Manley's Queer Forms: Repetition, techno-performativity, and the body

This chapter interrogates Manley’s repeated explorations of seduction and its effects, focusing on the characters of Urania (The New Atalantis), the eponymous Rivella, and Mariana (‘The Physician’s Strategem’ in The Power of Love). It examines the ways in which texts and bodies in Manley’s writing can disrupt and rework the seduction narrative by comparing Urania’s death in childbirth, Rivella’s self-consciously literary self-portrait, and Mariana’s rape, pregnancy, and retirement to a convent. Read together, these variations of the seduction narrative demonstrate the way in which Manley uses formula to examine the interactions between the discursively-constituted and material forms of being. The chapter argues that her use of formula can thus be read as proto-queer: Manley uses queering as a practice to work through redeployments and reformulations of power. Manley’s repetitions establish a citational world of repressive necessity and constructed identities, but Manley experiments with gender and sexuality within this framework, testing out the possibility of productive disruptions, whilst simultaneously exploring the transformative potential of the pregnant body.