그녀는 정말 소유되었나? — 수산나 산트리버와 엘라이자 헤이우드에 나타난 결혼법, 재산, 그리고 광기

Abstract

This paper reads the marriage plot of Susanna Centlivres comedy The Busybody (1709) and Eliza Haywoods amatory fiction The Distressd Orphan, or Love in a Madhouse (1726) to investigate the vexed question of womens legal right over property, marriage, and self-governance in early modern England. Specifically, the female protagonists of Centlivre and Haywood attempt to reconcile the right to property and self-ownership by commanding their fathers inheritance but defying the rule of the father. Their female protagonists are dubbed mad at one point or another because the articulation of female rights challenges normative social and gender behavior prescribed by men; the trope of the mad woman is used specifically to reflect on womens negotiation between self-possession and the state of marriage in which women in essence become property of her husband and thereby possessed. To put it in Lockean terms, the right to property is predicated on ones ability to first claim property in his own person, an internal property that cannot be alienated. Reading Centlivre and Haywoods texts as anticipating the marriage Act of 1753 that codified legal marriage through written documents, I argue that the female protagonists of Centlivre and Haywood overwrite their guardians legal authority through the manipulation of language and symptoms of madness. This paper explores how the interplay between legality, literacy, and lunacy negotiates the possibilities of womens right over property and self-ownership.