Abstract
While participating in the swirl of political satires of the first decade of the eighteenth century, Delarivier Manley, popular and widely-read author of several salacious fictions about the Whig court of Queen Anne’s reign, advanced a model for negotiating and understanding desire and sexual activity between fictional women in her depiction of a group of women called the ‘new Cabal’. These women form alliances with a ‘female favourite’, have strict guidelines for screening new members of the group, and take their pleasure in the ‘representations of men in women’, the juxtaposition of maleness or masculinity in and around a female body. In the eighteenth-century context, and in modern critical discourse about the eighteenth century, there is no term for the women of the new Cabal.2 They are not tribades, tommies, or hermaphrodites (terms operative in the early part of the century to describe women who desired women); though some of them cross-dress, they are not female husbands, for they do not adopt an exclusively male public persona.3 Nor are they bluestockings, romantic friends, sapphists, or ‘lesbians’ (terms used to discuss female same-sex relationships toward the end of the century).4
What an irregularity of taste is theirs? They do not in reality love men, but dote [on] the representation of men in women. Hence it is that those ladies are so fond of the dress en cavaliere, though it is extremely against my liking, I would have the sex distinguished as well by their garb as by their manner.
Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis (1709)1
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© 2009 Jennifer Frangos
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Frangos, J. (2009). The Woman in Man’s Clothes and the Pleasures of Delarivier Manley’s ‘New Cabal’. In: Peakman, J. (eds) Sexual Perversions, 1670–1890. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244689_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244689_4
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