with personal longings for home, friends, and family, The Wanderer takes up and further conflicts the struggle between self and society that informs Burney's earlier novels and indeed late-eighteenth-century 'pre-Romantic' fiction in general and becomes invested with new possibilities and complications in the full-blown Romantic novel. [2] With its intriguing exposure of the new nationalist nostalgia of the early nineteenth century, Burney's last novel casts a different light on the elusive genre of Romantic fiction and the uses (and abuses) of nostalgia by the Romantic nationalisms that are created and critiqued in the literature of the time. The concept of a shared, national, memory is evoked and then dismissed as the dramatic fate of the wandering orphan heroine dismantles ideologies of the homeland. The longing for belonging is instead realised by an alternative ideal community, the chosen family, transcending national borders and nationalist alignments by suggesting a domestic solution to the warring desires of self-fulfilment and social acceptance that plague the Romantic self. This essay sees The Wanderer as a reaction to the nationalist agenda that informs a large number of Romantic novels and as an alternative to Burkean reactions to the French Revolution.

     Wholeheartedly endorsing the new nationalist ideology of the homeland, regional novels and national tales, by contrast, attempt to create a communal nostalgia for places that are meant to be exotic to the general reader, while construing memories of something that is familiar, though remote enough to be invested with the allure of the exotic. It has been suggested that Walter Scott creates a Highland Arcadia in Waverley (1814) in which the hero's 'romantic reservoir' lives up to his expectations after all. [3] In Maria Edgeworth's Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812) and in Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806), estates in Ireland figure as repositories of down-to-earth attachments and ancient customs, as colonial spaces neglected by absentee landlords, and as the true home, in sharp relief to England, which is represented by the corrupt city of London. In The Absentee, for example, Lord Colambre's return to 'his mother earth' evokes 'the early associations of his childhood, and the patriotic hopes of his riper years.' [4]The Wild Irish Girl describes Ireland as 'a colonised or a conquered country'. [5] The 'diminutive body of our worthy steward' appears to be 'the abode of the transmigrated soul of some West Indian planter' (p. 23). Yet the hero's original bias-his expectation of an 'Esquimaux group' (p. 1)-is displaced by his belief that there is 'no country which the Irish at present resemble but the modern Greeks' (p. 182). In this land of antiquity, but refreshing climate, Horatio can shed the 'pining atrophy' (p. 58) he suffers in London. Like Glenthorn in Edgeworth's aptly entitled Ennui, Horatio is 'devoured by ennui, by discontent' (p. 131) until he rediscovers 'emotions of a character, an energy, long unknown to [his] apathised feelings' (p. 45) in a landscape that is exotic and replete with 'communal' nostalgia for a new homeland. In these novels, a personal quest coincides with a new patriotism; rebirth with the regeneration of the rediscovered nation. But what is presented as a straightforward alignment in these novels is exposed as conflicted in The Wanderer. The ideal or, in Benedict Anderson's useful phrase, 'imagined community' created by Romantic ideologies of the homeland is not always a viable option-as Burney's wandering heroine has to discover. [6] Written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, The Wanderer offers a different interpretation of nationalist ideologies-one that is nonetheless not simply an anti-Jacobin reaction to the excesses of the radical sensibility of the 1790s. [7] Frances Burney, by that time married to the émigré Constitutionalist Alexandre d'Arblay, had first hand experience of both British and French nationalist xenophobia, and her last novel offers insight into the production of fiction about the French Revolution and the uses of nostalgia at the time.

Romantic Nationalism and Fictions of Nostalgia
Nostalgia is not merely a recurring theme and an emotion that is both described in and evoked by the traditional British novel, but it is also appropriated as a strategic device to foster a community of readers. In what has now become a much cited analysis of the origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson has pointed out the significance of print-culture-and specifically the novel and the newspaper as a 'device for the presentation of simultaneity'-for the creation of imagined communities. [8] The Enlightenment, Anderson suggests, brings with it 'its own modern darkness', in which the idea of the nation, supported by the 'English novel', serves to ensure a 'secular transformation of fatality into continuity'. [9] In its focus on the simultaneity of events experienced by a community of readers, British fiction presents a 'shared' memory of common experiences that can be used to fill the emotional void left by the retreat, disintegration, or unavailability of real communities and networks. [10] Thomas Nipperdey has similarly suggested that nationalism is set up as a promise of the re-integration of a community rooted in a 'common culture' and thus a product of nostalgia caused by the dissolution of tradition and the concomitant uncertainty and homelessness of the individual. [11] Nostalgia, as a remarkably flexible as well as creative emotion undergoing significant changes in its definition and use at the time, is deployed in the construction of nationalist ideologies and promoted by the novel-an influential medium with an increasingly widespread readership.

     The passing of time and the representation of memory, however, are central to the development of the traditional 'classic' novel in more than one way: its use of nostalgia catering for a range of emotional needs and reacting to a changing ideological climate. A retrospective form of narrative and at the same time concerned with the life and emotions of the individual, the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries primarily intends to offer personal, individualised accounts of the past. In his influential study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt has already suggested that the classic novel interests itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time, while it also reflects a 'growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition', which-as Ian Watt puts it-similarly forms 'an important part of the general cultural background of the rise of the novel'. [12] So far from being contradictory, Watt's and Anderson's interpretations of the functions of time and nostalgia in the genre's early development pinpoint an ambiguity that becomes a central preoccupation in Romantic fiction. In English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Gary Kelly significantly speaks of the villain 'Society' as he analyses the conflicting longings for individual self-fulfilment and the creation of a new community or nation in the Romantic period. [13] This contradiction is already an essential aspect of the 'pre-Romantic' cults of sensibility and sentimentalism, as heroes and heroines of feeling advocate a highly individualist focus on their own emotions while simultaneously depending on an ideology of empathy. While this dilemma appears to be solved in self-confidently national or regional fiction, it becomes reactivated in what can be seen as the domestic Romantic fiction of Burney and Austen.

     As Romantic nationalism creates an ideology of belonging through the 'othering' of those outside the imagined community-on its borders or margins-it has moreover a dual relationship with its counterpart, Romantic orientalism. While the fictional creation of Highland Arcadias or a rediscovered 'mother earth' in Ireland plays with the concepts of the exotic while fostering a nation of readers and an awareness of a national history or heritage, descriptions of the 'other' also serve to define the borders of the imagined nation. Based on notions of exclusivity as well as containment, the writing of the nation highlights the presence of the 'other' as it simultaneously attempts to displace otherness (onto other nations) and to erase it (by subsuming it into an assumed homogeneity). Homesickness and the longing for 'other' spaces consequently acquire additional poignancy. In that the literary recreation of such national spaces conjures up places that are meant to be 'exotic' to the (English) reader, it undercuts the shared longing for a home or homeland. The 'nostalgia' these texts create is therefore more akin to the longing for an exotic site that is central to Romantic orientalism, substituting Fernweh, the longing for the remote, for Heimweh, or homesickness. As Nigel Leask has pointed out, in Romantic literature oriental places 'displace the Arcadian locus amoenus of neo-classicism from a Mediterranean "Golden Age" to a "contemporary eastern site" '. [14] As part of a general idealisation of a remote place this form of nostalgia can become more easily fraudulent and inauthentic. The nostalgic space is often reduced to an ideal topography devoid of any real emotional investment. Recent criticism of European orientalism has amply shown that such a writing of an exotic region or nation tends to distort its representation. [15]The Wild Irish Girl describes Ireland as 'a colonised or a conquered country' (p. 172); and while the novel succeeds in creating sympathy with the colonised as well as the coloniser, the described landscape also reduces it to a contained cosy, exotic space. In The Absentee, this connection between orientalism and the inner colonies is comically exemplified by the 'picturesque' decorations at Lady Clonbrony's gala night, which include a Chinese pagoda, a Turkish tent, and Alhambra hangings (p. 37).

     However, while the representation of the 'other' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature has been amply studied ever since Edward Said's seminal Orientalism (1975) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), the dual function of nostalgia in the fiction of the time has not received the attention it deserves. In an influential postcolonial study of the concepts of 'otherness' and hybridity, Homi Bhabha speaks of 'the heimlich pleasures of the hearth' that is poised against 'the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other'. [16] Those 'who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture', Bhabha emphasises with an allusion to Benedict Anderson, 'articulate the death-in-life of the idea of the 'imagined community' of the nation'. [17] The postcolonial reading of British and European classics-ranging from a focus on Shakespeare's Caliban and Defoe's Friday to a reassessment of the 'postcolonial Jane Austen'-has indeed become standard practice in recent literary criticism. [18] In her analysis of the 'Burkean themes of migrant maternity, disinheritance, and sexual improprieties of multinational proportions' in early-nineteenth-century novels by women writers, Deidre Lynch has suggested that they redeploy Burke's tropes or themes in a more radical context by marking their heroines as 'by and large irredeemably hybrid'. [19] Lynch, however, does not proceed to explore the impact of these alternative narratives of longing and belonging on the writing of nostalgia and the construction of both nationalism and nostalgic places themselves. In a recent eclectic study of nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon, however, Svetlana Boym significantly highlights a crucial difference between personal nostalgia and a nostalgia that has turned political, that has become a state policy: 'The official memory of the nation-state does not tolerate useless nostalgia, nostalgia for its own sake.' [20]The Wanderer analyses the effects of longings that have been turned into state policies and their clashes with the heroine's personal needs and desires, casting a different light on both nationalism and nostalgia.

Longing for Home: Clinical Homesickness and Romantic Melancholy
Dismissively treated as Romantic affectation, nostalgia is a frequently misunderstood emotion and way of remembering. As David Lowenthal has put it, nostalgia is 'a topic of embarrassment and a term of abuse. Diatribe upon diatribe denounces it as reactionary, repressive, ridiculous'. [21] According to the OED, nostalgia has two sets of meaning: firstly, having retained its original pathological connotation, it is a 'form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country; severe home-sickness'.Secondly, in its transferred usage, it describes '[r]egret or sorrowful longing for the conditions of a past age; regretful or wistful memory or recall of an earlier time'. Romantic representations of homesickness, homelessness, and homelands feed on the twofold meanings of nostalgia. The history of nostalgia, specifically its inception as a clinical term to describe homesickness, is moreover inseparable from its subsequent accumulation of meanings, revealing also the origins of the most common misunderstandings about nostalgia.

     The word 'nostalgia' was coined in a medical treatise in 1688 to describe the physical symptoms of homesickness. In his 'Dissertatio Medica de NOSTALGIA, oder Heimwehe', the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer analysed 'stories of certain youths, thus afflicted, that unless they had been brought back to the native land, whether in a fever or censured by the 'Wasting Disease', they had met their last day on foreign shores'. In search of a medical term for this malady, he combined Greek nostoV 'return home' and algoV 'pain', diagnosing nostalgia as a disease caused by 'the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one's native land'. [22] The meaning of nostalgia as a disease and an emotion continued to fluctuate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (1788), William Falconer carefully distinguished between hypochondria, melancholia, and nostalgia, although the latter was 'said to begin with melancholy, sadness, love of solitude'. These symptoms were also those of love, which Falconer classified as a passion and not a disease, highlighting the ways in which these categories were seen to overlap. Love could result in fever, epilepsy, or an aneurysm of the aorta. [23] In his Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness (1782), Thomas Arnold similarly maintained that nostalgia-'[t]his unreasonable fondness for the place of our birth'-closely resembled both grief and love. [24] In the late-eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, the symptoms of nostalgia-as of many other physical maladies-were redefined as praiseworthy signs of virtue and a high sensibility, anticipating the Romantic idealisation of creative recall.

     It has been suggested that the concept of nostalgia as a clinical term began to disappear in the course of the nineteenth century, as the emotion nostalgia was increasingly divorced from its symptomatology. [25] This process, however, was not as straightforward as it has often been presented. Immanuel Kant stressed the dependence even of a clinical nostalgia on a time rather than on a place as he set out to expose the patriotism of the Swiss, who had been particularly associated with this ailment ever since Hofer's emphasis on his countrymen's homesickness. [26] A return home, Kant argued, cured homesickness in that it dispelled the illusions it had created: 'Later, when they visit these places, they find their anticipation dampened and even their homesickness cured. They think that everything has drastically changed, but it is that they cannot bring back their youth.' [27] Nostalgia was conceived as a patriotic disease, while also related to memories of the childhood home. More significantly, even when considered a clinical condition, it was begrudgingly admired as a sign of loyalty to a time or place. The Romantics particularly proceeded to appropriate nostalgia in the contexts of a new idealisation of childhood and childhood memories, of nature and the natural, of the homeland, and also of what has been called 'a larger state of consciousness, the familiar mood known as Romantic melancholy', an alignment that contributes to the persistent confusion of nostalgia with melancholy. [28] Writing the tellingly entitled poem 'Home-sick' in 1799, Coleridge longed for the healing influence of the air of his homeland, suggesting that homesickness was a disease that could be cured by a return home-in short, a clinical nostalgia-while he simultaneously treated it as a Romantic yearning: 'Thou Breeze, that play'st on Albion's shore!' [29] When Wordsworth wrote that '[a]ll good poetry [.] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity', he formulated a definition of poetic production that emphasised the creative aspects of a specifically nostalgic way of recalling events and emotions. [30]

     Influenced by Romantic poetry, the fiction of the time shared its idealisation of longing, yet also depicted pining protagonists within a realist narrative, offering sympathetic insight into their yearnings as well as an almost clinical description of their symptoms. Fanny Burney's early novels exemplify this ambiguity, anticipating the analysis of different forms of nostalgic longings in The Wanderer. The vaguely defined illnesses with which her heroines are afflicted conform to a pathological interpretation of longing, even while they mark a shift from the detailing of both love- and homesickness to a sentimental idealisation of the home-of the childhood home and of domesticity in general. As in a host of novels of sensibility, raving lovesick heroines are healed by a return to or re-enactment of safe childhood homes. Yet as they span the development of Romantic fiction from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, it is possible to trace a shift from lovesickness to a longing for home in the succession of Burney's novels. The suffering of the heroine of her first novel, Evelina (1778), stands in the tradition of what has been called 'the sentimental love-madness vogue' of the late eighteenth century. [31] Evelina longs for Lord Orville while at home; her longing is mapped on her body. As her belief in Lord Orville is restored, she is cured at once: 'Lord Orville is still himself! [.] Your happy Evelina, restored at once to spirits and tranquillity.' [32] In Cecilia (1782), homelessness, combined with the temporary loss of her lover, plunges the heroine into a madness that can be traced back to clinical nostalgia in its last stage as well as to lovesickness. [33] In Camilla (1796), the love-interest moves into the background as the destruction of a happy family and a physical pining for a return home become the novel's climaxes. Camilla resides in 'the bosom of her respectable family'; the first chapter is entitled 'A Family Scene': 'O blissful state of innocence, purity, and delight, why must it fleet so fast? Why scarcely but by retrospection is its happiness known?' [34] The loss of this home is the novel's central crisis. Camilla's sickbed-reunion with her lover ends in a wedding, not a funeral, but it is her reunion with her family that constitutes the desired homecoming to 'primeval joy':

The Wanderer's hybridity subverts this fiction of a nation of relations. Instead, the novel ends with the realisation of a domestic alternative, at once evading and transcending nationalist ideologies of the homeland.

     Refutations of and reactions to the Reflections recur in fictional and non-fictional texts of the 1790s, as Burke's idealisation of the aristocracy and reverence for buildings that symbolise established institutions-and Burke even describes the Bastille as a venerable castle-complicate the functions of nostalgia and the picturesque in British novels that endorse a radical sensibility. Wollstonecraft expresses a radical rejection of Burkean nostalgia when she questions the point of restoring old buildings: '[W]hy was it a duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials?' [57] Charlotte Smith's self-avowedly pro-revolutionary novel Desmond (1792) is more ambiguous in its representation of the needs of revolution and, more emphatically, reform, yet its rejection of Burkean sentiments remains clear-cut. Writing home from France, the titular hero exposes the 'malignant fabrications' that are circulated in England. [58] Burkean rhetoric is denounced in a stylistic parody as sublime as Burke's own eloquence:

Burney's retrospective novel is necessarily far removed from such radical endorsements of a revolutionary agenda. The excesses of a British-off-stage, as it were-appreciation of the French Revolution are, in fact, embodied, and to an extent parodied, in the character of Elinor, a proto-feminist, pro-revolutionary, suicidal atheist who is shown to proclaim her ideological leanings primarily out of a 'spirit of contradiction' (p. 55). Various critics have considered Elinor the result of a misreading of Wollstonecraft. Julia Epstein calls her Juliet's 'protofeminist revolutionary alter ego', whose suicide attempt rescues the heroine 'just as Bertha Mason would later rescue Jane Eyre'. [60] While the novel treats the migrant's difficulties with sympathy and indignation, Elinor is, in fact, deeply tainted by her eccentric and, it is emphasised, inherently selfish appropriation of such sympathies with the suppressed. It is this twist that complicates an anti-Jacobin reading, singling out the novel as a significantly and intriguingly ambiguous treatment of the repercussions of nationalist and radical ideologies and particularly their use and abuse of sympathies with the homeless as well as of nostalgia for a home.

     As Frances Burney's last novel reacts against the concept of a British nationalist counter-ideology to the expansionist French nationalism, it takes the domestic novel into the realm of a more politically conscious genre without lapsing into the openly proclaimed agenda of nationalist literature. Romantic nationalism as founded on a shared culture is instead shown to clash with a personal past; the xenophobia nurtured by Jacobin as well as anti-Jacobin ideologies with the heroine's hybridity; and a manufactured nationalist heritage nostalgia with homesickness. The liberal, even radical, attitudes underlying the representation of a woman pursued by her husband, of the racism directed against a (seemingly) black refugee, and the treatment of an employee or hired companion, however, are undercut by the exposure of the anti-heroine's false liberality and eventual breakdown. The heroine herself is not only safely married, but revealed to be white, legitimate, and a member of the British upper classes after all. Nonetheless, The Wanderer provides an alternative to both pro-revolutionary novels of a radical sensibility and to anti-Jacobin, Burkean, reactions, offering an exploration of the impact of imperialist and nationalist economies and ideologies at home without becoming merely a domestic novel confined to the representation of a small stratum of society. As such, it sheds a different light on the heterogeneity of Romantic fiction and the writing of the French Revolution.