ABSTRACT
In the civil suit for adultery, known as “criminal conversation” or “crim. con.”, money talked. The parties, always a husband as plaintiff and his wife’s lover as defendant, sought to shore up their sense of respectability by distancing themselves from the fearsome otherness represented by women and domestic servants. The more they did so, they more they exposed the subject-position of the propertied male as a precarious one. In her posthumous novel Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft mounts an effective critique of crim. con., although she partly aligns herself with its ideology in her desire to reclaim a measure of self-sovereignty for bourgeois women.
