The first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise, Ingenuous SubjectionHelen Thompson recovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.

Ingenuous Subjection
Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel

Helen Thompson

2005 | 288 pages | Cloth $65.00
Literature

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I. INGENUOUS SUBJECTION AND FEMININE POLITICAL DIFFERENCE
1. Boys, Girls, and Wives: Post-Patriarchal Power and the Problem of Feminine Subjection
2. Mushrooms, Subjects, and Women: The Hobbesian Individual and the Domestic Novel
3. "The Words Command and Obey": Pamela and Domestic Modernity

PART II. INGENUOUS SUBJECTION AND THE NOVEL
4. Eliza Haywood's Philosophical Career: Ingenuous Subjection and Moral Physiology
5. Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance: Ingenuous Subjection and Genre
6. Frances Sheridan's "disingenuous girl": Ingenuous Subjection and Epistolary Form

Conclusion: "Marriage has bastilled me for life": Mary Wollstonecraft's Domestic Novel

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments