Women, Comedy, and A Simple Story
Hye-Soo Lee, Ewha Womans University
Volume 20, no. 2, Winter 2007-08
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In this article, I rethink two vital issues in historicist feminism through a reading of A Simple Story: one of genre and gender and one of female literary history. To begin, I foreground the close affinity of women and comedy, as it is embodied in the novel as a “woman’s genre,” with a glance at the supposed link of women and romance. Then I look at how Miss Milner figures as a genuinely comic heroine and also a Hogarthian “living woman” in A Simple Story. Last, I examine the ways Inchbald’s novel undermines “the didactic tradition of reformed heroines,” a main tradition of eighteenth-century women writers. I argue that A Simple Story’s neglected place in the literary canon parallels the historical repression of amatory fictions by Behn, Manley, and Haywood — they are all nearly “illegible” within the familiar frame of education or socialization. Recuperating the topos of female desire in comedy and amatory fictions, Inchbald succeeds in creating her extraordinary and intriguing heroine in A Simple Story.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Female Sexuality” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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