ABSTRACT
The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph displays a concern with, an anxiety about, feminine identity which relates the novel to Richardson's Clarissa and Lennox's The Female Quixote. Sheridan's 1761 text is particularly centred upon issues pertaining to female sexuality and motherhood; it explores the parameters of legitimate motherhood and the huge moral and legal gulf between the mother as dutiful wife and the mother as whore. In this respect, the novel may be related to a variety of other mid-eighteenth-century narratives, fictional and otherwise. In particular, I argue that, in terms of the text's concern with the details of proper and improper forms of motherhood, it may usefully be read alongside the legal debate pertaining to infanticide in the mid-eighteenth century. This debate will form the main reference point in respect of many of the arguments to follow. Infanticide narratives of this period began to renegotiate the opposition between unlicensed female sexuality and pure, proper motherhood upon which seventeenth and eighteenth-century infanticide law was founded, and it did so by means of an exchange between the discourse of law and the discourse of sensibility. The infanticide debate questioned traditional assumptions relating to the inevitable, monstrous criminality of the infanticidal mother. It was an aspect of mideighteenth-century legal discourse concerned overwhelmingly with the nature of proper feminine identity and it shared this concern with the discourse of sensibility, the language of which it largely absorbed. The infanticide debate was therefore a point of meeting between sensibility and the law and this chapter will situate Sheridan's text at this interface.
