WOMEN FICTIONS

It Is Power-Political, Sexual, and Social-Which Is Always the Real Concern in Writing about Women in this Period

It Is Power-Political, Sexual, and Social-Which Is Always the Real Concern in Writing about Women in this Period

Introduction

In the first decade of the eighteenth century two women published collections of their verse. In the 1790s more than thirty did so. Even so crude a measure may suggest that there had been an emphatic change in the literary status of women in the period. For the first three decades of the century women poets might appear relatively isolated and vulnerable figures, typified by Lady Chudleigh who wrote in Devonshire in the seclusion of what was evidently a joyless marriage, in moods which alternate between defiant assertion of the intellectual potential of women and a chastened religious stoicism. While Lady Chudleigh was able to publish her verse and prose in London, Octavia Walsh wrote so furtively for her own amusement and consolation that her relatives were unaware of her writing until her early death in 1706. Elizabeth Tollet, an intelligent and sophisticated writer, whose verse epistle to her undergraduate brother at Cambridge vicariously experiences the kind of education she herself was denied, published a collection of her verse in 1724 with such decorous anonymity that it has only recently been identified. Hetty Wright, sister of the famous Wesleys, wrote a handful of poems, mostly about the miseries of her marriage, few of which found their way into print in her lifetime. Such figures are not, however, entirely representative. Indeed, as the century began it must have seemed that women were at last making serious inroads into the complacently dominant male literary culture. The Restoration had brought a new confidence and competence to women's verse.

Ballaster (pp. 34-48) mentions “in the literature of the eighteenth centuries, the presence of women suddenly becomes noticeable and crucial to the sociological studies of these time periods. Women begin to appear with increasing significance in two aspects of the literature: as more recognized authors, in a time when literature is dominated by men, and as key, main characters, portraying a flawed society” (Ballaster, pp. 34-48). Prose narrative emerged in the 18th century novel as a dominant literary form, and with it a much more nuanced portrayal of women.

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill

John Cleland's 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' is a book about the displacement of sexual passion from the sexualized part of the English woman to the polygamous foreign women in its colonies. Otherwise known by the name of the protagonist, 'Fanny Hill,' it relocates England's colonialist agenda to the human geography of the female body which is 'characterized as a ship that travels from man to man, country to country' (Castle, pp. 89-103).

The eighteenth century has become increasingly marked as the originary moment for modern definitions of sexual difference as they are written onto the body. While significant in reshaping our understandings of the present, I think this emphasis on fixed sex/gender differences interferes with ...