ABSTRACT
Rivella presents the Natural Libertine that celebrates passion and honesty over deceit. Manley contrasts Rivella's free expression of emotion and sexuality with the negative portraits of women that Manley satirizes, notably Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and Cleveland, the source of gossip for Manley's notorious fictions. Manley depicts these women as unnatural, affected, and duplicitous. In Rivella, they follow Hobbesian patterns of competition and self-interest, not unlike Doralice and Melantha's competing in Dryden's Marriage A-la-Mode. Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood continued the legacy that Aphra Behn and Catharine Trotter began by looking at the female libertines struggle to express her desires in an unforgiving world. Many of their heroines ask the same kinds of questions that Olinda and Lesbia pose about women's sexual and intellectual freedom, which writers consistently begins to link together. Manley extends Behn's critique of vicious libertines modeled after figures such as John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester.
