The Two Tables: Staging Female Knowledge Production in Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1706)
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Focusing on Susanna Centlivre’s 1706 play The Basset Table, this essay argues that both protagonists—Lady Reveller and Valeria—exhibit autonomy by engaging respectively in gaming and experimental philosophy. When read against the backdrop of Centlivre’s Whiggish idealism and the development of experimental philosophy during the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the playwright’s staging of these heroines as gambler and amateur experimental scientist epitomizes Centlivre’s implicit critique of the gender divide in knowledge production. This essay pays particular attention to the tables occupied by Reveller and Valeria. These props merit our attention, as they emblematize a gendered spatial construction, in which these heroines seek to participate in theories of probability and experimental philosophy, albeit quite distant from male-dominant venues in early eighteenth-century England. Lastly, Centlivre’s ultimate gesture toward a transnational move attests to the possibility of a female agency in the global context of the early eighteenth century.
Abstract
Focusing on Susanna Centlivre’s 1706 play The Basset Table, this essay argues that both protagonists—Lady Reveller and Valeria—exhibit autonomy by engaging respectively in gaming and experimental philosophy. When read against the backdrop of Centlivre’s Whiggish idealism and the development of experimental philosophy during the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the playwright’s staging of these heroines as gambler and amateur experimental scientist epitomizes Centlivre’s implicit critique of the gender divide in knowledge production. This essay pays particular attention to the tables occupied by Reveller and Valeria. These props merit our attention, as they emblematize a gendered spatial construction, in which these heroines seek to participate in theories of probability and experimental philosophy, albeit quite distant from male-dominant venues in early eighteenth-century England. Lastly, Centlivre’s ultimate gesture toward a transnational move attests to the possibility of a female agency in the global context of the early eighteenth century.
참고문헌 (26)
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