Celibate pleasures: convents, asexuality, and women's agency in British literature, 1660-1760

“Celibate Pleasures” explores the importance of singleness to conceptualizations of female agency in British literature and culture in the early Enlightenment period. While critical narratives of women’s rejection of sex and/or marriage in literature of the period focus on the potential for closeted same-sex desire, I draw on the burgeoning field of early modern asexuality studies to take seriously women’s expressed desire for singleness, celibacy, chastity, and asexuality. As such, I bring to light an understudied phenomenon from the early moments of feminism, in which women, drawing on the legacy of medieval nuns, articulated singleness—and particularly vocational celibacy, an ideal which was lost in England after the Reformation—not as a restricted lifepath, but as one that opened up new pleasures, opportunities, and relational modes. In uncovering the single woman as a queer, subversive figure, I bring to light an underrecognized transhistorical strain of thought, uniting eighteenth-century women with their medieval predecessors and twenty-first-century legacy.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Cole, Megan Elizabeth

Contributors dc:contributor

• Nazar, Hina
• Pollock, Anthony
• Markley, Robert
• Weiss, Deborah

• Singleness
• Asexuality
• Women Writers
• Eighteenth Century

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Megan Cole

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121202

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121202