ABSTRACT
Holcroft's characterization of Frank and Mac Fane reveal a fissure between Holcroft's egalitarian Jacobin politics and his more conventional sexual politics. Furthermore, according to Katherine Binhammer, both Jacobins and anti-Jacobins participated in a widespread hysteria about female sexuality as potentially politically dangerous, during what she terms "the sex panic of the 1790s". Contrary to Holcroft's fairly conventional depictions of masculinity, his portrait of Anna is revolutionary. Holcroft's depiction of Phelim Mac Fane as a sexual predator rests upon Mac Fane's nationality, religion, and social status as an Irish Catholic highwayman. Herein lies the principle difference between Holcroft's depiction of female friendship and that of Richardson. The edifying portrait of female friendship is a convention of eighteenth-century British novels by both women and men. Armstrong's argument may in part explain Holcroft's rather liberal representation of female subjectivity and his more conventional depiction of Frank's working-class subject formation, which is based on white, English, Protestant gender and sexual norms.
