ABSTRACT
Frances Wright and Julia Ward Howe introduce a more radical discourse in their work and are certainly very outspoken on issues of gender equality and women's rights. Like Frances Wright's Altorf, Julia W. Howe's Leonora manages to undermine aspects of the culturally-determined gender roles through the exploration of the prevalent system of sexual relations. Employing the techniques of romantic tragedy, they manage to reveal their own awareness of the complex implications of political and sexual ideology in women's struggle for autonomy and self-definition. Female powerlessness, male violence, seduction, madness, and suicide figure prominently in the romantic plays written in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Imitative of Shakespearean plays and the neoclassical dramas of the eighteenth century, American poetic plays appealed to the more sophisticated part of the nineteenth-century American audience—those people who had a cultural background in England and Europe.
