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Course Description:
By establishing English politics on a contractual basis, the "Glorious
Revolution" of 1688-89 contributed to the passing away of a set of sex-and-gender codes
rooted in patriarchalism. With the codes replacing them not fully forming for
several decades, the English entered a transitional, "post-patriarchalist" period.
Our goal is to gain an understanding of how the struggle after
1688-89 between domestic patriarchalism(which construed sex and gender as
differences in degree) and its succeeding ideology, modern patriarchy(which
constructed sex and gender as differences in kind), marked the period's literary texts. We
will look for the evidence of this struggle in poems, plays, and prose that represent male
and female identities in transition.
The course will begin by reading dramatic representations of patriarchalism in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrewand King Lear. We then will turn to the gradual dismantling of this gender regime in the feminist writings of Judith Drake and Mary Astell and in the poetry of Anne Finch, Mary Chudleigh, and Sarah Egerton. And we will examine how redistributions of male-female power were depicted onstage in John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife,and George Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem,both of which thematize marital discord. Daniel Defoe pushes post-patriarchalist thinking as far as it will go in his 1724 novel Roxana.The outlines of the succeeding ideology, modern patriarchy, clearly are evident in the course's final reading, Samuel Richardson's great novel, Clarissa. |
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