Ruling passions: Sovereignty, femininity and fiction, 1680--1742.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Schutzman, Julie Rebecca.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

Women's studies.

0453.

0593.

Local Subjects:

0453.

0593.

Physical Description:

255 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 60-11A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

My project investigates constructions of female authority in prose texts published between 1680 and 1745. By placing early fiction in its political context, I explore how female activity is constructed through discourses of conservative politics, whether Royalist, Tory, or Jacobite. Partisan allegories, satires, and novels locate a dialectic between sovereignty and femininity in conventionally female arenas: the boudoir, the boarding house, the Queen's bedchamber, the servants' quarters of a country house. Structures of dominance and subjection---seduction, narcissism, masochism, and same-sex desire---structure this domain, producing an erotics of sovereignty, which, I argue, shapes the literary history of female domestic authority.

My first three chapters map the politically instrumental role of femininity in fictions by partisan female writers. I first define a "Tory erotics" in Aphra Behn's Love Letters from A Nobleman to his Sister and then, in Chapter Two, explore the impact of a female monarch---Anne Sutart---on established links between sovereign influence and seductive power. The fictions of Jane Barker, the focus of Chapter Three, develop a concern with a writer's "unaccountability" into a figure for a woman's bid to gain sovereignty over herself Finally, Chapter Four argues that such fictional negotiations of female domestic sovereignty help structure the development of Richardson's "new species of writing" in Pamela, Parts I and II. Ultimately, Pamela's refusal to embrace her new social role---that of imperious mistress---dramatizes the process of loss found in earlier fiction, a loss inhering in the shift from class-based notions of female authority to an essentialized femininity of bourgeois domesticity.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-11, Section: A, page: 4022.

Adviser: John Richetti.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1999.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9780599559189

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.