Mrs. Fielding: The Single Woman as the Incarnation of the Ideal Domestic Women

Authors

  • Aída Díaz Bild Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filología. Universidad de La Laguna

Abstract

Eighteenth-century female writers realized that single women were scorned and viewed with contempt. They tried to modify the negative stereotypes, found mainly in the work of male authors, by offering more attractive portraits of single, independent women. Elizabeth Hamilton dignified the figure of the “old maid” by creating the characters of Martha Goodwin, Maria Fielding and Mrs. Mason. The aim of this article is to analyse the similarities between Hamilton herself and Mrs. Fielding in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), as well as comment on how Hamilton used her fictional counterpart to explore her own ideas on women’s education, marriage or spinsterhood. With a character like Mrs. Fielding, Hamilton not only created a positive role for old maids like herself but showed her readers that it was possible for an unmarried woman to have a varied, interesting, useful and fulfilled life.


Keywords: Elizabeth Hamilton; single woman; education; marriage; benevolence

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Aída Díaz Bild, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filología. Universidad de La Laguna

Aída Díaz Bild is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Laguna. She has carried out research and published on eighteenth-century women’s writing (Charlotte Smith, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Hamilton, Elizabeth Inchbald, Jane Austen) and on contemporary British and Irish novelists (David Lodge, Penelope Lively, Roddy Doyle, Jamie O’Neill, Graham Swift, Seamus Deane). She has also focused on the important role that humour plays in literature.

References

Astell, Mary. (1694) 1999. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Edited by Patricia Springborg. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Austen, Jane. (1816) 1987. Emma. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Benger, Elizabeth. 1818. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton: With a Selection from Her Unpublished Correspondence and Other Unpublished Writings. 2 vols. London: Longman.

Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. 1991. Women’s Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Tampa: U of South Florida P.

Copeland, Edward. (1995) 1998. Women Writing about Money. Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Defoe, Daniel. (4 April 1719) 1869. “An Office for Marriages.” In Daniel Defoe, His Life and Recently Discovered Writings: Extending from 1716 to 1729, edited by William Lee, vol. 2, 115-117. London: John Camden Hotten, Picadilly.

Earle, Peter. 1994. “The Middling Sort in London.” In The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550-1800, edited by Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, 141-158. London: Macmillan.

Egenwolf, Susan B. 2009. The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth and Owenson. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Figes, Eva. (1982) 1988. Sex and Subterfuge. Women Writers to 1850. New York: Persea Books.

Froide, Amy M. (2005) 2007. Never Married. Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Grogan, Claire. 2000. Introduction to Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, by Elizabeth Hamilton, 9-26. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Hamilton, Elizabeth. (1796) 1999. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

—. (1800) 2000. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Edited by Claire Grogan. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

—. (1801) 2010. Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education. In The Cottagers of Glenburnie and Other Educational Writing, edited by Pam Perkins, 220-288. Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

—. 1813. A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart, vol. 2. Edinburgh: Longman.

Hill, Bridget. (1989) 2003. Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England. London and New York: Routledge.

Hufton, Olwen. 1984. “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Family History 9 (4): 355-376.

Hunt, Margaret R. 1999. “The Sapphic Strain. English Lesbians in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 270-296. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.

Kelly, Gary. (1993) 1997. Women, Writing and Revolution 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kern, Jean B. (1986) 1987. “The Old Maid, or ‘to grow old, and be poor, and laughed at’.” In Fetter’d or Free? British Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, 201-214. Athens, Ohio and London: Ohio UP.

Lanser, Susan S. 1999. “Singular Politics. The Rise of the British Nation and the Production of the Old Maid.” In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, 297-323. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.

Palazzi, Maura. 1990. “Female Solitude and Patrilineage: Unmarried Women and Widows during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of Family History 15 (4): 443-459.

Perkins, Pam. 2010. Introduction to The Cottagers of Glenburnie, by Elizabeth Hamilton, 1-44. Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Peters, Christine. 1997. “Single Women in Early Modern England: Attitudes and Expectations.” Continuity and Change 12 (3): 325-345.

Philips, Katherine. (1667) 1994. “A Married State.” In The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader, edited by N.H. Keeble, 255-256. New York: Routledge.

Prochaska, Francis K. 1974. “Women in English Philanthropy, 1790-1830.” International Review of Social History 19: 426-445.

Sharpe, Pamela. 1999. “Dealing with Love: The Ambiguous Independence of the Single Woman in Early Modern England.” Gender & History 11 (2): 209-232.

Taylor, Susan B. 2000. “Feminism and Orientalism in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.” Women’s Studies 29: 555-581.

Thaddeus, Janice. 1995. “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Modern Philosophers and the Uncertainties of Satire.” In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, edited by James E. Gill, 395-418. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P.

Vichert, Gordon S. 1975. “Bernard Mandeville’s The Virgin Unmask’d.” In New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, edited by Irwin Prime, 1-10. The Hague: Kluwer Academic P.

Wall, Richard. 1981. “Women Alone in English Society.” Annales de Démographie Historique: 303-317.

Warburton, Penny. 2001. “Theorising Public Opinion: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Model of Self, Sympathy and Society.” In Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700-1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona O’Gallchoir and Penny Warburton, 257-273. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1792) 1993. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In Political Writings. A Vindication of the Rights of Man, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Edited by Janet Todd. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P.

Downloads

Published

2017-06-23

How to Cite

Bild, A. D. (2017). Mrs. Fielding: The Single Woman as the Incarnation of the Ideal Domestic Women. Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, 39(1), 55–70. Retrieved from https://atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/321

Issue

2017: Vol. 39, Num. 1

Section

Articles

License

The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.

Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.

Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.

Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:

  • That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
  • That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.

Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.