Tag: novel

Critique of Class and Gender within Eliza Haywood’s Novel Love in Excess, Or, the Fatal Inquiry

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Happy New Year! Wanted to start the year with posting an essay. I hope you enjoy. 🙂

Women have generally been oppressed throughout the centuries in Western societies pre-twenty-first century, especially if they are within a society based on a hierarchy of class. The novel initially arose as a genre in the eighteenth century with authors using the novels to find ways to critique those they couldn’t do in normal conversations, especially for women within a patriarchal society that’s dominated by class hierarchy values. The middle-class authors started to write books that held critique of the social classes and gender. Love in Excess, Or, The Fatal Enquiry by Eliza Haywood contributed to the rise and formation of the novel as a genre by using the novel as a way to critique the upper-class and gender roles by utilizing her characters and their descriptions of desire and sexuality in order to display their interactions with one another based on class and gender.

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The Use of the Fictional Novel to Further a Nonfictional Discourse (Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman & Vindication of the Rights of Women)

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*This is written in particular to the time period of Mary Wollstonecraft in mind and how she utilizes her fiction to enhance her nonfiction.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote both a fictional novel and a nonfiction essay to further her feminist, political agenda as she was interested in the conditions of her sex, and for which she, herself, utilized it to become her philosophy. The Wrongs of Woman functions as a fictional version of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women by having her characters exemplify her points of women being forcefully subjugated and repressed by men to further her feminist politics. Three critical sources, Mikhail Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, and Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Women Novelist help explain why The Wrongs of Woman as a fictional novel enhances Wollstonecraft’s feminist politics that she wrote earlier in her essay The Vindication of the Rights of Women.

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