Em/bedded Narratives: Marriage, Seduction and Adultery in the Eighteenth-Century English novel
Em/bedded Narratives: Marriage, Seduction and Adultery in the Eighteenth-Century English novel

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with embedded stories of seduction in the context of eighteenth-century novels. Although literary history has focused mainly on the novel of courtship, marital and family life has actually had a very important place in literature throughout the century. Within novels about the life of a marriage the tales of chaste wives repeatedly run in narrative conjunction with embedded tales of fallen women. These do not function merely as cautionary contrasts but participate in the process of consolidating the discourse of marriage and love in the period of sensibility. The principal object of analysis is the novel of Frances Sheridan (1724–1766) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) where embedded tales of seduction problematise traditional concepts of female and conjugal morality. The article relies on recent approaches to the history of the family and on the methods of feminist narratology.

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