Civil wars: Marriage, gender and militarism in English literature, 1642--1714

This dissertation investigates the ways in which constructions of gender and the rise of militarism in England became fundamentally imbricated in English literature of the period 1642–1714. The English experience of civil war in the mid-seventeenth century transformed late seventeenth-century representations of marriage and constructions of gender, both feminine and masculine, and these representations and constructions in turn reshaped the meaning of war. In this study I demonstrate how Restoration representations of marriage and gender harbored residual anxieties from the Civil Wars as well as a general preoccupation with the increasing military power of England in the late seventeenth century. In this context, civil war became an active metaphor in the late seventeenth century for representations of contentious marriage as a “battle of the sexes.”; Each chapter integrates literary sources, social and military history, and gender studies to analyze how gender and marriage were constructed in terms of militarism and violence in this period. The introduction explains how war, as a culturally produced act dependent on sexual differentiation and exclusion, serves as a crucial occasion when constructions of gender are produced, legitimated and deployed back into society. Chapter 2 examines representations of the home as the site of gender conflict in the Civil Wars and Interregnum, arguing that home and battlefield often were imagined as synonymous. The writings of Milton and Cavendish exemplify this conflation of home and battlefield. The next two chapters explore literary representations of female and male warriors, Amazons and soldiers, in light of Restoration military history. Chapter 3 focuses on Behn's The Widow Ranter and Pope's The Rape of the Lock, while Chapter 4 centers on readings of Otway's The Souldier's Fortune and Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer . Chapter 5 analyzes metaphors of marriage and war to show how they ultimately produced a concept of domesticity that was both preoccupied with marriage and immersed in militarism, as Addison and Steele's The Spectator and Arbuthnot's The History of John Bull illustrate. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to Eighteenth-Century Studies by demonstrating how Restoration gender constructions emerged from the political and military conflicts of the past.