Sex And Gender Roles In Mary Wollstonecraft's The Distress D Orphan

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Recommended: Response to feminism in the 18th century

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Assignment Two: Critical Essay
Courtney McGann (24219134)
Compare, contrast and critically analyse the representation of sex and gender roles in Eliza Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman.
Eliza Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan (1726) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798) can both be described as texts that put forth radical feminist ideals of equality through their condemnation of the “social, economic, and legal power that male guardians and husbands wielded over their female wards” (Luhning 2006, p. 14) in the eighteenth century. While Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan (1726) bears a strong focus on the ways in which the “social climate worked to confine and control the female body and mind” (Luhning 2006, p. 14), Wollstonecraft (1798) makes “an explicit and systemic argument for women’s political rights as autonomous citizens” (Fenno 2012, p. 5). The focus of this essay will be on the representations of sex and gender roles in the eighteenth century, as illustrated by Haywood (1726) and Wollstonecraft (1798) and the place these views had in relation to wider literature of the period and scholarly debates surrounding the issue.
Throughout Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan (1726) the character of Annilia is treated and referred to as an object whose sole purpose is to be used by men for their own sexual or financial gain. It is shown that the male characters in the text view Annilia materialistically through Haywood’s language choices. One example of this is the character of Marathon. Despite his overtly melodramatic proclamations of love, Marathon refers to Annilia as an “Object so engageing” (Haywood 1726, p. 32) and as the “Objec...

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...od “allows the reader to view the consequences of sexual inequality from a unique perspective” (Wilputte 1995, p. 54). The idea that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are defined as such by their stereotypical traits is one that links to critical theory written by Judith Butler. Butler argues that gender is “in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed” (Butler 1988, p. 519) but rather an “identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts” (Butler 1988, p. 519). Butler suggests that gender must be perceived solely as the “mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (Butler 1988, p. 519). Haywood defines her characters by their exaggerated gendered traits, demonstrating the futility of gender and the power- or lack thereof- that is associated with it.

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