Book contents
Chapter 2 - The virtue of singularity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Published in the same year as Roxana, Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet (1724) has a quite different relationship to the mid-century achievements of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. While many of the themes discussed in Chapter 1 – secrecy, doubles, mentors, female power, disguise – are taken up by Davys, she uses romance conventions to frame and then resolve these elements in terms that reinforce traditional hierarchies. In this tailoring of singularity to mesh with prevailing social norms, she anticipates mid-century fiction. Like Joseph Andrews, Amelia, Pamela, and Clarissa, The Reform’d Coquet represents virtue as “singular” by drawing on the double sense of the latter as at once an exceptional quality and a characteristic trait. At the same time, however, the adventures of the heroine, Amoranda, immerse her in the contexts of what Dror Wahrman calls the “ancien régime of identity” with its distinctly un-modern view of selfhood as “mutable, malleable, unreliable, divisible, replaceable, transferable, manipulable, escapable, or otherwise fuzzy around the edges.” While observing how The Reform’d Coquet tolerates certain transgressive energies in realizing the fluid and experimental understanding of identity it shares with Moll Flanders and Roxana, I want also to suggest how Davys’s muting of other counter-normative behaviors forecasts Fielding and Richardson’s novels.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012