Sarah Fielding and the Salic Law of Wit

Abstract

The structure of satire would seem to make it an appropriate, though admittedly complex, form for women who have ready access to the doubled vision that satire requires. In a masculine-normative culture, where women know the culture intimately but have good reasons not to identify with it, educated women possess the insider's knowledge and outsider's perspective that is satire's special mark. It would surely be odd if such women did not satirize. Yet satire is conventionally a masculine genre, excluding women from the tradition by what this anonymous seventeenth-century critic calls "great Apollo's Salic law." Eighteenth-century female satirists challenge this gendered convention when they assert their own satiric authority, and, as the concept of gender changes in the eighteenth century, their strategies of challenge change as well.