'The rubicon of female virtue': Dividing and uniting women in eighteenth-century British literature.

摘要

During the eighteenth century, chaste women were frequently warned against associating with their fallen sisters. As John Bowles insists in Remarks on Modern Female Manners (1802), “Honour, especially in women, can admit of no compromise with dishonour; no approaches from one to the other must be suffered;…the line by which they are divided is the RUBICON of female virtue.” In eighteenth-century texts, however, women often cross that boundary. What work do these scenes perform? Why do authors, especially women, juxtapose in imaginative writings the very women who were prohibited from meeting in reality?; In answering these questions, this project argues that one way of understanding scandalous and reputable female characters is to consider them in the same way that many eighteenth-century authors did: together. Attending to literary encounters between women of different sexual reputation encourages us to refine our notions of eighteenth-century women in several ways. First, women writers consistently interrogate the division of women into two kinds, chaste and fallen, suggesting that dichotomy was less stable than we have assumed. Second, female authors carefully place their subjects in relation to other women, underscoring that women defined themselves with respect to other women as well as men. Third, both men's and women's writings show that female virtue was never simply about chastity: men's works often define virtue in relation to male honor, while women shift the concept of virtue away from male-centered interests and toward women's concerns, such as loyalty to their own gender. The juxtaposition of chaste and fallen women further provided women writers opportunities for investigating female sexuality, a concept of particular interest as women were increasingly imagined during the eighteenth century as without sexual needs. Tracing how women imagine such encounters over this period enables us to gauge how women felt about such changing notions of woman.