The Wife's Resentment by Delarivier Manley

            A deliciously gruesome re-telling of a good girl gone bad tale, Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment engages with 18th-century notions of female identity, sexuality, and criminality, using a subtle mixture of counter-arguments to successfully flip the early conventions on their heads. Through her (very appropriately named) heroine Violenta, Manley examines the lack of options and loss of power women of the 18th century faced in a unforgivingly patriarchal society that punished them for straying from the societal dictates of modest and chaste femininity. Violenta's fall from a reputed paragon of feminine virtue and subsequent turn to violent measures is portrayed as a fatal consequence of a flawed social system rather than, as was the belief of the time, a violence innate to the female body. Manley is, very clearly, refuting the accepted ideals of feminine passivity and the defenseless position in which a blind execution of such ideals leaves women. However, rather than launching into an explicit diatribe against the repressive societal standards women of the 18th century were subject to, Manley's novel employs a more subtle approach in highlighting the contradictory foundation upon which 18th-century concepts of femininity and female sexuality were based. The text presents a society in which the stringent regulations of femininity and sexual chastity were upheld, and in so doing, traces the logical consequence of a belief in and implementation of arbitrary societal constructs that at their very foundation are contrary and illogical: the creation of heroines driven to extreme acts of violence that must be considered heroic rather than repugnant as they are a defense of those same societal constructs upon which the value of a female is precariously balanced.
             The first of the contradictions Manley addresses appears in relation to the economics of an 18th-century woman. Specifically, Manley highlights the disparity between the belief that a woman's sexual chastity was priceless and the extent to which this supposedly invaluable entity was treated as a bargaining tool, a material representation of the value of a "proper" woman.