INGENUOUS SUBJECTION: COMPLIANCE AND POWER IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTIC NOVEL.

THOMPSON, Helen.

ISBN 10: 0812238915 / ISBN 13: 9780812238914

Published by University Of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2005

About this Item

8vo. pp vi, 278. Original publishers dark blue cloth lettered gilt on spine. ISBN: 0812238915 Fine in fine dust wrapper.

Seller Inventory # C15740

Bibliographic Details

• Title: INGENUOUS SUBJECTION: COMPLIANCE AND POWER IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTIC NOVEL.
• Publisher: University Of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812238915
• ISBN 13: 9780812238914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Helen Thompson's Ingenuous Subjection offers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or "ingenuous" assent to the law. The domestic novel figures feminine political difference not as women's deviation from an abstract universal but rather as their failure freely or ingenuously to submit to the power retained by Enlightenment husbands.
Ingenuous Subjection claims domestic novelists as vital participants in Enlightenment political discourse. By tracing the political, philosophical, and generic significance of feminine compliance, this book revises our literary historical account of the rise of the novel. Rather than imagining a realm of harmonious sentiment, domestic fiction represents the persistent arbitrariness of eighteenth-century men's conjugal power. Ingenuous Subjection revises feminist theory and historiography, locating the genealogy of feminism in a contractual model of ingenuous assent which challenges the legitimacy of masculine conjugal government. The first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise, Ingenuous Subjection recovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.

About the Author

Helen Thompson is a member of the Department of English at Northwestern University.