1. The Wife's Resentment by Delarivier Manley
... tale, Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment engages with 18th-century notions of female identity, sexuality, and criminality, using a subtle mixture of counter-arguments to successfully flip the early conventions on their heads. Through her (very appropriately named) heroine Violenta, Manley examines the lack of options and loss of power women of the 18th century faced in a unforgivingly patriarchal society that ... between the belief that a woman's sexual chastity was priceless and the extent to which this supposedly invaluable entity was treated as a bargaining tool, a material rep...
- Word Count: 1986
- Approx Pages: 8
- Grade Level: Graduate