ABSTRACT

The similarities between The New Atalantis and texts that make up a longstanding anti-lesbian and anti-homosexual textual tradition are extensive and fundamental. In The New Atalantis, as in other French and British anti-lesbian texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who repeatedly protest their virtue and high-mindedness are not to be believed. As The New Atalantis is a quintessential scandal narrative, a prime example of the genre so popular in England and France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The New Atalantis is by no means the only lesbo- or homophobic text of the period mistaken for lesbo- or homophilic. Without the Cabal section, The New Atalantis- which depicts women seduced and betrayed by men in episode after episode- might easily lead its readers to conclude that women should separate from men and turn to each other for love and sex.