Studies in Eighteenth-century Literatures The Adventures of David Simple: A Study in Contrasts.

Of course, Miranda's deliberate assumption of the role of sexual victim is itself a paradoxically powerful move, a strategy that beats patriarchy, as it were, at its own game; and certainly the mere representation of a powerful woman exercising sexual desire is extraordinarily subversive (enough so, perhaps, to contribute to the continued exclusion of The Fair Jilt from the canons of eighteenth-century literature). But along with the potentially empowering aspects of amatory fiction's scenes of female lust, there are also disturbing assumptions at work. Amatory fiction's women actively desire, often initiate, and thoroughly enjoy heterosexual sex; but they consistently define and act out their desire according to the force-oriented ethic of the Augustan rake. Within such a framework, representations of female sexuality fail to exemplify a positively or uniquely female form of sexual desire, though they do succeed in creating a space for such representation. Even the most transgressive scenes, then, function in contradictory ways, at once revolutionary and conventional: they show women exercising sexual desire, and at the same time bolster phallocentric patterns of sexual dominance ...»