The widow's might: Law and the widow in British fiction, 1689-1792.

Repeatedly in eighteenth-century fiction, the widow embodies a narrative agency that has as its actual counterpart the directive relation to property granted to widows by English law: unlike a wife, a widow had a separate legal identity and could hold real property as could a man. Common law dower granted her a life interest in her husband's estate, but over the course of the eighteenth century, dower was increasingly barred by jointure, a monetary provision negotiated in the marriage settlement. Jointure was contractual in nature, often unconnected to land, subject to the ideological vagaries of the Courts of Equity, and violable in ways that dower was not. Running parallel to this legal alteration is a demographic decline in the rate of remarriage for widows. These historical phenomena together provoke speculation about the widow's disadvantaging through jointure over dower. From the perspective of a feminist reading, the replacement of a common law right with a discretionary claim, and its corollary substitution of mobile for real property, indicate an anxiety about the widow's potential might in accumulating wealth in land. This uneasiness infuses contemporary representations of widowhood. Satirical treatments both mock the widow's lubricity and apprehend a re-allocation of property through remarriage. Conduct manuals advocate the strictest modesty to contain the widow's energy. The thesis elucidates, within the context of these representations, the legal and historical developments affecting the widow and reads, accordingly, a range of British fictions. Short fictions by Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood, and novels by Frances Sheridan, Sarah Scott and Clara Reeve are analyzed to assess a widow's entitlement to desire, to examine her capacity for narrative agency, and to question her security in a transactional economy. Although the widow exerts a consequential narrative authority in the texts under consideration, a familiarity with eighteenth-century law reveals what the novelists imply: the contemporary valorization of acquisitive inclination over disinterested civic virtue, and its legal parallel of unchartered contract over entrenched status right, register a diminution of the widow's proprietary might