LINKER, LAURA LEIGH, Ph.D. the Female Libertine from Dryden to Defoe. (2008) Directed by Dr
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LINKER, LAURA LEIGH, Ph.D. The Female Libertine from Dryden to Defoe. (2008) Directed by Dr. James E. Evans, 284 pp. This dissertation considers how Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers imagined the female libertine in representative comedies and fiction written from the 1670s to the 1720s. These include John Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra Behn’s late comedy, The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman’s Bargain (1686), and novella, The History of the Nun (1689), Catharine Trotter’s epistolary narrative, Olinda’s Adventures (1693), and only comedy, Love at a Loss, or the Most Votes Carries It (1700), and Daniel Defoe’s novel, Roxana (1724). Because Charles II’s court mistresses gained prominent positions at court, they inspired onstage adaptations of female libertines by writers also interested in Epicureanism. This dissertation gives attention both to perceptions of the mistresses at Charles II’s court and to Lucretius’s De rerum natura , which informs the witty, rebellious female libertine figures that influenced the development of sensibility in England during the seventeenth century. The increased emphasis on morality during the eighteenth century resulted in writers featuring heroines of sensibility that reject libertinism. Defoe’s Roxana provides one of the last examples of a libertine heroine, and her absence of feeling marks a notable division between the heroine of sensibility and the female libertine. THE FEMALE LIBERTINE FROM DRYDEN TO DEFOE by Laura Leigh Linker A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2008 Approved by ________________________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ____________________________________ James E. Evans Committee Members ____________________________________ Jennifer Keith ____________________________________ Christopher Hodgkins _____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _____________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. WHAT IS THE FEMALE LIBERTINE?………………………………………1 II. ‘DECENCIES OF BEHAVIOR’: DRYDEN’S LIBERTINES IN MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE …………………………………………………...37 III. ETHEREGE’S HARRIET AND THE ‘PLEASURE OF PLAY’……….…....88 IV. WRITING TOWARDS AN AGE OF SENSIBILITY: BEHN’S THE LUCKEY CHANCE AND THE HISTORY OF THE NUN .............................130 V. LOVING AT A LOSS: CATHARINE TROTTER AND THE DISTRESSED FEMALE LIBERTINE……………………………………..179 VI. DEFOE’S LIBERTINE AMAZON AND THE REAL DEVIL OF DISTRESS…………………………………………………………………..216 VII. PHANTOMS AND FOES: LATER FEMALE LIBERTINES…....................255 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..269 iii 1 CHAPTER I WHAT IS THE FEMALE LIBERTINE? What is the female libertine? Does she exist? The Oxford English Dictionary defines the libertine as an identity “rarely applied to a woman,” 1though most critics assume that there were women, both real and fictional, who were libertines during the Restoration, when libertinism reached its height in England. J. Douglas Canfield, Warren Chernaik, Pat Gill, Jacqueline Pearson, Janet Todd, James Turner, Harold Weber, and others have increasingly studied how women participate in libertine values. 2 These critics examine women’s engagement of a culture traditionally described in terms of masculine 1 “Libertine,” OED Online, 2nd ed., 5 Nov. 2007. <http://www.oed.com>. 2Scholars have traditionally studied the female libertine as a reflection of her more notorious male counterpart, the rake-hero. It is important, however, to recognize that women’s libertine identities are not only responsive to men, but that they are also often independent in their complex articulations of libertine desire. Earlier studies of gender, wit, and sexuality that offer definitions of the female libertine or suggest that women participate in a libertine culture include, among others, Warren Chernaik’s Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature , which explores the darker psychological implications of the “libertine dream of human freedom”; Pat Gill’s Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners , which offers a feminist critique of Restoration dramatists’ often satiric depictions of women by using Freud’s two versions of the tendentious joke, or the hostile and the obscene; Jacqueline Pearson’s The Prostituted Muse , which includes quantitative data that impressively documents the overwhelming number of women writing for the stage during an oppressive social time in England; Janet Todd’s The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 , which likewise examines how the commercial implications of women writers and their textual, economic, and literary “signs” affected their artistic representations of sexual desire; James Turner’s Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern England , which offers a detailed description of the sexual culture of letters in England prior to and during the Restoration, pays particular attention to pornography and prostitution; and Harold Weber’s The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England , which defines the female libertine primarily as a projection of her male counterpart’s deepest sexual fears and anxieties. Though each of these critics examine women’s sexual placement and treatment in libertine writings, Todd, Turner, Pearson, and Gill have particularly focused on the complex negotiation between women’s sexual transgression and the literary and social constraints such a transgression places on them, with Gill’s study articulating the issues of decorum and wit in a gendered context. 2 behavior and beliefs, and their studies ask us to interrogate the essentialist assumptions attached to the libertine figure. This dissertation considers how writers imagined the female libertine in representative comedies and fiction written from the 1670s to the 1720s and includes John Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra Behn’s late comedy, The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman’s Bargain (1686), and novella, The History of the Nun (1689), Catharine Trotter’s epistolary narrative, Olinda’s Adventures (1693), and only comedy, Love at a Loss, or the Most Votes Carries It (1700), and Daniel Defoe’s novel, Roxana (1724). These writers depict the female libertine as a witty, rebellious figure frequently targeted by satirists because of her transgressive sexuality. Though I also compare the representations of women in verse, I focus most attention on comedy and fiction because much of the criticism, with the exception of a few studies, has neglected to discuss the important way in which female libertine figures exercise agency and power in these forms. Even less attention has been given to how the figure was inspired by “real life” female libertines, notably members of Charles II’s court, including his mistresses, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, and Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin. These women gained titles and wealth but were often satirically treated in the verses included in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714 , which I consider in relation to Dryden’s and Etherege’s comedies in chapters one and two.3 3 Sonya Wynne argues for the importance that these women played in the political world of the Restoration. She offers helpful information about the dates and significance of their “reigns” over Charles. Cleveland was the chief mistress during the early years, from 1660-70, while Portsmouth gained prominence in 1671, becoming the more important mistress until Charles’s death in 1685 (Wynne 172). See also Nancy Klein 3 After Charles II’s death in 1685, there was an overall decline in the theater, as neither James II nor William and Mary patronized the arts, and female libertines were featured less prominently in dramatic works than they had been during the 1670s. 4 Aphra Behn, previously successful as a playwright, turned to more profitable forms, like fiction. Her incorporation of romance conventions influenced several of her complicated libertine heroines, whose demonstrations of erotic transgression and emotional anguish helped to establish a new aesthetics that privileged pathos. Novelists following Behn also experimented with French models of sensibilité and the Ovidian epistle, providing earlier examples of literature of sensibility in England than G. J. Barker-Benfield, Adela Pinch, John Mullan, and Janet Todd have suggested. 5 Early novels feature a complex interaction between the heart, mind, and body that augments the discussion about libertinism’s relationship to sensibility in imaginative works written from the late Stuart to the early Georgian periods. Macguire’s article, “The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670-85,” and Susan Shifrin’s “ ‘At the end of the Walk by Madam Mazarines Lodgings’: Si(gh)ting the Transgressive Woman in Accounts of the Restoration Court.” 4 Richard Lewis Braverman’s Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 provides a thorough study of political, sexual, and literary “bodies” that interacted, changed, even revolutioned monarchical