The Wrongs of Man: Moral Sense and the Development of Gendered Morality in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

This dissertation brings together a consideration of eighteenth-century moral philosophy and novels engaged with issues of vice and virtue in order to better understand the ways in which the modern world has developed gendered strategies for managing questions of morality. My argument is that one can find evidence of specific modes of moral agency and evaluation being assigned to each of the two unequal but complementary genders in new ways in British texts over the long eighteenth century, and that these assignments were designed to manage and constrain aspects of morality that represented new problems for the modern era. Considering the moral schemes offered through the work of moral sense philosophers and of novelists from the middle of the eighteenth century through the beginning of the nineteenth, I identify an arc of exploration, improvisation, and eventual resolution achieved through a gendered divide of moral modes. Eighteenth-century moral sense philosophers grounded morality in an individualized moral sense, breaking the easy association of morality and universal reason (chapter one). The novel of sensibility then gave the reading public male and female protagonists whose moral compasses were founded on notions of an innate and internal moral sense, and whose virtuous aims were hence well-aligned and comparatively undifferentiated by gender (chapter two). The radical novels of the British 1790s in turn carried the utopian and equalizing potential of these earlier works forward with an increasing emphasis on the possibilities for morally-directed effective change in the world, and signs of a more gendered division of moral possibilities still somewhat unsettled by questions of the rights and capacities of women (chapter three). Finally, early nineteenth-century novels of manners offer the first clear example of the novelistic resolution of modern moral tensions through a marriage plot that both divided and united gendered moral agents in ways that contained the unstable potentials of active selflessness and unmoderated selfishness (chapter four).