Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century

Abstract

George Haggerty examines the 'unnatural' affections that defy cultural taboos and challenge what are seen as natural boundaries to desire. Such affections abound in eighteenth century novels offering a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women came into their own as novel writers. On the one hand defying cultural dictates of domestic and familial ideology, and on the other eroticising relations that the family would naturalise - such as sister, brother, father, and mother - the women novelists have accomplished more than literary history has ever allowed them. What is queer about these works is their refusal to conform to heteronormative expectation as well as their sheer inventiveness of imagined alternatives. The novelists offer romantic friends, effeminized male partners, devoted sisterly affection, mother-daughter bonds, maimed and disfigured heroines, bleeding heroes, abject paternal obsession, and lesbian couples. For the first time, women were able to take a literary form and invest it with some of their own most deeply felt concerns.