Romantic and Socio-Sexual Scripts in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

My thesis re-examines scholarly understandings of love, courtship, and socio-sexual practice during the long eighteenth century through the double lens of scripting theory and feminism. My research contributes to understandings of sexual consent, female agency, and the emotional and romantic development of young men and women throughout the period. In Chapter One, I will demonstrate how young men and women developed distinctly different ideas and expectations of, and scripts for, love and marriage during the decade-long developmental stage between the onset of puberty and the point at which many were practically able to seriously consider courtship and matrimony. I will explore the disparate lived experiences of young men and women in the long eighteenth-century, as well as the contrary cultural influences they were exposed to during this time, and demonstrate the effects of these divergent developmental experiences by analysing men’s and women’s behaviours and attitudes once they reached an age at which they began seeking, entering, or being sought out for serious romantic relationships with or by the opposite sex. In Chapter Two, I will analyse literary and artistic representations of socio-sexual practice to demonstrate how sexual consent was requested, performed, and interpreted in received eighteenth-century socio-sexual scripts. Particularly, I will show that erotic literature specifically advised men to request consent when their partner was sexually inexperienced, and to wait for their partner to give that consent before proceeding with sexual contact. I will further explore how people, particularly women, were expected to express consent nonverbally, by making their faces and bodies sites of communication. Finally, I will show how men in erotic literature were portrayed as being deliberately attentive to nonverbal communication, demonstrating that men were expected to be actively engaging with women’s nonverbal communication. This research complicates existing understandings of eighteenth-century courtship dynamics and socio-sexual practice, and identifies elements of the received socio-sexual script regarding the requesting, communicating, and interpreting of sexual consent throughout the long eighteenth century.