Adeline Cowbray Or The Bitter Acceptance

Politics of marriage

The standard eighteen-century view on sexual differences was a valuable form needed by England’s patriarchal society so as to emphasize the dangers to which women would be subjected if they advocated against the sacred institution of marriage and decided to enter, what James Boswell has termed a “promiscuous concubinage”. Their refusal to comply with the established norms could only convert them in licentious women, therefore sexual objects. This is why Adeline and Glenmurray's relationship becomes the focal point for Opie's satire on society's attitudes towards female self-assertion, erotic desire, marriage, and women’s struggles to justify individual choice. In her essay “Adeline Mowbray, or The Bitter acceptance
Here Opie depicts Adeline’s married life as that of a servant who has to constantly obey and please her “master”. But all the while Adeline fulfils with perfection her duties as a wife, being cheerfully submissive and accepting his decisions, all in the interest of domestic stability, Berrendale solely proves that he is well aware of the authority with which society has empowered him, making use of it to its fullest. His appalling behavior and despotism only embitters Adeline’s existence, while his language and affirmations are aimed exclusively at producing hurtful reproaches: “I think that I gave a sufficient proof of [my affection] when, disregarding the opinion of the world, I married you, though you had been the mistress of another”(Opie, 1999: 189). Thus, the egalitarian type of marriage is clearly not a possibility in Opie’s narrative, and all the while conduct books and society condemns female sexual transgression, men’s infidelities are left aside as simple errors of judgment that can be easily forgotten. As Carol Howard notes in her essay “The history of the pineapple” Berrendale’s sexual transgression “cannot be separated from his other acts of vulgar intemperance” (1998: 363), still his errors can be effortlessly dismissed on account of men’s superiority with regards to women’s. These circumstances show us how Adeline
Like Godwin, Frederick Glenmurray rejects the conservative concept of a proper wedding in favor of a heterosexual relationship outside of marriage, that is “cemented by no ties but those of love and honor”(Opie, 1999: 15). Thus, while radicals found marriage lacking political modernity and reciprocal dependence for both sexes, conservative thinkers saw it as the stable pillar of society who kept women safe from libertine conceptions that made them fall into disgrace and convert into prostitutes. Richard Polwhele spoke in his famous poem “The Unsex’d Female” about those “enlightened“ women who only brought shame to their kind, and how from “once the female Muse” they disgraced themselves and “loose the chaste cincture”(1798: ll. 49, 25) which made them pure. As I previously stated Opie adapts her novel to the limitations that early nineteen-century society dictated, and does that by inserting characters that disapprove of Adeline’s philosophical ideas, characters like Rachel