ABSTRACT
Conduct literature equated ‘natural’ femininity with passive asexual virtue. In contrast, in the texts included here women are defined entirely by their active, and therefore suspect, sexuality. At first glance, then, these first two sections might be taken to illustrate the familiar opposition between women as angels and women as whores, between women as the embodiment of moral value and women as the source of moral disorder. But the binary categories are too simple. As a detailed comparative reading across the two sections makes clear, these contradictory representations are actually ideologically inseparable. In the introduction to Section 1, I suggested that conduct literature should be read in the light of other, more overtly political, discourses, and that its potentially disruptive, and often barely disguised, sub-text is the control of (female) sexuality. Read in juxtaposition with the passages here, those alliances and that sub-text become all the more apparent. The private moral constraints urged by the conduct manual can be read as part of more public discourses of economic utility and social intervention, articulated here through the objectification and limitation of female sexuality.
