Abstract

This thesis examines the articulation and configuration of modern gender in three texts: John Lyly's Gallathea , William Wycherley's The Country Wife , and Eliza Haywood's Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze . The theoretical works of Laurie Shannon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ros Ballaster and Catherine Ingrassia are employed in order to think through the gender paradigms in each of these texts. The three principle texts for consideration offer neither a clearly crystallized binary system of gender, nor a concrete and heteronormative model of desire. Rather, an analysis of the tropes of desire reveals these paradigms as represented in the texts to be in the process of developing and becoming increasingly naturalized. These texts represent an emergent system of modern gender difference, which is a process that Michael McKeon has associated with Restoration and eighteenth-century economies, cultures and histories. Through the analysis of the interlocking nature of gender and class, this thesis also examines the shifting definitions of status and gender and asserts that private and public spheres as well as generic forms, whether theatre or print-based, inform the conception of these definitions. As part of this analysis, this thesis examines generic and rhetorical modes in each text, and argues that each author's chosen methods of representation inform the configurations of sex and gender.