Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720)

Abstract

In this essay, I use Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720) to examine how my own scholarly reading practices more broadly reflect and have helped shape a primarily cis-gendered, overwhelmingly white feminist critical history of amatory fictions of the long eighteenth century. I have previously read Manley’s text primarily as a study in feminist rage: Violenta, the virtuous white protagonist, and Ianthe, a woman of African descent enslaved to Violenta’s family, work together across statuses to dispatch an abusive patriarch. However, Ianthe engages in this labour neither for the sake of Violenta nor to attack the system of gendered and economic violation that results in Violenta’s wrongful ruin, but to liberate herself from enslavement. This micro-critical reflection suggests that the text offers a prequel of contemporary discourses on gendered and racial rage. Whose rage is politically consequential or imaginatively possible? Who gets to enact “understandable” violence even in imaginative literature?