What is it about?
My chapter in this collection of essays on Manley examines the political nature of what appear to be two apolitical novellas. "The Husband's Resentment"--Novels IV and V in "The Power of Love" (1720)--follow the domestic horror of "The Wife's Resentment," drawing parallels among servants, wives, subjects, and authors. The layers of mastery and servitude explored in these two novels manifest the interdependent roles within a domestic as well as a national hierarchy.
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Why is it important?
In contrast to scholars who have dismissed "The Power of Love" as overly didactic and disengaged from current affairs, this chapter reads "The Husband's Resentment" novels from the collection as equivocal, and thus critical of established social and political norms as Manley subtly depicts abuses of power.
Perspectives
As far-fetched as the husbands' treatment of their wives appear in these two novellas, in real life King George I imprisoned his adulterous wife in a castle from 1694 to 1726 and murdered her lover. Manley's tales blur the boundaries between right and wrong behaviour by destabilizing accepted codes of what is proper, and questioning the relationship between husbands and wives, masters and servants, and implicitly, between author and reader.
Professor Earla A. Wilputte
Saint Francis Xavier University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature, July 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781315559995.
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