A Questioning of 'Truths' Universally Acknowledged: Gender and Literary Value in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The field of eighteenth-century studies has seen a rapid expansion of feminist theory and criticism, as well as the significant emergence of gender studies, within its domain in the final decades of the twentieth century. One of the most pressing issues for feminists working in eighteenth-century studies has been canon revision and the restoration of women writers to the traditionally male literary canon. The overriding concern of making women's texts available in modern editions and compiling textual and biographical information has been usefully addressed by a number of critics in the past three decades. In addition to canon revision, feminist scholars of the eighteenth century have isolated significant feminist concerns within women's writing of the period. They have examined (among others) such issues as women's self-identity, women's legal status, the mother-child dyad, women's education, the emergence of a dominant ideology of domesticity, and a new ideology of femininity and of patriarchy in the eighteenth century. Further, they have validated the importance of so-called subliterary genres of romance, scandal chronicles, journals, periodical writings and familiar letters. They have also examined canonic (mostly male) writing from a feminist perspective, thereby opening new levels of understanding of eighteenth-century life and culture. Finally, women's social and historical position within the eighteenth century has been explored, enabling a revision of historical, as well as literary understanding of the period. The six texts reviewed below complement and complicate the existing body of work in a number of ways, making important contributions to the fields of feminist literary history and gender studies, and not incidentally to our broader understanding of eighteenth-century literary production. The first five texts, centered around the writing of Eliza Haywood, engage in the work of canon revision, while the last problematizes the notion of objectivity in any critical discourse.