Shaffer, Julie. "Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality." Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. 283-310.

Shaffer describes the political significance of Mary Robinson’s 1799 novel, The Natural Daughter, which links negative characters with traitors to the French Revolution. This direct politicism, writes Shaffer, challenges the norms of women’s fiction, which equated female writers’ conservatisim with femininity. Further, Robinson’s authorial mercy on women who have transgressed sexual taboos translates into the idea that “the cultural pressure to demonize, exclude, and eradicate fallen women has a negative social and political impact not only on women but also on the nation as a whole” (285).

Shaffer examines the cultural expectations of women in the late 18th century, and especially the care that women writers had to take to guard their reputations. Further, she examines popular views of female sexuality and passivity, before launching into a section on “revolution and the radicality of lenience toward the ruinted woman," most specifically in The Natural Daughter (292). She moves on to discuss the metaphorical parallel from a child’s technical illegitimacy to a woman’s social illegitimacy. Special attention is paid to Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art.

The article returns to The Natural Daughter, concluding that the community of the novel represents the French Revolutionary ideal and that the novel’s treatment of women suggests that it is wrong to punish women “who offer the best social cure: by helping, not hindering others; by offering familial love freely to the moral, making strangers family and so recuperating rather than criminalizing them; and by recognizing the common humanity of women, rather than seeing them solely as the sex, always already criminal” (310).

Entered by Sarah on 03 August 2004 at 10:29 AM.