(Download) "Mary Robinson: On Trial in the Public Court (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Mary Robinson: On Trial in the Public Court (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 239 KB
Description
Trials for Adultery: or, the History of Divorces. Being Select Trials at Doctors Commons for Adultery, Fornication, Cruelty, Impotence, &c. From the Year 1760, to the present Time. Including the whole of the Evidence in each Cause. Together with the Letters, &c. that have been intercepted between the amorous Parties. The whole forming a complete History of the Private Life, Intrigues, and Amours of many Characters in the most elevated Sphere: every Scene and Transaction, however ridiculous, whimsical, or extraordinary, being fairly represented, as becomes a faithful Historian, who is fully determined not to sacrifice Truth at the Shrine of Guilt and Folly. Taken in Short-Hand, by a Civilian. (1) DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, THE WAYS IN WHICH NARRATIVE STRATEGIES of a variety of discourses influenced and helped construct each other's worlds in relation to the tensions produced by the socio-political stresses of the French Revolution were intensely focused on the family and its networks. These bi-directional influences were so successful that they have become normalized, the literary reflections of these influences being read as indelible textual strategies. This essay considers the production of narrative intersections in legal, popular culture, and literary discourses through the case of Mary Robinson (1758--1800) to examine how a woman celebrity, known for her sexual liaisons and acting career as much as for her copious literary production, and most famous for belonging to the pre-Regency constellation of the demi-monde, responded in nuanced ways to public representations of her--both ad hominem or scandal mongering publications, and politicized or critical public images--in her autobiographical poetry and fiction. These representations participated in the shifting relations between the public sphere and its irascible advocate, publicity. Robinson's literary responses were indirect, often deflecting attention away from her own story and sense of victimization toward the general cultural fate of women. I am particularly interested in Robinson's use of images of the stressed, fractured, or threatened family to expose a variety of gender inequalities that heightened men's political and social flexibility at the expense of women's. In Robinson's texts the family becomes denaturalized, its presumptive structure put in question, not because of female behavior but because of legal codes that safeguarded a cultural double standard in which manliness expends domestic ties. In order to flesh out the relation between legal and cultural standards in Robinson's textual bodies, I will be less concerned with the more obvious choices of her (seemingly) domesticating narratives--her Lyrical Tales for instance, or her novels depicting families in threat--and more concerned with those autobiographical texts that allow her to stage publicly the manly attacks of others on her person as an exploration of the gendered implications of such attacks, and to put forward a self-defense that redresses their legal sanctioning. (2)