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Making Space: the Case for Amatory Fiction, 1660-1740

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Making Space: the Case for Amatory Fiction, 1660-1740 MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740 _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department Of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Chrisoula M. Gonzales May, 2017 MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740 _________________________ Chrisoula M. Gonzales APPROVED: _________________________ Ann Christensen, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ David Mazella, Ph.D. _________________________ Maria Gonzalez, Ph.D. _________________________ Lynn Voskuil, Ph.D. _________________________ Robert Shimko, Ph.D. University of Houston _________________________ Antonio D. Tillis, Ph.D. Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Hispanic Studies ii MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740 _______________ An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Psychology University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _____________ By Chrisoula M. Gonzales May, 2017 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores amatory fiction as a genre significant to English literary history. I ground the study of amatory fiction in literary history, specifically exploring the ways that amatory fiction participates in the development of the novel. In amatory fiction, female characters express desire in a public setting, a feature that distinguishes amatory fiction from the novel, where characters more often express themselves in private, domestic spaces. By analyzing the various expressions of female desire in the works of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe, I show that female characters are motivated to inhabit public space because they seek to know themselves as sexual, social, and political agents. I also locate representations of the Restoration and eighteenth-century coquette in amatory fiction in order to illustrate how female characters manage both their spatial and social position in various public settings. This study’s taxonomy of characters ranges from minor characters to titular heroines, revealing an equal representation of female desire in amatory fiction and, subsequently, English history. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The guidance and support of Dr. Ann Christensen and Dr. Dave Mazella have made this dissertation possible. I would like to thank Ann for taking such great care in reading my work and providing me excellent feedback at every stage of the dissertation. Ann has been both a teacher and a friend, and I am grateful to have her as a mentor. I would like to thank Dave for his continued interest in my project and his invaluable instruction and advice along the way. I am grateful to Dr. Maria Gonzalez, Dr. Lynn Voskuil, and Dr. Robert Shimko for serving on my committee and encouraging me with their important questions. Above all, I am grateful to my family, near and far, for their enduring love and patience. To my husband, Matthew, I am better because of you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Amatory Fiction as History 1 Chapter 1: A Prelude 18 Chapter 2: The Formation of Desire; Locating Behn’s Heroines in Public Space 34 Chapter 3: Desire and Privacy in Manley’s New Atalantis and The Adventures of Rivella 81 Chapter 4: The Philosophy of the Coquette; or Fantomina’s “Innocent Curiosity” 116 Chapter 5: Roxana and Amy’s Divided Desire 139 Coda: The Space Amatory Fiction Makes 171 Bibliography 178 vi Introduction Amatory Fiction as History The writers of amatory fiction who inspired this project owe their legacy today to the late twentieth-century feminist theorists who recovered them from obscurity. Without the introduction of encomiast biography to the world of feminist literary criticism, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, would likely have remained unknown or ill reputed. This new strain of scholarship illuminated the presence of women writers in England at the time of the Restoration and eighteenth-century, as this was the period when women first worked alongside men in the male-dominated profession of writing. The discovery of women in this professional setting prompted several feminist scholars to ascribe these early writers an exceptional status—a gesture Virginia Woolf made famous in A Room of One’s Own (1927), where she says that all women writers should strew flowers on Aphra Behn’s grave for being the first woman to earn a living by her pen (50). Despite Woolf’s laudatory nod to Behn, very little was known about women writers (and women’s history in general), so the arrival of the late twentieth-century feminist recovery movement was both exciting and empirically advantageous. Scholars exposed the lives of Behn, Manley, and Haywood to be simultaneously public and mysterious, scandalous and sexy. For example, in the 1988 special edition of Women’s Studies, Catherine Gallagher’s “Who Was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn” and Janet Todd’s “Life After Sex: The Fictional Autobiography of Delarivier Manley” refer to Behn and Manley as “author-whore” in order to demonstrate the public nature of women writers’ professional lives, which came with the understanding that 1 women writers needed to “seduce” their readers (and publishers) in order succeed in the early British literary marketplace1 (Gallagher 24; Todd 54). Nevertheless, this increasing interest in the sensational lives of women writers had the unintended effect of overshadowing the literary merits of their work, rendering it anomalous to the more male- unified trajectory of literary history. Women’s writing is then placed in a separate group: that which is not male and, consequently, that which is secondary, even inferior. However, in the twenty-first century, scholars began to question the sustainability of the women writers recovery project for very similar reasons; this was evident at the 2010 ASECS Women’s Caucus, where Laura Rosenthal argued that “while recovery has been, and continues to be, indispensable, it has nevertheless framed women writers in ways that sometimes limit our full understanding of their intellectual, historical, and artistic force” (2). In other words, while women writers are certainly discussed more frequently today thanks to the recovery movement, there were limitations to the method that brought attention to women writers in the first place, particularly the designation of gender-specific writerly markers like author-whore, prostitute-playwright, or scandalmongering hack2. 1 Gallagher’s “Who Was that Masked Woman?” becomes a chapter in her book, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (1994) and Todd’s “Life After Sex” is adapted for her book, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (1989). The phrase “author-whore” proliferates in the recovery scholarship on women writers, giving the label its own literary history, which I believe unintentionally undermined the literary merit of these women writers. As literary historians, Gallagher and Todd acknowledge that the author-whore was a reputation that pervaded the minds of Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences and so, for the most part, women writers, or the successful ones anyway, used it to their advantage. There is some disagreement among critics, though, on whether Behn flaunted the title, as Gallagher asserts, or if she “savagely resented” it, as Behn’s biographer, Angeline Goreau, argues instead. In 2000, Derek Hughes’s “The Masked Woman Revealed” unravels Gallagher’s thesis, suggesting that her New Historicist approach distorts the amount of influence the label supposedly had. 2 These terms recur in Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story. For example, on Manley: “[t]he combination of sexual scandal and venality in Manley’s self-presentation made her, indeed, the archetypal ‘hack’ [ . ] short for ‘author-whore’ and had an especially appropriate ring when applied to a ruined scandalmongering woman” (Nobody 133). 2 Because these gendered identifiers align the woman writer with the notoriety of her biography rather than that of her literary oeuvre, her writing is often excluded from larger discussions of authorial legacy and canonicity. I open with this (very) brief survey of early English women writers’ literary history in order to expose the discrepancy between the encomiast critical effort to revive women writers and the subsequent assessment of women writers’ work as simply not that good. Virginia Woolf demonstrates this by encouraging women writers to “let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,” as noted above, because “[s]he made, by working very hard, enough to live on,” but then Woolf adds, “The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote” (50, 48). This kind of caveat recurs in the twenty-first century, nearly eighty years later, in Susan Stave’s A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789 (2006), where she identifies Behn and Manley as writers of amatory fiction, saying, “Manley follows Behn in helping to create the clichéd prose of debased romance,” and then concludes that much of their work is “badly written” (148). Staves justifies her accusation of their “bad writing3” by prefacing that “literary merit is an important principle of selection in [her] literary history,” and “[i]t cannot be a sin against feminism to say that some women wrote well and others badly” (2, 3). Even if I disagree with her opinion on amatory fiction’s
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