Maidenly amusements: Narrating female sexuality in eighteenth-century England (Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson)

This dissertation examines the relation between female-female affiliations and heterosexuality in a variety of eighteenth-century English discourses. Analyzing representations of four female figures–the macroclitoride, the passing woman, the coquette, and the paragon of virtue–I argue that intimacies between women play a central role in the definition of gender and sexual norms for women in the period. Further, these figures register the eighteenth-century development of an ideology of heterosexuality wherein gender conceptually precedes desire.; Chapter One investigates the treatment of female erotic desire and genital morphology in early modern anatomies. In the eighteenth century, earlier anatomically-based explanations of female homoeroticism erode under the pressure of increasingly binary understandings of biological sex and gender. The shift from the ‘tribade’ (a figure that links homoeroticism to clitoral enlargement) to the ‘macroclitoride’ (a figure defined only by clitoral enlargement) allows for the possibility that any woman might desire other women. Chapter Two examines life narratives of women who pass as men. Despite their homoerotic content, these narratives seek to construct a model of sexuality wherein ‘natural’ desire takes place within a context of gender difference. In addition, the consistent inclusion of childhood stories in these narratives signals a trend toward psychological and developmental explanations of female homoerotic desire as anatomical explanations wane. Chapter Three analyzes the figure of the coquette in comedy, periodicals, and prose fiction, arguing that this figure's linking of unruly erotic desire with conspicuous consumption and display of luxury goods registers broader anxieties about female choice in the period's changing market economy. In narratives of ‘reforming the coquette’ by Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox, female-female intimacy marks the excessiveness of the coquette's choice and must be rejected as part of her education into virtue. The final chapter considers the figure of the hyper-virtuous heroine whose plot is structured by her primary intimacy with another woman. Focusing on Frances Burney's Cecilia and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, I explicate a dialectic between the heterosexual marriage plot and the female friendship plot in order to argue that exemplary heterosexuality in these texts is modeled upon passionate commitment between exemplary women.