Hidden in plain sight: The problem of consent in the novel, 1748-99

Although there is an established discourse surrounding consent in eighteenth century scholarship, the original contribution of this thesis to the field is through its confrontation of assumptions of consent within courtship, seduction and non consensual sexual altercations, and challenging of the notion that a young woman’s consent is attainable when there are so many external factors influencing her ability to act autonomously. Often, the dissonance between the act of consenting itself, and society’s perception of female consent, has tragic consequences for a woman. I reveal how contemporary notions of consent derived from the social contract theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau illuminate later eighteenth century women writers’ interventions, revealing the inadequacy of social contract theory with regard to women’s experiences in the construction and application of consent. Beginning with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, I show the question of consent to be at the heart of novels by Eliza Hayward, Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft. By deconstructing the process through which young women learn consent, this thesis exposes that the education of a young woman, or lack thereof, has significant consequences for the trajectory of her romantic life. Parental authority in the patriarchal society continues to influence the conduct of young women beyond their initial entry into the marital marketplace, often continuing through marriage and beyond. This thesis challenges the idea that women benefit from marriage (in terms of individual freedom) by analysing marital exchanges in which women are subject to the demands of their husbands, and their wider communities, often contrary to their individual desires. The objectification of married women, pawns of their husbands rather than actors in their own right, shows that women are consistently controlled by patriarchal authority. This thesis demonstrates that the experience of being a woman whose consent is not valued in the eighteenth-century novel, enduring this level of oppression during all stages of her life, can only be depicted accurately through female testimony. The act of creating a cultural conversation, as these novelists propose, through which women share the harsh realities of uniquely feminine suffering, becomes a means to warn of the dangers that are an inherent part of being a woman and a ground from which reparative justice can be imagined.