The Will of Thomas Southerne

Southerne, Thomas; Jordan, Robert; Love, Harold

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00024775

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“…39 She eventually relents, but love and desire are absent in her acceptance: "I give you all, / My hand; and would I had a heart to give; / But if it ever return again, 'tis wholly yours." 40 Thus when Biron returns, Isabella feels intense guilt about her second marriage; there is none of the inner struggle that Behn's heroine experiences. Southerne treats desire as unchanging and unconflicted in "good" women; once Isabella has loved and had a child, her desire is fixed to one man.…”

Section: Tragedy: the Palimpsest Of Virtuous Desire And The Event Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As she states, "Conflicting passions have at last unhing'd / The great Machine," and she wavers between adoring Biron, and not knowing who he is. 42 When he calls for her, she exclaims, "A man's voice! In my bed!…”

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…and draws a dagger. 43 A Shakespearean knocking at the gate interrupts the scene; he wakes, she recognizes him, stays her hand, and flees. When we next see her, she attempts suicide because despite the fact that Villeroy and Biron "Divide my body to their equal claims; / My soul is only Biron's; that is free, / And thus I strike for him, and liberty"; death frees her from her own patriarchally imposed constraints.…”

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When we next see her, she attempts suicide because despite the fact that Villeroy and Biron "Divide my body to their equal claims; / My soul is only Biron's; that is free, / And thus I strike for him, and liberty"; death frees her from her own patriarchally imposed constraints. 44 Despite the "equal claims" on her body, her soul and desires are unified in that they concentrate only in Biron; self-murder is her attempt to free her unified desire from her divided body. When madness retreats and realization sets in, she commits suicide; even though she represents an ideal virtue, she murders herself because she is not-and can never bevirtuous enough.…”

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adapting Desires in Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun

Hultquist¹

2015

ecy

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The plot of Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun; or the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) is sensational-a former nun named Isabella unintentionally commits bigamy by marrying a second husband while the first is still alive. When she discovers her mistake, she murders both husbands by smothering the first, sewing the sack containing the corpse of the dead husband to the living husband's clothing, and encouraging the live husband to throw the corpse into a river, where he drowns. The bigamous wife freely confesses to the murders of "two husbands (both beloved) in one night" 1 and is beheaded, to the dismay of the town. The plotline makes it easy to understand why this story was so fascinating to writers and audiences and thus so frequently rewritten in the long eighteenth century. Between 1694 and 1757, there were at least five adaptations. 2 Modern critics have focused on Thomas Southerne's play, The Fatal Marriage: or, the Innocent Adultery (1694), David Garrick's 1757 revision of Southerne's play into the tragedy Isabella: or, the Fatal Marriage, and Jane Barker's short fictional excerpt, "Philinda's Story out of the Book" in The Lining of the PatchWork Screen (1726). 3 My research has unearthed two previously unknown texts, both moral fables in periodicals, the first in The Universal Spectator, under the heading "Sure, of all Ills, Domestic are the Worst!" (ca. 1728) 4 and the second in The Gentleman's Magazine, which condensed the Universal Spectator version in 1731 as "Matrimonial Murders." 5 Several critics have commented at length on the heroine's ability in Behn's novella to inspire both horror and sympathy from readers (sometimes simultaneously). 6 But despite these analyses, the possibilities of what the adaptations can reveal about the original text has not yet been fully explored. This essay uses adaptation theory in order to demonstrate that the problem of female sexual desire is always at stake in the adaptations-the way the protagonist struggles with desire, and the social implications of expressing desire-and each version's method of depicting the heavy burdens associated with that desire. In all of the versions, the heroines' desires and responses are

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Section: Tragedy: the Palimpsest Of Virtuous Desire And The Event Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: And Yet a Wife To Neither! 41mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations