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Chapter 2 - The virtue of singularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

April London
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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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 Press
Print publication year: 2012

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  • The virtue of singularity
  • April London, University of Ottawa
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139021555.004
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  • The virtue of singularity
  • April London, University of Ottawa
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139021555.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The virtue of singularity
  • April London, University of Ottawa
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139021555.004
Available formats
×