ABSTRACT
Recently, feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer critics (the four categories are not necessarily discrete) have emphasized the political necessity and the analytic utility of investigating sexuality as a relatively autonomous system of cultural meaning and site of social struggle, one that cannot simply be subsumed under an analysis of gender difference and hierarchy (Sedgwick 1990:27-35; Traub, forthcoming 1992).2 As Gayle Rubin has written, in revision of her own earlier conflation of sex and gender into one system, ‘Gender affects the operation of the sexual system, and the sexual system has had gender-specific manifestations. But although sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form the basis of two distinct arenas of social practice’ (Rubin 1984:308). In this essay I will attend to the specificity of sexuality by looking at how sexual practices and desires are represented in this text and points of conflict within the sexual economy rendered visible. But at the same time I will try to show interconnections between sexuality and other systems through which social conflict was regulated and registered in early modern England, especially the effect on sexual practice of class antagonisms and of a gender ideology that sexualized the desiring, speaking, publicly visible woman and simultaneously made her a threat to man’s gender dominance and to patriarchal constructions of ‘the good wife’.
