The Self-Analysis of a Submissive Wife in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
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This study reads Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph focusing on the novel’s critical analysis of the ideal of the submissive wife. Wifely submission was recommended by a group of mid- to late-eighteenth-century “Matriarchal” female writers as a tool for establishing a practical female domestic and civic authority. Published years earlier than most of the writings that promoted the female authority based on apparent obedience, Memoirs nevertheless presents a prescient critique of the ideal of the respectably obedient wife by elucidating the model’s psychological instability and harmful effects on social cohesion. The novel employs the sentimental epistolary narrative to highlight the deep-seated and self-centered desire for moral probity that upholds the submissive wife’s self-discipline but ultimately transforms her into a negative authority figure who destroys the happiness of both herself and her admirers. The torrential use of tragic events in Memoirs reflects the author’s urgent yet careful search for a female authority stable enough to withstand the personal, familial, social, and political resistance to the mid-century British women’s endeavors to claim their deserved place in the family, society, and nation.
Abstract
This study reads Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph focusing on the novel’s critical analysis of the ideal of the submissive wife. Wifely submission was recommended by a group of mid- to late-eighteenth-century “Matriarchal” female writers as a tool for establishing a practical female domestic and civic authority. Published years earlier than most of the writings that promoted the female authority based on apparent obedience, Memoirs nevertheless presents a prescient critique of the ideal of the respectably obedient wife by elucidating the model’s psychological instability and harmful effects on social cohesion. The novel employs the sentimental epistolary narrative to highlight the deep-seated and self-centered desire for moral probity that upholds the submissive wife’s self-discipline but ultimately transforms her into a negative authority figure who destroys the happiness of both herself and her admirers. The torrential use of tragic events in Memoirs reflects the author’s urgent yet careful search for a female authority stable enough to withstand the personal, familial, social, and political resistance to the mid-century British women’s endeavors to claim their deserved place in the family, society, and nation.
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