| "Love, Liberty, and the Politics of Genre in the Romantic Novel" investigates the interplay of gender norms and political theory in novels of the romantic era. Following Thomas Laqueur's suggestion that conceptions of gender changed markedly during the eighteenth century when the public/private divide was being theorized, I examine the British Romantic novel's depiction of love, duty, and marriage in the context of the period's rights-based discourse of equality. I argue that in the shift from a single-sex hierarchical model of gender to a dual-sex horizontal model of gender, the single-sex hierarchy reappears translated into other forms---projected variously onto conceptions of history, social class, and knowledge.;As the ascendant genre of courtship, the novel played an active and reactive role in the period, helping to define new configurations of the private. With Jane Austen's Emma and Walter Scott's Waverley, I argue that while the major current of each novel capitulates to status quo inequality, each reserves the private sphere as a space that may potentially resolve problems that in the public realm appear intractable. Turning to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I track the competing influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, observing how fundamental differences between their views on gender play out in Shelley's novel in the opposition between science and love. Lastly, with the help of Derrida's "The Law of Genre," I investigate the theoretical implications of the relationship between gender, genre, and the public and private divide. |
