The Eighteenth-Century British Romance Fiction of White Femininity and Its Neoliberal Aftermath

Abstract

In this project, I argue that eighteenth-century romance novels engender affective feminine citizenship by politicizing feminine desire within the paradigm of whiteness. I read how fictions such as Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) standardize and innovate romance conventions in response to cultural shifts radiating from emergent philosophies of feeling, politics, and economy. I contend that the romance heroine mediates these fluctuations in her localized dilemmas through a consistent passive affect enacted through sympathy that confirms her exceptionalism. This exceptionalism naturalizes feminine virtue within the logic of whiteness. Through the legacy of Austen, I consider how eighteenth-century romance fictions’ racialized femininity continues to influence contemporary romance and white femininity.