“[I]s the Woman Really Possessed?” : Marriage Act, Property, and Madness in Susanna Centlivre and Eliza Haywood
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This paper reads the marriage plot of Susanna Centlivre’s comedy The Busybody (1709) and Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction The Distress’d Orphan, or Love in a Madhouse (1726) to investigate the vexed question of women’s 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 father’s 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 women’s 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 one’s ability to first claim “property in his own person,” an internal property that cannot be alienated. Reading Centlivre and Haywood’s 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 guardian’s 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 women’s right over property and self-ownership.
Abstract
This paper reads the marriage plot of Susanna Centlivre’s comedy The Busybody (1709) and Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction The Distress’d Orphan, or Love in a Madhouse (1726) to investigate the vexed question of women’s 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 father’s 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 women’s 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 one’s ability to first claim “property in his own person,” an internal property that cannot be alienated. Reading Centlivre and Haywood’s 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 guardian’s 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 women’s right over property and self-ownership.
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