Hannah Snell

There is a tendency among literary scholars to confine presentations of armed women offered in British literature between 1793 and 1801 to a restrictive binary; the women are political, non-sentimental and condemned, or apolitical, excessively sentimental, and excused. This dissertation seeks to both explore, and repudiate, this binary, by revealing the existence of an idiosyncratic military heroine presented within literature of the age, who is political, rational, and heroic.
Chapter one focuses on portrayals of public and political military women within two anti-Jacobin novels published in 1795 and 1801 respectively. It identifies the way in which the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century novel, thoroughly devoted to domestic ideology, depicts women who favour the political and military sphere to the domestic, familial sphere, as monstrous and reprehensible. Chapter two analyses female warrior-ballads and historical narratives, and illuminates the way in which armed women exhibited in these genres are excused for their violence on account of their apolitical motives and sentimentalised portrayals, whilst arguing concurrently that the authors maintain a dissuasion of female militarism by delineating women as essentially unsuited to military activity, on account of the very characteristic which renders them virtuous; their delicacy. Chapter three, offering an analysis of literature produced by three radical authors, in 1799, 1796, and 1800, seeks to infer that, though indeed in the minority, anomalous depictions of armed women offered between 1793 and 1801, which conform to neither the political, monstrous, and condemned, nor the apolitical, sentimental and excused portrayal, did in fact exist. I reveal throughout this chapter the way in which the discussed radical authors grant their non-romanticised military women a heroic status, by intimating that it is the spirited armed woman, as opposed to the delicate, defenceless women, who is most capable of meliorating the nation.