Contagious Desire as Feminist Satire in Delarivier Manley’s The Royal Mischief Christopher Bertucci Much of the reception of Delarivier Manley’s The Royal Mischief (1696), both then and now, has grappled with the play’s overt sensuality and display of unrestrained desires.1 Its main intrigue involves Homais, the Princess of Libardian, scheming to have sex with Levan, her husband’s nephew. From start to finish, she shows neither moral restraint nor remorse. Scholars have been left to wonder why Manley, who is so conscious of feminist issues, would create such a character as Homais. Some critics see Homais as a feminist heroine for her boldness in pursuing her desires, or, at the very least, “a sympathetically studied femme fatale.”2 Others find the play devoid of redeeming feminist qualities. Susan Staves, for example, finds the play “energetic but ridiculous, even pathetic and misogynistic, and Homais, bereft of moral scruples or even moral consciousness, a repulsive character.”3 Yet these interpretations mostly overlook Manley’s robust capacity for satire and irony. We need to remember that Manley would go on to become an accomplished political satirist, famous for The New Atalantis (1709), an influential satirical attack on many notable Whigs. With a more ironic Manley in mind, Melinda Rabb argues that Manley “thought of herself as a satirist from her earliest efforts.”4 Rabb contends that The Royal Mischief is a “satirical revision of tragedy and heroism” that displays “new possibilities for the female satirist to attack not women but abuses of women.”5 Although Rabb rightly foregrounds Manley’s proficiency with satire and irony and draws attention to her critique of masculine conventions, I want to suggest that Manley’s ironic strategies for critiquing misogynist customs extend far beyond satirizing heroic tragedy. Indeed, I see The Royal Mischief as part of broader Restoration proto-feminist conversations over female desire, moral education, and sexual double standards. [End Page 81] I argue that Manley portrays Homais’s corrupt morality in order to critique the patriarchal system that creates such behavior. Like writers such as Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell, Manley throughout her writings places great importance on the role of liberal education as part of moral development. The general consensus of late seventeenth-century proto-feminist writers, which I argue includes Manley, contends that most female moral and intellectual failings can be traced back to misogynist customs that privilege vanity and frivolity over higher thought. Men and women need the right type of education and a supportive environment to develop their reason in order to control their desires. Homais, in contrast, (at least from what we can gather) receives neither; instead, she is tightly confined and valued only for her beauty. As a result, according to this logic, it should come as no surprise that she pursues her desires without qualms. Moreover, Manley explores desire in the absence of higher reasoning and sincere religion. She peels back the layers of custom to reveal the base desires below. Ultimately, this process shows the natural similarities in the desires of men and women: Levan, Osman, and Homais all slavishly pursue their appetites to the point of destruction. In this, women are no better or worse than men; by implication, differences between the sexes arise not from a fundamental difference in the experience of desire but, as proto-feminists argue, from custom and upbringing. To show how Manley’s work draws from and contributes to this proto-feminist tradition, I first outline the terms of late seventeenth-century feminist debates and show how Manley takes up those same terms and stances in her writings. In particular, I note how she repeatedly draws attention to issues of female education and sexual double standards, such as how women are unfairly held to a higher—and perhaps unrealistic and even unhealthy—standard of self-control over the passions, especially in terms of chastity and modesty. I then investigate the ways that Manley portrays desire as functioning contagiously in The Royal Mischief. As I will discuss at greater length below, René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire offers a useful vocabulary for describing how desire spreads like wildfire through favorable reports and portrait exchanges in the play...