Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel
Helen Thompson
Helen Thompson's Ingenuous Subjection offers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or "ingenuous" assent to the law. The domestic novel figures feminine political difference not as women's deviation from ... Read more
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About Helen Thompson
Reviews for Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel
Deidre Lynch, Indiana University
"Helen Thompson's brilliant and persuasive new study makes clear that domestic fiction can best be seen as a theoretical battleground, where the debate about the political philosophy of personal agency, ... Read more