The Pre-History of White Feminism in Amatory Fiction

Abstract

This article reads amatory fiction through the image of white women’s tears, and it argues that amatory fiction assists in eighteenth-century racialization by idealizing a feminine affect that mobilizes passivity for status. A spectacle of sympathetic attention, white women’s tears exemplify the affective work of white feminism, which singularly analyzes power through gender. Lacking intersectionality, white feminism upholds white supremacy and enables constituents to wield gender oppression self-servingly. This article locates and deconstructs that affective dynamic in Delarivier Manley’s “The Wife’s Resentment” (1720), Penelope Aubin’s “Conjugal Duty Rewarded” (1721), and Eliza Haywood’s “Female Revenge” (1727). These retellings of heroines navigating adulterous lovers depict feminine virtue as passive and essentialize this virtuous passivity within the logic of whiteness. This narrativization victimizes the heroine and purchases her sympathy, which protects her virtue and maintains the heteropatriarchal standards that initially threatened her. This genealogical consideration reframes the affordances of amatory fiction within hegemonic affect.