Gender

Abstract

As a platform where Irish ‘good nature’ and wit could be performed for a literary profit, Goldsmith’s dramas explicate the gendered paradoxes in his writing. His ‘Essay on Theatre’ (1773) rhetorically overstates the tide of ‘sentimental comedies’ in order to assert a family resemblance between his ‘laughing comedy’ and the early-eighteenth-century stage, denouncing French drama to manoeuvre his plays closer to a ‘manly’ English humour. But Goldsmith’s plays are as much a product of sentiment as of wit, ridicule, and satire. Indeed, the inherently performative qualities of Richardsonian sensibility spawned many comedies, helping to ‘revive theatrical culture’ following the Licensing Act of 1737. Despite his promotion of Anglo-masculinity, reading for gender in Goldsmith reveals ‘eighteenth-century Anglophone culture [as] already inherently queer’, illuminating the odd, unaccountable, or other as constituent parts of mainstream literary culture. Goldsmith’s works, as James Kim observes, display a ‘striking ambivalence toward the new sexual economy, a curious and recurrent discontent with the prospect of bourgeois matrimony and its promise of heterosexual intercourse.’ The ‘odd fellows’ of Goldsmith’s works evince persistent disinclinations toward both marriage and women, insinuating queer strains of gender and sexuality. In The Vicar of Wakefield, the polyphiloprogenitive Primrose is more enamoured of almost every man he meets than of his own wife and daughters. In The Good-Natur’d Man (1768), the sentimental hero is a reluctant lover, preferring the pleasures of assisting other men. In She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Marlow’s sexual phobia of ‘modest’ women emasculates him around prospective spouses, libidinally curtailed to lower rank women who are conveniently unsuitable for marriage. Crucially, instead of subverting or disrupting gender or genre, these figures instead ‘anchor emergent norms’ by their conscription into nuptial happy endings and their indictment of women’s unruly passions. These works elevate homosociability above the heterosexual conjugality rhetorically affirmed by their plots.