Morality In Adeline Mowbray

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 “promiscuous concubinage”. Their refusal to comply with the established norms can only convert them in sexual transgressive women and 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 of women’s fate” Aida Diaz notes how “it cannot be denied that Opie offers us […] a dark image of the powerlessness and vulnerability of married women”(2010: 192). If at first Adeline refuses to marry out of philosophical principles, which she openly professes, her later acceptance of that precise status of wife can be understood as a marriage of convenience which she accepts so as to elude the stigma of prostitution to which she has fallen. But before touching upon the position of Adeline in society as a married women, we first have to look at the context

First it occurs when her mother remarries and she becomes Sir Patrick’s stepdaughter. His promiscuity and sexual appetite places Adeline, while she is living in his house, in genuine danger. His profligate attempt “on the honor of the daughter of his wife”(Opie, 1999: 60) illustrates how the head of the household is a libertine and an oppressor. Concurrently he embodies all the “qualities” that conservative societies encouraged, and which I have previously listed with regard to the differences between men and