ABSTRACT
A discussion of historical agency in women Romantic playwrights may seem in some ways a contradictory enterprise. The entire nation seemed to depend on Woman’s moral integrity and familial affections. The nation became a feminized home and nurturing place where the origin and the stability of all citizens dwelled, even more so during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years. In Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency, William Jewett discusses how Romanticism, having extended the concept of subjectivity to new realms of knowledge and consciousness, inevitably reshaped the category of action that, losing its single association with an obvious political or military event, came to embrace a quieter and more social mode. Agency would thus involve an interplay between the category of subjectivity, either individual or collective, and the process of causality, namely the effect that the act or action of the subject produces on a given reality, and as a consequence modifying it.
