The rhetoric of romance: Representations of the female speaker in women's prose fiction in early modern England

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, prose romances, often cited as the favorite reading of women, were also believed to be morally dangerous for them. One source of this danger, this study shows, rests in the challenge some of these romances presented to customary expectations of female behavior, especially social norms that governed female speaking. While conduct literature throughout the period warns women against speaking in public to teach and persuade, romance applauds their oratory. Through speaking conventions of the prose romance that provide opportunities for female characters to speak at length and with authority, female writers create for themselves points of entry into public discourse, establishing positions from which to participate in public debates concerning the nature of women. In the hands of certain women, I argue, the prose romance becomes a form of political discourse, in which the representation of female characters calls into question the power relations of its male and female readers.;Chapter 1 compares Lady Mary Wroth's Countesse of Montgomery's Urania with its precursor, Sir Philip Sidney's Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia showing that Wroth re-envisions and reshapes her uncle's work, constructing the ethos of the female speaker and revising contemporary notions of female virtue. Chapter 2 considers Margaret Cavendish's romances Assaulted and Pursued Chastity and The Contract as vehicles for imagining what she later offers in Orations of Divers Sorts: models of public female eloquence that speak to the condition of English women in the early seventeenth century and that contradict notions about women in technical rhetorics of the period. Chapter 3 shows that Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaii mimics and deliberately reverses many of the conventions of French heroic romance in order to dramatize the relation between female sexuality and the desire to control discourse. Chapter 4 reads Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier's The Cry as a dramatic and vocal response to contemporary prejudice against women's learning and a challenge to the masculinized ideas of authorship promoted by Henry Fielding. Chapter 5 investigates the power of the heroine's speaking in The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, exploring the worth of romance and the meaning of its banishment from Lennox's story.